The first part of Bore Hole is about Joey's earlier life, preceding his conversion to the perforated head movement. He was born within a few days of the outbreak of the Second World War, was educated at Eton College and Oxford University and, at the age of twenty-one, found himself in London, on course for a career as a chartered accountant. The marvellous era of the 1960s was then dawning. New modes of music, combined with the sudden appearance and popularity of all sorts of drugs, were giving rise to radically new styles of thought and fashion. Joey had always been an enthusiast. Following the example of his father, a former Oxford rowing blue, he had become a renowned sportsman during his schooldays, ending up as captain of the Oxford University boxing team. In London, the devotion he had paid to boxing was transferred to drugs, beginning with amphetamines and cannabis. At about that time a book came into his hands called Wisdom, Madness and Folly: the Philosophy of a Lunatic. Its author was a manic-depressive, and the insights he recorded were similar to those Joey was experiencing through drugs, persuading him that life at large offered more interest and excitement than could be found in an accountant's office. He abandoned professional studies for life in London's High Bohemia.

The account in Bore Hole of its author's career during the 1960s constitutes a valuable record of the peculiar atmosphere of the period. Joey's friends included a drug-addict crooks and con-men, as well as many of the young artists and aristocrats of avant-garde society. Among these were Jane Ormesby-Gore and her future husband, Michael Rainey, whose Chelsea boutique purveyed colorful outfits to Beatles, Rolling Stones and others of fame and rank; Christopher Gibbs who provided the same sort of customers with fine English furniture and country houses; Kenneth Anger the mystical film-maker; Sir Mark Palmer, the Queen's page who rose to become an itinerant horse-dealer; Lord Timothy Willoughby who disappeared from his boat in the Mediterranean; and Joshua Macmillan, a grandson of the then Prime Minister and an early victim of alcohol and amphetamines combined. Their favorite resort was Torremolinos in the south of Spain, where Rainey's sister, Shelagh Tennant, had a night-club. She disapproved of Joey's passion for drugs, but liked him enough to bear him a daughter, whom they presented to his mother for adoption. With other friends, the beatniks, bohemians, and early hippies of Torremolinos, he enjoyed the life of a free spirit and the diversity of sex and drugs on offer at the time. After an experience of mescaline he decided that he had only one drug problem, how to obtain more of it. Soon the pleasures of Torremolinos became widely famed, waves of fresh hedonists arrived for a share in them, and Joey and his friends were impelled to seek new playgrounds. He found his in Ibiza where, on his first evening, he met Bart Huges and took his first LSD trip. >>>>>