Jade Jungwirth
David was born on March 21 1934, in Kalgoorlie, the first and only child of Julia Alicia and Sydney Watson.
“My dad, who was a French scholar, a brilliant engineer and mathematician and an electronics expert, was just about the cleverest man I have ever met or could ever hope to. He was very clever, very quiet, and a crack shot. He could hit a target, drunk, firing from the hip, 200 metres. He was an expert,” David said.
“He spent a lot of his wartime years working with Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia). Then he worked for the science department at the University of Sydney.”
Young David’s schooling began at a boarding house overlooking Rose Bay run by two ladies who he describes as sadists. He was relentlessly bullied in school. A sad theme that continued when he went to Sydney Grammar, where he was the youngest student.
“What do you do to a skinny kid? You bully them; they were bad days,” he said.
Pushed to his limits, David retaliated and was flogged in front of the whole school and expelled.
“Everybody has a breaking point, but how and when you’re going to reach that, you don’t know,” David said.
In 1944, immediately at the end of WWII, David’s father got a position in England working in the patents department of Electric and Musical Industries.
David had his twelfth birthday a few days after arriving in London.
“London had been bombed sh**tless. It was awful. London was, and is, very densely developed. Just after the war, it was terrace house, terrace house, blank, terrace house, blank, blank, blank, where places had been bombed,” he said.
Attending his first English school, David made the mistake of calling someone a ‘silly bastard’ in the playground one day.
“That’s what you said in Australia. Next thing I knew, I was looking up at the sky! I asked, ‘What did you do that for?’ and he said, ‘You insulted my mother.’ ‘I what? I don’t know your mother!’ I had no concept at all.”
David’s father started working overseas a lot, doing seismograph surveys, and David would visit on holidays, travelling to countries such as Holland and Iraq.
After finishing high school, David went to university to study architecture.
“Frankly, I don’t think I made a very good architect at all,” he said.
“I had the conceit you need to have if you’re an architect: you need to believe you’re really somebody.”
Never having actually been out of the company of solely boys from the age of 12 onward, David, having no idea how to meet girls, decided to learn how to dance.
“I ended up doing Latin American dancing – and was quite good at it!” he said.
“And it was a wonderful way of meeting girls!”
The second installment of David’s two-part interview will be published in next week’s Mail on August 21.