Jack Sheffield

Miss Barrington-Huntley, Chairwoman of the interviewing panel, took off her steel-framed spectacles and polished them slowly and deliberately. As she did so, her eyes passed over my gangling six-feet-one-inch frame like an X-ray scanner, from the top of my unruly brown hair, down past my Buddy Holly spectacles and fashionable flower power tie, to the neat creases in my flared polyester trousers and the toecaps of my polished shoes.

So it was that on a bright sunny morning in the summer of 1977, at the age of thirty-one, I left my tiny, bachelor flat in the village of Bradley, near Skipton, filled up my emerald-green Morris Minor Traveller with petrol and drove on the A59 over Blubberhouses and through Harrogate towards the beautiful, historic city of York.