All at Sea, Memories of a Coram Boy by Gordon Aspey

Gordon Aspey was born in the workhouse on the Isle of Sheppy in Kent. The Foundling Hospital an institution that catered for abandoned children looked after him until he was fifteen years old. Shortly before leaving school in 1948 he is reunited with Flossy his birth mother, who last saw him at the age of three months old, but the reunion fails and he leaves home and goes to London.

At the age of eighteen he is conscripted into the RAF where he shows an aptitude for making money and also a questionable disregard for authority. After his demob in 1953 he continues on this unsteady path with a worrying diversification into boats and dodgy deals. In between these hazardous escapades he finds time to get married and raise a family. He makes a conscious effort to distance himself from the charitable past even refusing to tell his own family. A bad storm off the African Coast in a Catamaran with his two sons brings about a change in his thinking and he divulges all.

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