Anthony Cuerden was born in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, in March, 1940, to an Indian army officer and his wife.After following his father and stepmother out to South Africa in 1948, he was educated at Hottentots-Holland High School in Somerset West, in the Cape Province.He returned to the UK in 1963 and eventually spent 22 years programming mainframe computers, before he and his wife retired and moved to East Devon in 1999, where they have lived ever since.