Before the journeys, the departures, the Philippines, and the long search for identity that would later shape The Road to Myself, there were the early years.
These photographs belong to another England now largely vanished: canals crowded with narrowboats, school classrooms lined with wooden desks, post-war streets still marked by rationing and recovery, and childhood summers that seemed endless beneath uncertain skies.
Like many lives shaped by the years following the Second World War, memory survives not as a continuous story but through fragments, faces, places, friendships, moments caught accidentally on old Kodachrome film. Some images remain remarkably clear despite the passing decades, while others fade slowly at the edges like memory itself.
The photographs shown here are drawn from family collections spanning the 1950s and 1960s, including slides and prints preserved for more than sixty years. Together they offer a glimpse into the world that formed the foundations of later journeys: childhood friendships, school days, family life, and the quiet ordinary moments that often become most important only in retrospect.
In many ways, these are not simply photographs of the past. They are fragments of the road that eventually led toward everything that followed.