Even the first line has me excited:
I’m Peter Darwin.
Everyone asks, so I may as well say at once that no, I’m not related to Charles.
I was in fact born Peter Perry, but John Darwin, marrying my widowed mother when I was twelve, gave me, among many other things, a new life, a new name and a new identity.
Twenty years rolled like mist over the memories of my distant childhood in Gloucestershire, and now I, Peter Darwin, was thirty-two, adopted son of a diplomat, in the diplomatic service myself.
As my stepfather’s postings and later my own were all at the whim of the Foreign Office, I’d mostly lived those twenty years abroad in scattered three- or four-year segments, some blazing, some boring, from Caracas to Lima, from Moscow to Cairo to Madrid, housed in Foreign Office lodgings from one-bedroom concrete to gilt-decked mansions, counting nowhere home.
Friendships were transitory. Locals, left behind. Other diplomats and their children came and went. I was rootless and nomadic, well used to it and content.
Francis, Dick - Comeback
"Twenty years rolled like mist over the memories of my distant childhood in Gloucestershire," . . . what I wouldn't give to be able to write like that.
