I was 19 years old and having spent a year or so as a computer programmer, earning my wings, I landed a job with a company recruiting the young and naive to work in the United States – PMI, Programming Methods Incorporated, PMI, Piranha Methods Incorporated as we who worked for them came to call it.

My mum and sister took me to Heathrow, me in my brand new dark blue wool overcoat, the height of the mature man, my mother and sister sobbing their eyes out. I couldn’t wait to get through to departures.

I flew to New York, and was collected and taken to a hotel and then joined the rest of the luckless recruits for orientation where we were assigned our missions.

PMI was a cowboy outfit hiring gullible foreigners and American misfits who were then rented out to various corporations as contractors who paid a fortune for us – we were paid a pittance but were tied into iron-clad punitive contracts.

I was going to be sent to Detroit, Murder City as it was known as in 1978. I was assigned to Ford Motor Company in Dearborn Michigan to work on machines I’d never seen before, with software I’d never heard of and now apparently 25 years old according to my CV, no sorry, my resume. It was November, Detroit is cold, very cold and a long way from home. I had to grow up fast.

But hey, at least I was away from home, and the darkness that lingered in my family. I soon found a new family, or maybe they found me, the PMI family. We’d all been taken advantage of and so we had to take care of each other. None of us worked in the same companies but we all came together for beers and pool and dope smoking. Graham, an English guy who was a sort local supervisor took me under his wing. I remember sobbing my eyes out with homesickness and him hugging me to comfort me. When I see the image of that memory I see my brother Geoff.

I got an apartment in Taylor ‘Tucky, thus called because most of those who lived in Taylor had originated from poor areas in Kentucky and had come to work in the car plants of Detroit. My apartment complex was government subsidised, because my salary was so low, in an area known as ‘the projects’.

Another PMIer moved in with me, Bob Monaco, a recovering alcoholic with a predilection for gambling from Queens in New York. 12 years my elder we became good friends.

What a place it was that I was living. I met some scary people, Vietnam vets, who like my father were totally fucked by their experiences. There was plenty of beer, whisky, marijuana, and guns. Wow, welcome to the USA!

I was protected by Carl. An enormous black guy who approached me one day. I was nervous. He could see I was nervous. He then smiled and put out his hand. He saw my innocence, declared I was now officially his friend. It made me feel safe.

I realised I would survive.

I mean Detroit, 1978. What a buzz. A little middle-class, innocent white boy in the birth place of Motown, I tell you, it was a gas.

I worked the night shift at Ford’s along with mostly black guys. The coolest dudes a 19 years old English boy could ever meet. The black guys and white guys didn’t really hang out together, but for me it was different. I became known as ‘The English Man’ and was totally welcomed and made part of the crew, going to parties and cruising round in large cars, drinking Bacardi and smoking weed, Dad’s bonhomie shing through. These guys were so cool. Wide lapelled suits and Afros. And they loved my London suits, especially the tweed. Can you imagine? How innocent. I was 19, going to the States, so I bought a tweed suit. My goodness, I love that 19 year old David.

My first Christmas  away from home came around and I spent it with Vicky and her cousin Wayne and his wife Marylou. Vicky was part Japanese and part Cherokee, about my age and pretty wild. I had a bit of a crush on her but nothing ever came of it, which was probably for the best, however we did become firm friends. She and her family hailed from Tennessee, and her cousin Wayne was a truck driver, the real deal, just like in the movies, in my mind’s eye he looks like Johnny Depp. We arrived at their house and were warmly welcomed, good old Southern hospitality. That evening Wayne had some of his buddies around for a Christmas eve poker session. We sat around the kitchen table and bottles of Bourbon and Tennessee whiskey were put in front of each of us and off we went. I had no idea how to play poker, but apparently I knew how to drink, which seemed to impress these good old boys. After the game most of them left apart from Wayne’s cousin who stayed on to keep drinking and to drunkenly wail along to Dwayne Eddie songs while twirling a 6 shooter from the holster on his hip – I kid you not. Then he and Wayne had a falling out and stumbled out into the snow and started to beat the hell out of each other while Marylou lamented “not of Christmas eve Wayne!”. They eventually collapsed into the blood spattered snow in hugs and tears and vows of everlasting fealty. What a night, certainly not like any Christmas eve I’d ever experienced in the middle-class north-western London suburbs, but probably an evening my dad may have been more familiar with back in his war days.

Is this what it means to be a man – god help me!

I slept, passed out, on a mattress under the Christmas tree. I was woken up the next morning by Wayne handing me a cigarette and a bottle of beer. Merry Christmas Dave. That was December 25th 1978.

I’d survived once again.

I carried on working on the night shift at Ford’s  during January 1979. It was gruelling. Starting work at midnight and finishing at 8.00 am, then ‘going out’ before trying to sleep in the afternoon for a few hours before getting up to spend a couple of hours of the evening with friends before heading back to work again. The weekends were particularly tough as I would hook up with friends Friday evening and fall back into a ‘normal’ weekend routine, hanging out and going to bars and clubs, until exhausted crashing out on a Sunday evening only to have to drag myself out to start work again at midnight. It took its toll and was making me unwell and I finally got moved onto the day shift in the February.

I then got laid off from the Ford contract in the late spring, during which time I was put on a temporary assignment in St. Louis, Missouri, for a month or so, commuting weekly by plane from Detroit, a concept beyond anything that I had ever experienced before. Fly out Monday morning, motel and rental car and back again Friday evening. I was just a kid, 19, never being asked for ID in bars, the age limit for alcohol being 21 in the states, 18 for going to war. My memories of St. Louis are misty. I remember being stopped by the police for speeding and stepping out of my car England style and the cops pulling their guns on me with a “freeze!”. Jesus! They let me go as I was just some dumb English kid. I remember two guys I worked with who were on helicopter gunships in Vietnam, who would regale me with their stories as though it was all jolly fun.

Was it fun dad, or was it a fucking nightmare?

The St. Louis assignment came to an end and I was put ‘on the beach’. This was one of the few upsides of this job, a period of what was effectively paid holiday whilst awaiting  reassignment, it lasted about 6 weeks. The downside was that when you were told to go, you had to go, literally within 48 hours, wherever it was.

I then fell in with a woman in her early thirties who had a young 13 or 14 year old teenage son, she lived in the same apartment complex and we ended up having a torrid affair. We never really discussed my age, 19 when we met. On my birthday, hanging out with friends having a barbecue on a hot summer’s evening she finally asked

“…so, how old are you now?”.

When I told her it was my 20th birthday, she screamed and ran off. We soon made up but I was getting ready to move on.

I was being reassigned to Rock Hill, South Carolina and only had a matter of days before I had to leave, so I told her that it was time to bring the relationship to an end. She seemed to accept it.

Just before I left I called round to a couple who were friends of hers and they told me something that I have never forgotten. She had always wanted another child and that despite telling me otherwise, during the brief time we were together she was not taking the pill in the hope that she would become pregnant.

I was taken aback, and being just 20 years old, happy to be disappearing the next day to the deep south.

I never asked her about it, I just left. She even wrote to me once when I was in Rock Hill asking if I would like her to move down there to join me. She said she would understand if I wouldn’t and if I didn’t reply, she would take it as a no. I didn’t reply.

Did she know something I didn’t? I will never know, but sometimes I wish I did.

Dad, I would have made a good father, despite everything, I would have been a good dad, but back then a different voice spoke so quietly in the shadows that I didn’t know I could hear it.