David Gold - Flying
Alchemy Part Two
stunning indoor swimming pool complex.
"How did it all start?" I asked him as we later relaxed in a sunlit sitting room.
"It says on my birth certificate that I was born in 1936.1 think they made a mistake and it should have been 1956," David joked. "I can't be that old!"
David's earliest memories are of being cold and hungry, often having to go to bed in his clothes to try to find some warmth. His devoted mother Rosie was, and still is, a totally indomitable lady, who has been a great influence on his whole life. Nowadays, at the age of ninety, she regularly visits her local gym to work out! David's formative years were spent during the Second World War, with quite a lot of the time spent in the local air raid shelter. His father, who was away for long periods, he has not seen for over thirty years.
David left school at the age of fifteen to become, as he put it, 'an out of work bricklayer'.
"You know," he mused. "If I could have four people to dinner - any four I liked -1 would invite Margaret Thatcher, because she transformed this country; Isambard Kingdom Brunei, because of what he achieved in such a short time; Charles Lindbergh, who made the first non-stop solo flight
from New York to Paris in 1927. And Mrs Green." Since both Andy and I looked blank at the last name, he went on gleefully to explain. "Mrs Green was my teacher when I failed the Eleven Plus exam. She said to me 'Gold, you will never amount to anything in this life.' I'd just love to see her face now!"
Gold Air have a range of aircraft that includes its own aerobatics team, a Gazelle helicopter and a fleet of executive jets.
He did eventually find work after about a year but was used as a form of cheap labour. "When I finished my apprenticeship I'd had enough of being a brickie, I wanted to do something else. My brother Ralph was a salesman at the time and had found a little back street shop, just off Charing Cross Road in London, which sold books and magazines. I'd acquired a motor bike by then and sold that to raise the £2001 needed to buy
the lease. But, to begin with, the shop did badly and I was really struggling. Anyway, Ralph used to pick me up every Wednesday and we'd go to have a meal with our mum. One Wednesday he rang me to say he had broken down and wouldn't get to me before about nine or ten o'clock. I kept the shop open until he arrived and took more money in those few extra hours than I usually did in a whole week!"
"Luck plays a tremendous part in our lives"
Although predominantly a traditional book shop, David found that there was an increasing appetite for more adventurous titles. Before long he was opening seven days a week and working from ten in the morning until late into the night.
"Luck plays a tremendous part in our lives," David said. "If my brother hadn't broken down all those years ago I would probably have gone bust because I wouldn't have realised that all the trade was late into the evening. And we probably wouldn't have been sitting here today."
After three years David had more than he had ever dreamed of. He had bought himself a two-bedroom bungalow and acquired a second-hand Vauxhall complete with radio and heater. "This, to me, was super-wealthy, because all things are relative."
But a snag was just around the corner
