Born and raised near London, I was fortunate enough to live in an apartment in London at the beginning of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, and since leaving home at 18 have lived well over half my life overseas.
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, so could add ‘FCA’ after my name. However, it was a profession I soon realised didn’t suit me, so I later resigned. I thought at the time what a waste of five years studying, but it, in fact, this benefited me as I was able to talk sensibly about Profit and Loss, Management Accounts and financial affairs with managers and directors of the various companies I later worked for or with.
My working life has been like a series of projects. It started by emigrating to Spain in the mid-sixties, looking at Spanish companies being considered for acquisition by American and British firms.
It was here in Barcelona that I met Valarie, who was fleeing the Biafra war in Nigeria, and I ‘inherited’ two tiny children, Jan and Don.
We returned to the UK and married, and Diana joined our family a year later.
Back in the UK, I spent periods working out a system for charging other airlines for BOAC’s first Flight Simulator, juggling an overdraft for a failing (different) airline and then working for a computer group which was a subsidiary of Greyhound Bus.
Then in the early 1970s, we moved to spend ten years in Hong Kong. This included a six-month fill-in job with Cathay Pacific Airways, but then later designing and running an insurance system, together with financial and management information systems. Back to the UK in the mid-eighties to work for a large insurance group, I installed an online group management information system from worldwide data, introducing an international email system to replace faxes, dabbling in one of the first company internet sites, supporting systems in Portugal, Spain and Italy, and embracing the early days of Local Area Networks and Help Desks.
One of those lucky people who enjoyed their career.
On the personal side of my life, sadly Valerie and I divorced in 1990, and eight years later I met and married Jo (not Joe!) in 1999. Within months, both self-employed, we retired and moved to live in the sun in a 150-year-old finca on the Costa Blanca. Not surprisingly perhaps, we were bored within three months. So we started selling houses, with a website called ‘Javea Online’ at a time when few agents had websites. We sold over eighty, worth nearly €40 million before the financial crisis spoiled our fun in 2008.
Frustrated again, I spent some time exploring my ancestry and had a few surprises, not least finding my ancestors fought in China and Spain over a century before I lived in those countries.
Until then, I thought I was the traveller in the family!
I wrote a couple of short stories, which were published, and then thought, why not write a novel? When I lived in Hong Kong, two work colleagues had fled Shanghai in 1937 to escape a Japanese invasion, and two of the Chinese staff were ‘Freedom Swimmers’ who had swum five miles across Mirs Bay to Hong Kong to escape Mao’s communism.
So I developed a new passion/project. Research. This revealed many fascinating events in China and Hong Kong from the mid-1930s. All I needed to do was create some characters, blend them in with real people and weave stories around actual events. I wrote three novels quite quickly, built a website and published them on Amazon.
Then over the years, I moved on to other stuff until two things happened. Firstly one of my daughters, Diana, had her first novel, ‘Alberto’s Lost BIrthday’, published by Macmillan’s in 2016, and later translated into German, French and Italian. Her second book, ‘Pippo and Clara‘ was published in February 2021 and has been translated into Portuguese and Italian. These can be found on her website dianarosie.co.uk
Secondly, after 20 years, Jo and I decided the decision to live in an old house in a village called Jesus Pobre, with 4,500 m² of land, and nestling on a national park on a mountain called Montgo was not as sensible as it was in 1999. So in 2020, we sold the house and moved just ten kilometres to our apartment in the port of Javea, which is a two-minute walk to the Mediterranean sea.
I found that apartment life was more restricted. So I had a literary consultant review one of my novels and suggest improvements. Then I used an American firm to edit the novels professionally and help me publish them as paperbacks in 2023. I started to get reviews including these
So I returned to think about the cities I had came to love, Shanghai and Hong Kong, which today are two of the most exciting and charismatic cities in the world, just as they were in the 1930s. Then thought why not write another novel? So I started `The 1997 Circle’.
Yes, I have, of course, had other important stuff in my personal life. Valerie, is still a friend, and Jo and I have five great kids scattered over the world (mine in Mexico, Spain and the UK, and Jo with sons in Canada and Sweden).
So in summary, I’ve had, and am still having, a great life.
Tony Henderson
March 2023
I’ve grown quite a few vwhite hairs since this was taken!