Andy Landau

I am a very lucky man I am 72, and a healthy man.  I come from a large family number 5 of 6 siblings. Like a lot of Gibraltarians, we spent our early years in Gib. In 1963 Moved to the UK. Officially by then the London smog had all gone, the 1956 when the Clean Air bill was enacted, but I remember some really horrible occasions when you could not see 3 feet in front of your face, that was not the worst of it, the ice and cold was not used to it, so different from Gibraltar’s climate, not a happy 9-year-old.

At the age of 11, I went to the BIG school, a place where boys commenced their growth spurt, on the way to become a man. By the time I was 15 I was ready to leave school, having graduated “A survivor” befitting a student in a secondary modern school in the Paddington ghetto. It was not an education; it was a survival course that prepared me for years ahead in the real world.

At 18, I joined the army (Royal Signals Regiment), that’s a place to train you for adulthood. It was there that I learnt many of the skills which proved to be the foundation and joys of being a young man in the early 70’s.