I was born in Jamaica and won a World Youth Forum scholarship to study at English schools and stay with English families when I was 16. I started my newspaper career at The Haiti Sun in Port au Prince in 1954. My major influences? Aldous Huxley (when I was very young), Don Marquis, Thorne Smith, Raymond Chandler, and of course the usual people whose works we had to read in school (Shakespeare, Milton, Browning and so on).