Life
His father was originally from South Africa, and his mother was English; he has two younger brothers. After a childhood in poverty, he studied languages and taught himself Gregg Shorthand. Having learned Welsh, he was interviewed in Welsh on radio; he has a reasonable knowledge of ten different languages. He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be homosexual at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his homosexuality public.
Read more about this topic: John C. Wells
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life . . .”
—Robert Lowell (19171977)
“The bitter sea of life is boundless; if one but turns around, theres the shore.”
—Chinese proverb.
“No Life can pompless pass away
The lowliest career
To the same Pageant wends its way
As that exalted here”
—Emily Dickinson (18301886)