ABOUT

It was the 28th of December 1954. Falling pregnant at 40 years of age wasn’t part of the plan, yet that is what happened to Mark’s future mother. The odds against a successful birth were dangerously high.

She was still weak from a recent emergency operation that removed three-quarters of her stomach. Outside the hospital a snow-blown blizzard had arrived from Siberia, which stopped certain doctors and nurses from making it in.

Yet they were a couple of tough fighters and eventually made it through. His family were poor in wealth but loving. They lived in a rough and beaten up part of London called the East End.

Although a generally happy child, he had a wild side which brought with it a difficulty in concentrating on any one thing. At the age of seven this landed him in hospital for a week of observations. These days the they would have found him hyperactive, and prescribed the resultant mind-numbing drugs. Fortunately, the diagnosis then was that he was just one active child!

“Sitting still and concentrating was something he constantly struggled with. This meant his school studies suffered right up to the end. One thing he did have was a natural ability to spend hours by himself playing in the many worlds created by an increasingly active and fertile imagination.”

At the age of ten his family immigrated to Israel. It was an emotional upheaval, causing him to cry himself to sleep the night before. They spent a year in a Kibbutz (collective farm) where no one else spoke English. It was tough, hot and a very different way of life. In the end they returned to England, with his dog left to a tribe of Bedouins.

After that large adventure they lived in North London where his struggles with school, his wildness and ever-growing imagination continued on. One day, at the age of fourteen, he was touched by a new deeper urge to write a poem about his much older father.

He did this without too much trouble then decided to show it to his sister. She wouldn’t believe he could write such a good poem and spent a long time after searching through books and the back of his record albums to see where he had copied it from.

From that moment on he knew that he could write poetry.