Anthony E Thorogood

I was born in 1953 in the East End of London. My Dad had a market stall in the Woolwich Market and my first memories, even before I went to school, were of going around to the market and helping out. I was probably more trouble than I was worth. Then my old Dad got sick and we ended up impoverished but Mum and Dad, having six children, were accepted by the Australian Government for immigration to the ‘Lucky Country’. I was about nine years old when Mum, Dad, me, my brothers and sisters drove past the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace on the way to Gatwick Airport. I remember vividly flying across the world to Australia and we ended up in an abandoned migrant hostel in sunny South Australia. The cost of immigrating for our family was ten pounds each for my Mum and my Dad, we were ‘Ten Pound Poms.’

From day one I was a dead loss at school, I was usually at the bottom of the class and no amount of help did any good. I couldn’t read or write and was barely able to add up. I was a ‘thick as a brick’ immigrant from Pommy Land. In fact I suffered from a condition called dyslexia but at the time no one had heard of the word let alone knew what to do to help someone with the condition. Then one day, I was about thirteen, I sat down and taught myself the whole of the twelve times table. With that success under my belt I got hold of the novel The Silver Sword and taught myself to read by recognising words rather than being able to spell them. Within a couple of years I was coming top of the class and when I sat my matriculation exams I won a scholarship and was accepted into the hallowed halls of the University of Adelaide Law School. Law was not for me however so I swapped to arts and studied revolutions, politics and the new wave of music and theatre, those were heady and historic times. Ironically years later I applied to undertake a one year teaching course in Manchester, England and to do that I had to have a pass in a subject called ‘O’ level English language which I didn’t have, so I applied to do night school ‘O’ level English language. When I went along to fill out my application form the man behind the desk said: You are a smart fella just sit the exam you’ll pass. So, having done no preparation at all, the dyslexic boy from Woolwich, who at one stage couldn’t read or write, sat a matriculation English language exam, I was hoping to squeeze through with a pass, I got a distinction!

When I graduated from The University of Adelaide I had no idea what I wanted to do, only a few years before a dead end job was all I could have hoped for. I spent several years hanging about the theatre and found myself writing and producing plays. My play Noah’s Nuclear Niche was presented in 1978 at the Balcony Theatre, Adelaide and was very well received. Another of my plays, Planet of the Cows, was produced as part of The Fringe of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1980 and Tim Lloyd wrote in the Adelaide Advertiser: Thorogood has the tremendous advantage of being able to write fresh and fluent dialogue which makes the play come alive, it is indulgent and funny… But I was still very, very self conscious about my spelling and grammar so I ended up putting the whole writing experiment on the back burner.

By the early 1980’s I wanted to extend my horizons so I took any job I could get. I worked as an all night waiter, a painter, a junk mail distributor, a gardener and a builder’s labourer, all at the same time, and I saved up enough money to go on a world tour that was to keep me on the road for six years. The highlights of my travels included getting caught in the middle of a gun battle in Israel, being dragged off to a robbers den in Bangkok, nearly dying of an unknown virus in Egypt, being apprehended and accused of drug trafficking by the German police, having to bribe my way out of Nepal, working as a guinea pig for a medical experiment in Yorkshire, England, being cast as an extra in a Bollywood movie in India and getting run down three times, first by a truck in London, then a caravan crashed into me in Oxford and finally a Mini Minor drove straight at me in Stockport. I had a few laughs.

At one stage on my travels I felt that the forces that be were trying to pretend that I had never existed. While I was away from Australia the high school where I was educated was bulldozed, I got to the house where I was born in Woolwich and that was now a car park, I visited the house in West Ham where my Dad was born and that had just been bulldozed. So I went south cycling through Somerset and drinking cider. I met a nice girl from Yorkshire named Susan and later I took a train north to visit her, there was a problem though, most of her family wouldn’t speak to me as I was foreign. We got married anyway and returned to Australia to buy some land and plant out an apple orchard and make the best cider in the world.

Susan, my brother Chris and I built a mud brick farmhouse and Susan and I planted ten thousand native trees, one thousand apple trees, built our own road and then built a mud brick cider cellar and started producing and selling real cider. Much hard work, many awards and accolades later and having achieved our goals I one day sat down to write a book about my experiences in setting up our farm and making cider and Cider Make It Drink It Cook With It was published in 2009 and quickly sold out.

In 2010 all my early plays were published in a single volume Noahs Nuclear Niche An Assortment of Crazy Plays, we launched the book on Boxing Day morning 2010at the Largs Hotel on the beach front in Adelaide. The setting was lovely with the sea gently rolling into the shore. We hired a suite and gave brunch to a raucous collection of my old friends from The University of Adelaide, I tried to give a short speech but the happy, noisy crowd shouted me down, laughed, joked and bought copies of my book, what more could I ask? One raucous reveller said about the plays: Deeply strange. But what fun they would be to perform; snappy repartee of staggering banality which then takes an unexpected twist.

Since we launched Noahs Nuclear Niche Susan and I have been dreaming up recipes, cooking and writing and creating our own cookbook, Susan’s Country Kitchen, with its unique combination of quirky, vegetarian, sugarless, traditional English and cider enthused cuisine which is to be published in 2011. It is a brilliant and original cookbook and it would be only sensible for you, the reader, to dash out now and grab a copy. Cookbooks, I have discovered, are great things to write as one gets to eat lots of delicious food in the process. And now my greatest classic A Foxtrot Through India has been published and I am over the moon! Foxtrot is a great book, it is so good in fact that when I read it I have to pinch myself and ask: Did I write this? Not bad for a dyslexic boy from Woolwich.

As I write, summer 2012, two novelas of mine, Hotel Le Big Knob and Just a Little Bit of Fun have been accepted for publication by the German publishing company: JustFiction and a short piece about my chilhood is to be published in England. It's all happening.

Cheers Anthony E Thorogood