I was born near Etruria. Not the place in Italy where the Etruscans lived, but the place in the Midlands of England that Josiah Wedgwood made famous. It's in Staffordshire.
I was named after Robert Carter, my grandfather, who was a Lancashire fisherman. His father, William, was one of the first men to die in the First World War. I have his posthumous medals and the bronze plaque that his widow got instead of her husband's body. His trawler, the Mary, had been sent to the North Sea to fish for German mines, but it fished up one too many.
My grandfather was left at the age of thirteen to bring up the rest of the family. He hunted cod in the North Atlantic through the 1920's and 30's, sailing by dead reckoning between Iceland and the White Sea. He rounded the North Cape and even visited Archangel, and he knew equally well the coasts of Greenland, the Hebrides and the fjords of Norway.
My mother was nineteen when she had me. My father, a cargo ship's engineer, was in the Red Sea and heading for New Zealand at the time.
By the time I was three we had moved as a family to the Fylde on the silvery shores of the Irish Sea. Two years later, following the severe winter of 1962, we emigrated to hotter climes.
As a child I lived in Sydney. Home was Maroubra Junction in the Eastern Suburbs. I went to a junior school in Matraville, then later to a special school in Woollahra, where kids were hot-housed. I think there was some plan to create a new Australian intelligencia. At any rate, they took us to plenty of museums and art galleries ...
I was twelve when family commitments took my parents away from the Land of Oz and back to England aboard the P&O liner Orcades.
We went back to live in the fishing town where my father's parents came from. I was sent to the local school, but didn't fit in and couldn't settle. In those days I used to write little bits of fiction by way of escape.
My own musical tastes included Led Zeppelin, who I saw perform in Manchester. I also saw The Who play at Blackpool's Grand Theatre. All the bands I liked seemed to have a colour in their names: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream ... you get the idea.
I attended Newcastle University - the famous font of knowledge for students who like to drink! I loved Newcastle from the moment I arrived. I loved the university, loved the city and I especially loved the Geordies. Newcastle was, and is, the queen of cities. My subject was Astrophysics.
By then I was reading a lot of science fiction - it was the amazing ideas that grabbed people like me. Soon I began to write stories of my own, and I eventually launched the university's first science fiction society.
I graduated with a First! But no job ... So I made a decision and went to work in the USA. The day I flew off to Fort Worth to be trained in the oil industry, I put my writing ambitions on hold. From here on, it was going to be a time of serious world-wide experiences.
After a while training in West Texas (which I have a yearning to return to) I was posted to various parts of the Middle East and after that into the war-torn heart of Africa and, I have to say that it was both dangerous and well-paid work. More than once I came close to being killed - and plenty of good men I knew never came home. I went to some very remote places like the Rub al Khali and the Congo, and I saw things most people don't see, or ever want to.
I got around quite a lot in my 20's, visiting dozens of different countries at every opportunity. I travelled to East Berlin and Warsaw an then on to Moscow and Leningrad during the reign of Czar Brezhnev. Shortly afterwards I took the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan. I worked in Hong Kong and entered China proper as part of a project to develop that country's communications with the outside world following the hand-over. I took tea with the heir of the last king of Upper Burma near Mandalay, and on the road to Everest base camp I just happened to run into Sir Edmund Hillary. After travelling around most of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia , I needed to get serious and responsible, so I returned home and got a job with the BBC working on: Play School (first day induction!) and then Breakfast Time, Newsnight, Panorama and The Money Programme.
Then after about four years, I felt it was time to follow my ambitions and I left the BBC to write.
I have had four historical novels published as print books: Armada, Talwar, Courage and Barbarians and these will all be available as e-books soon. I also have three mythic history/fantasy novels: The Language of Stones, Giants' Dance and Whitemantle published by HarperCollins which are available electronically. I am now working on a new project , set in more recent times -more information will be available soon.
