The Mountain (ePub)

Born in the suburbs of London in 1955, Ray was an avid reader from a very young age. As a young boy, he read the abridged classics, after lights out under his blankets, using a flashlight his grandfather gave him. He Journeyed to the Centre of the Earth, Travelled Around the World in Eighty Days and rocketed from the Earth to the Moon inspired by the writings of Jules Verne and H.G Wells - all from the safety of his bed. It was this, and the fact that he lived under a flight path from Heathrow Airport, that kindled his later passions for writing and traveling.
His favorite subject at school was creative writing and his ambition was to become a journalist and an author. He loved boxing, and as a young teenager, he trained at the Hayes Boxing Club, in London, where he rubbed shoulders with some of the better amateur boxers in the country. He left school at sixteen, anxious to see the world, and started his working life as a trainee accountant. As soon as he turned eighteen, he quit his job and began to travel around Europe. Over the next two years, he took odd jobs in the winter in the UK and traveled on the continent in the summer months using a combination of hitchhiking, cycling and trains. He enjoyed many diverse and wonderful experiences from the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona to watching the sunset over Athens from the mystical ruins of the Acropolis.
In the winter of his twentieth year, Ray took another 'temporary' winter job as a trainee croupier in a London Casino. It turned into his career for the next forty years - so much for his dreams of journalism and writing, which ended up on the back burner. Ray continued to travel the world, living in Australia and visiting the Philippines and the Far East.
Ray settled in the Bahamas in 1990 and worked for over twenty years in the Atlantis Casino on Paradise Island. He travelled throughout the Caribbean where many of the scenes in his first book, The Hatcher File, are set. Ray parted ways with the casino in