Mum had given me a Tiny Tears doll and a large baby doll she called Debbie. Eventually she had to rescue them because they were vandalised by the two boys. They scribbled over the dolls with ballpoint pen and pushed their eyes in. My mother was always sentimental about dolls. Perhaps they reminded her of her own childhood, which was also deprived of motherly love, or maybe they substituted in some way for the fact that she was separated from her children. Despite her poverty Mum took the baby doll, Debbie, to a toy hospital and paid to have it mended. She kept Debbie after that. Another time she brought along two new dolls to show us, which she had named Beverley and Sally. She told me that these were the names that she would have chosen for us.

For a short time Mum was lodging in a room of a private house in the suburbs of London and the couple allowed her to use their living room for the day. Mum bought a red plastic toy tea set and Sarah and I spent the afternoon playing with it. Early on Mum wrote reluctantly to her brother Arthur and asked him to put her up until she found a home. However Mum found Arthur’s lack of sympathy difficult to take.

In common with others Arthur had liked Trevor. While my parents were married, Arthur and his wife Doreen were invited up to London to see a show with them. They ate together afterwards at Trevor’s expense and to all appearances Jo and Trevor were devoted to each other. Now Mum sat around her brother’s house, chain smoking and talking little. She moved on as soon as she could and found lodgings out near Romford, in the suburbs of East London, which meant a long journey by tube when she came to see us.

We spent these tedious journeys counting off the underground stations, which we came to know by heart. When the train came into the station we had to run down the platform so that Mum could sit in a smoking compartment. To pay for the train fare Mum took a job in a factory packing butter. One week she would work the 2pm to 10pm shift and the following week she would do the 6am to 2pm shift. It was monotonous work so she would take a word from the dictionary every day and see how many other words she could find in it. One of the foremen used to help her.

Jo was going to the doctor at the time and she told him that she had changed from not being able to have anything to do with men to wanting anyone. He asked her what had been happening in her life and when she told him about losing custody of her children, he said it was not the men she wanted but a baby. He then put her on the pill and Mum was back to normal. After about six months on the pill she thought it was safe to come off but soon after she became pregnant. The father was the foreman at work. There was not much chance of him wanting to take the baby away from her as he already had twins and two other children. Jo felt she could not take any more and asked the doctor if she could go into hospital for a while.

She was given an interview with the head of Warley Hospital near Brentwood. It was agreed that she would stay at the mental hospital during the week and go back to her flat at weekends so that she could still see us. When Jo was released the report from the hospital stated that she was suffering from a slight form of schizophrenia. The opinion was that if she was to have any more stress in her life it might lead to a psychotic breakdown. Jo’s view was that she was clinically depressed. Mum wore loose clothing when she came to see us and kept her pregnancy secret from us so that we would not tell Daphne. She did not want Trevor to know in case it stood against her in the custody battle.

My mother had kept her married name because she associated her maiden name with poverty and shame. When my brother was born in September 1967, she named him Simon Thomas so that he would have the same initials as Trevor. It was her way of getting back at him because Trevor had always wanted a son. Jo had nowhere to live and so initially foster parents looked after the baby. She went back to work at the factory and visited Simon one weekend and us the next. Our older sister Anne was mentally handicapped and cared for too far away so she only managed to visit her once. Mum received a letter from Simon’s foster mother in which she begged to keep him.

Mum went to the council in Romford and asked them to house her so that she could have her children with her. They refused for a long time on the grounds that she did not have enough points to make her eligible for council housing. Finally they agreed to give her a flat in Gidea Park and she applied to get Simon back from his foster family. We were staying with Mum at the time and I remember the emotional atmosphere when the couple arrived to hand over the toddler. Simon was a pretty child with a gentle temperament. Shirley and Howard had five children of their own, plus two adopted and many fostered. They had a nice home in Essex and were no doubt concerned for his future growing up in the poverty of a council flat.

Now that Mum had Simon to look after she could no longer work to pay for tube fares. Her doctor asked her why she did not ask her brother Arthur to help her. Mum was too proud to ask her brother for help but the doctor replied that if she did not ask then he would. So Mum wrote to Arthur who agreed to send £5 every other week to pay for a taxi to bring us from London for the weekend. I remember feeling self-consciously privileged during these chauffeured car rides. The flat was in a high-rise block and once Sarah and I played in the lifts until other residents told us off. This was the first time that we stayed overnight with Mum since she lost custody.

Later Mum told me how dire this time at Romford was for her. She had very little money and spent months living on nothing but a loaf of bread for the week. She had little furniture so her flat seemed barren. Luckily Sarah and I were accustomed to amusing ourselves. Mum was a keen card player and she and I played for hours. She taught me rummy and brag, a gambling game that we used as practice for sorting hands. Sarah had always been a fussy eater and at mealtimes Mum would play aeroplanes or make up stories to encourage Sarah to eat.

From when I was quite young Mum told me of the six years she spent trying to win custody of us. She engaged a solicitor under the legal aid system but did not understand the difference between what she deemed to be justice and what the law allowed. She believed that her divorce petition proved that Trevor’s unreasonable behaviour had deprived her of a home. He had not yet sold the house in Bayswater and since he had two houses and she had none, she expected a court to agree that he should give one of them to her. The solicitor said that she was unlikely to get anything. Her solicitor said that to get custody of us she would have to prove that we were in danger.

On one of our visits Mum arranged for us to see the social services. They asked us whether we liked living with Dad in London. We were too young to understand the legal situation but I remember being concerned to defend Dad during the questioning, which seemed to imply some criticism of him. I considered the love and attention I received from my parents to be special. Even though I saw them rarely, their relationship with me was unique and different to the relationship I had with anyone else. I did not judge or blame Dad for the deficiencies in our care because I was unaware of his responsibilities.

Once when Mum collected us from Daphne’s she had to wash Sarah’s coat because it was so filthy. Both of us had fleas. She reported Trevor to the NSPCC who came to inspect the London flat. That morning Daphne overslept and we did not dare wake her. When she woke up she was furious with us. There was no change in our lives subsequent to this visit. Presumably the social services would only interfere if we had been seriously neglected or abused.

At the next hearing Jo brought an action against my father for neglect. When the case came up the court was told that Mrs Campion was ill and could not attend. Trevor made light of the lice and said that everyone caught lice at some time or other. Mum concluded that the legal system was biased against her because of Dad’s upper class accent and her lack of education. Unfortunately she also had a history of mental illness, no home and no money to enable her to keep us.

Dad’s parents decided to pay for us to go to boarding school and when Dad broke the news to Daphne, she was not pleased. She confronted me over the move as if we had complained about her. Later, during a school holiday Dad took us to see Daphne. She was living with Patrick and Christopher in a tower block of council flats in Wandsworth. Seeing the circumstances in which she was living gave me a glimpse of what my life might have been like if Granny had not paid for us to go away to school.

Mum told us that once she obtained the council flat she came close to winning custody of us. The action of removing us from London had given Mum the ideal excuse to go for custody again. This time Trevor’s legal team (paid for by Dr and Mrs Hare) tried to use the fact that Jo had already given up a baby before she met Trevor in order to weaken her custody claim. However the judge was cross with Trevor for changing our situation without the court’s permission. For a while Mum thought that she was going to get us back. The court broke for lunch to allow Dr and Mrs Hare to decide whether they would still pay for our education if Mum was given custody. The answer came back “no”. So the court decided to leave us at boarding school.

I have always remembered these early years: both the poverty and being separated from Mum. I did not understand why we could not live with our parents in a family home like other children did. With our parents at a distance, I was often held responsible my younger sister and so I learned to be emotionally self-sufficient from the start. I knew that my parents loved me but I also accepted that they did not provide for me in the sense that most parents do. We never knew the advantages of a home, new clothes or expensive toys. So even though I was privately educated from the age of eight, I did not think of myself as socially privileged.

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When we first arrived, Sarah and I slept in a dormitory with two other girls. One of these was Feri Salvesen who became my best friend throughout The Sneep. It never occurred to me to feel homesick since we were used to living away from our parents. We had better care at school than we had had with Daphne even if the environment was institutional. The other girls remarked on our cockney accents but we quickly lost them. Our lack of privileged upbringing only showed occasionally. Feri was amazed when I told her that I had never heard of the Bible. No one had taken us to church or shown me a bible before.

Feri was as quiet as I was but she was more of a tomboy. She had a close relationship with her father and took great pride in a Swiss army knife he had given her. She was fiercely proud of having short hair and at the eight years of age, Feri already knew that she wanted to be an engineer. She had a young uncle who was an expert on Victorian engineering and Feri’s experience of helping him while he worked on steam traction engines had captured her imagination.

The school term was broken by first a ‘quarter weekend’, then half term week and finally a ‘three quarter weekend’. Given the distance from our parent’s homes, we spent short weekends or half terms either with Granny or with friends.

The families of school friend were middle class people who lived in large houses with a good lifestyle. I was also shocked by how disrespectful some girls were towards their parents. I could not imagine having the nerve to speak to my grandmother in that way and I was too fond of my parents to be rude to them. The parents were well spoken and the children had their own rooms sometimes with horses and stables. Feri and I did not ride or have any experience of horses so we complained when the other girls talked constantly about horses. I was terribly shy when I visited another girl’s house. They were often more confident than I was about pop music, which we never listened to at school.

During one birthday party at a girl’s home, I finally had the chance of a very short ride on a pony. It was a great treat, similar to the donkey rides Dad took us on once on Scarborough beach. During another birthday party, the mother had devised a treasure hunt that involved roaming all over the countryside around their house trying to find and solve clues left in advance. Over the years we became used to being guests in other people’s houses.

The most significant contact we had with another family was the time we spent with the Salvesens who lived near Haddington, in Scotland. Feri was the eldest of seven children. Feri’s mother was happy to have a couple of friends along as playmates for her own children. The arrangement suited both sides well. Occasionally we reciprocated by having the Salvesen girls to stay at Granny’s house but since she did not have any transport we were dependent on trips to my Aunt Barbara’s house for entertainment.

The Salvesens lived at Eaglescarnie, a substantial house on a country estate near Edinburgh. When I first went there as a child, I found the place awe-inspiring it was so huge. This was a different world for me where it was possible to get lost just looking for the bathroom.

Feri’s parents, Sari and Robin Salvesen, were always welcoming and evidently pleased that their children had made friends. The fact that we were not from a wealthy family never seemed to be an issue. Time spent at Eaglescairnie was unstructured and mainly unsupervised. Meals were prepared for us and occasionally we went on outings.

Most of the time we roamed the house or the grounds by ourselves making our own entertainment as we always did. The house was full of books. We also played around the shallow river that ran through the grounds just past a walled garden, very much in the style of Mr McGregor’s vegetable garden in the tale of Peter Rabbit. We cleared sticks from the shallow river or made a path through the garlic smelling plants that covered our Italia Island. We built camps and planned adventures. For one birthday, Feri had her own canoe, which she rowed down the river.

In the spring of 1972 industrial action resulted in frequent power cuts at school. We had to use candles in the bathroom and in the dormitories, which was a great adventure. Since we were the only full-boarders in our year at weekends we had the dormitory to ourselves. In the week immediately the lights were turned off, we enjoyed slipping out of bed before the other girls’ eyes had grown used to the darkness. Then we could keep everyone else in suspense wondering where we were hiding ready to pounce on the unsuspecting. Pillow fights were an occasional bit of fun. There was always a matron or teacher around on duty so we were not able to make too much noise before we were ‘caught’.

On birthdays the ‘birthday girl’ was given ‘the bumps’ by the rest of her dorm. I was woken at 7am on a Sunday for my bumps one whole hour before the morning bell was due to sound. For my eleventh birthday Dad sent me a jewellery box covered in black leather that was also a music box. I used this box to store my miniature bottles of French perfume, an embroidered handkerchief and other treasured trivia.

On the last night of term there was a tradition of giving everyone ‘apple pie beds’. We would untuck the bottom sheet and fold it up and over the top sheet so that when you got into bed you could not get your feet further than a foot or two into the bed. It was effective at giving someone an unexpected surprise until the victim realised what had happened. At the end of term we always planned a midnight feast. The weekly boarders would smuggle some biscuits or cakes into school and hide them until the last night. I confided in my diary “Last days of term are lovely.”

Over the years Feri and I, as full-time boarders, had time to develop games that were more involved. The most sophisticated of these games was called ‘Hares and Rabbits’ after my family name. I was a March Hare because of my birthday and Feri was a mountain rabbit since she came from Scotland. We evolved a whole series of tests and procedures that other children had to comply with in order to join the game. There was a hierarchy and self-evidently we automatically qualified to be at the most senior levels of the game whereas others had to learn our rules in order to achieve this level of privilege.

Most of the game was about establishing and maintaining a camp as well as making our own brooms and building mock fires. It was our way of mimicking the outdoor activities we read about in books such as Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’. Feri was the practical one whereas I was more domesticated taking the lead in camp making. Feri used her pen knife to shape bows and arrows.

The school was also the home of the headmistress, Mrs Herring, and her husband who we saw mainly at meal times. In the summer they would invite their friends to the house to play a sociable game of tennis. In the summer months there were always impressive displays of fresh flowers in the main hallway of the school arranged by Mrs Herring. I was fascinated to watch her creating a structure and colour balance with flowers collected from the formal gardens of the school.

She was a handsome woman and kept her dark wavy shoulder-length hair fastened back in a large hair slide. She dressed expensively in colour co-ordinated tweeds with matching low-heeled but elegant shoes. She was Swiss by birth and our main interaction with her came through French classes in the senior years. She was always aloof from the pupils and we were never permitted to share any humour or affection with her.

As with most schools we absorbed the school vernacular on arrival. Mrs Herring’s nickname was inevitably ‘Kipper’ and the head teacher, Miss McConchie was called ‘Conkers’. I did not even dare write Mrs Herring’s nickname in my diary in case she found it. Miss McConchie had a much closer relationship with the pupils. She was a spinster and she had an intelligent wit and a sharp tongue. We were not allowed to get away with any sloppiness or thoughtlessness. I was thoroughly intimidated by her and always nervous of being reprimanded for some transgression of speech or action. As we progressed through the school she did soften a little and we came to like her.

Miss McConchie had a small flat in the annex beyond the assembly hall on the first floor. During winter weekends she would invite the boarders to her sitting room before bed. We would sit on the carpet in front of her fire with some needlework and listen while she read the next chapter from a children’s book. She always chose thought-provoking books and since she was an experienced reader these evenings were a treat.

There was a television in the assembly hall and in winter we were allowed to watch a couple of programmes on Saturday afternoons. We watched Cilla Black’s entertainment show as well as various children’s serials such as ‘Pollyanna’, ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour’.

Life at school revolved around routine, lessons and our free time spent playing with friends. In the morning there was a first bell followed by a second bell five minutes later. We would lay out our socks and knickers out on the chair before we went to bed. Even our knickers were uniform, both the blue underpants and the larger brown knickers that were worn over the blue pair. Mufti (as we called non-uniform clothes) was also prescribed to a degree and included ‘slacks’, as my grandmother used to refer to women’s trousers, and a tartan kilt.

As soon as the second bell rang in the morning, the race was on to dress in our underwear and line up at the door of our dormitory. We waited in our dressing gowns for the matron to tell us when it was our turn to go along to the bathroom with flannel and hand towel. After breakfast we queued again outside the two or three available toilets. Then we would trip along to the basins where matron kept a register and we had to report ‘been’ or ‘not been’. Amongst ourselves, we used to refer discretely to ‘number 1’ and ‘number 2’. In the evening we bathed in groups of four with two girls in the bath at a time. Our hair was washed over a basin at weekends.

Food was a constant source of pleasure and dread. Fried bread for breakfast was one of my favourites. Most Fridays I would write “Fish – yuk!” in my diary. I remember mostly having white flavourless boiled fish that used to stink out the dining room. A regular exception to the white fish was a bright yellow smoked haddock that was almost as bad. Lunch was usually roast meat with potatoes and other vegetables. Thursdays meant Irish stew and tapioca for pudding. Both of these were favourites of mine and I used to eat everyone else’s tapioca. There were no snacks between meals so by mealtimes I was hungry. Despite being skinny, I was always a healthy eater. I liked most food and especially adored the steamed puddings.

On a couple of occasions Mrs Herring showed the older girls how to make a simple pudding: bread soaked in hot milk and cinnamon. It made me feel sick and ironically it was the only dish I could never eat. I was made to sit at the table until teatime but I never ate the pudding.

Later my cousin Sue told me of her carefree memories of The Sneep. Coming from a stable home she had not suffered my shyness and insecurities. She was also sporty and enjoyed games all the way through her school days. I did not enjoy being outside in cold or wet weather and I hated ball games. Netball bored me and I never see the point in chasing around after a ball. One day I questioned why I should even pretend to be interested in the whereabouts of the ball. So I stopped dodging about and just stood on the pitch watching the others. Soon the games teacher spotted me and sent me into the school building to report to the head mistress. I concluded that non-participation in games was not an option despite my lack of personal motivation.

On parents’ days Feri’s mother, Mrs Salvesen, always looked out for Sarah’s and my artwork because she knew we had no one else to see. There were other occasions when we felt the lack of parental interest. During the winter months the matron gave out orange vitamin tablets every morning that many parents provided for their daughters. We thought of these pills as sweets and one of the day girls offered to buy some for Sarah and me. The next thing I knew about it was when Mrs Herring called me in for a telling off. Sarah had eaten the whole packet. I thought it most unjust that I was told off for buying the pills when I had not eaten a single one.

In most weathers we were sent outside to play. Only if it rained heavily would we be allowed indoors where we sat on the desks in one of the classrooms. The winters were cold and there was snow and ice on the ground for a number of weeks each year. We flattened the snow to make a slide along the ground. The first signs of spring came with the snowdrops and daffodils, closely followed by the attractive bushes of ‘Pussy Willow’ with their long flowing catkins and furry buds. The school overlooked sloping grounds covering four or five acres. The grounds included a large garden with formal lawns and rose gardens, which were off-bounds to children.

The main area of garden consisted of open ground and paths where we played. We would build camps or play hide-and-seek games in among the holly and hawthorn bushes. There were also copses of trees, such as hazel and crab apple. We spent hours collecting items from around the garden. In autumn there were acorns, conkers and, from the coppid beach tree, beechnuts, which we would eat. We collected the fallen leaves from the trees in large piles and then kicked our way through them for the fun of seeing the leaves all tossed about.

In the more formal areas of the garden, there were snowberry bushes with their attractive but poisonous white balls, which we would squish on the ground to see their contents of clear liquid burst out. There were dog roses and rose hips. Honesty was another attractive plant with its old-penny-shaped transparent seed pods. In summer the lilac bushes gave off a strong scent from their clusters of white and purple flowers.

The younger children played towards the top of the garden where there was a sandpit and swings. We also used to play hopscotch, marking out our own squares on the ground. For many months in the winter, we played French skipping with a long piece of elastic. Two girls stood inside the circle of elastic to hold it in place at ankle height. Then the third player had to jump in and out of the circle, taking the elastic with her feet, in a prescribed set of moves to complete the game.

Of course, there was always tag and the inevitable horse games. The girl who was pretending to be the horse would wear a skipping rope over her shoulders so that she could be steered from behind. Then someone else, pretending to be the rider, would pull on the rope and give instructions such as ‘gee up’ and ‘halt’. Halfway down the hill there was a tennis court, which doubled as a netball pitch.

There was also a grass field on the lower slopes, which we used on sports day. At the bottom of the field, there were a couple of copses of silver birch trees. In the summer, we played on the bars in the field. There were two sets of bars, a small set for the juniors and a larger set for the older girls. It was possible to do a full turn or somersault over the top bar and continue to do a further turn around the lower bar onto the ground.

We would stand around on these bars or hang upside down talking together. Handstand competitions were also popular in summer and we played ‘Sun, rain, thunder, lightening’ for hours on end. On the far side of the garden beyond the tennis courts, there was a sport’s hut where we had our lessons in gymnastics, ballet and Scottish country dancing. In our younger years, we also had Brownies.

School terms lasted ten weeks or more. Time at school was divided into lessons, meals and play time outdoors. At weekends Miss McConchie or matron looked after us. After lunch on Saturday whoever was on duty would take us on a walk outside the school grounds. One of my favourite destinations was the woods, which we walked to further up the lane above the school. In the woods we built wigwams out of the fallen branches of fir trees. We also took the bus to a nearby lake where we explored the area and try to reach some of the small islands. Miss McConchie told us about the different wild plants and flowers along the way. She would tell us the family of plant that the flower came from. One of these were the many vetches, which are a little like a small wild sweet pea.

We walked along country lanes lined with cow parsley, yarrow in the verges, campions and foxgloves. Less pretty were the thistles and the various varieties of knapweed. We learned to differentiate between a buttercup and a celandine; a primrose and a cowslip. The woods smelled of bracken and in the spring, the ground was carpeted with bluebells. We learned that chickweed, bindweed and groundsel were just common weeds. Other common flowers were white and red dead nettles, speedwell and forget-me-nots. Walking across the moors and open ground we pased gorse and broom bushes as well as many varieties of heather.

More unusual sightings were ‘Lords and ladies’ or cuckoo pint, bulrushes and stinking hellebore. Once we found a bright orange fungus with long tendrils called ‘Ladies’ fingers’ growing from a tree. Every week we chose one flower each, which we later painted in our nature lessons, describing where we had found it. Miss McConchie also told us the calls of the common wild birds. Within the school grounds she encouraged us to have our own personal gardens in some small plots set aside along the path below the tennis courts. Mainly we grew flowers but sometime also vegetables such as a broad beans that were fun because they grew so quickly.

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Once settled Jo asked a solicitor one last time whether she had a chance of winning custody of us. His view was that she had no chance since the situation had not changed since the court agreed to give custody to Trevor. Mum said later how when she found herself missing us too much she take other people’s children out walking with her and Simon.

Mum finally had a home and with our future committed to boarding school, she decided to get on with her life. She got a ginger cat, calling him Asher after the actress. A couple of years later she named a second cat Seymour after the other Jane. The house had three bedrooms but no central heating, still considered an optional extra in the early 1970s. After buying the house Mum had enough money for fitted carpets, some furniture and a Hoover. The rest she bought as she went along, mostly second-hand from advertisements in shop windows in the village.

Mum’s house at Kingsclere was the only real home we knew. Compared with the routine of school life, holidays with Mum were relaxed and without constraints. Each morning we watched children’s programmes such as The Thunderbirds and Hammy Hamster with Simon. Later we went down to the village to shop for some groceries.

Mum would pick up her benefit money once a week and we had to carry the groceries back up the hill so we only bought for a day or two. We did the tour of the shops: provisions from the grocery store, fruit and vegetables from the green grocers and meat from the family butcher. On rainy days, we played Scrabble or Bingo and did jigsaw puzzles together.

The centre of Kingsclere had retained the character of a village. The rich people lived in large houses in the old part of the village around the Church. Mum’s house was on a small housing estate up the hill from the church. We attended church most Sundays but occasionally we could not go because Mum could not find any small change in the house to put in the collection tray. Even 2p was enough to allow us to go to church but she felt that we had to able to give something. Middle class families at church made their social status evident by their hats and expensive coats.

Mum’s education came primarily from books and most of those were light-weight novels. She was interested in other people’s lives and read biographies from the local public library. Once Simon started school, Mum had more free time. For a while she took on a part-time job cleaning and washing up in a small restaurant in the village.

Mum was only allowed to work part-time hours otherwise she would lose her benefits. Mum also had a job cleaning a large house in the village. Later she worked at a local chicken farm packing eggs. Mum had no washing machine so all the washing had to be done at the launderette in the village. In summer she saved the money for the dryer by hanging out the washing on the line in the garden.

In winter the house was very cold at night and we would go up to bed with hot water bottles. I remember placing mine in the top part of the bed while I brushed my teeth. Then I would curl up just under the cover and slowly work the hot water bottle down the bed with my feet until I could stretch my legs out all the way to the bottom. When it was freezing overnight, we went to bed wearing socks and jumpers.

In the mornings, we woke to windows frozen both inside and out. Mum would go down early and light the coal fire in the living room. We only ventured down once we could huddle in front of the fire with one side of us roasting and the other still freezing. Later Mum invested in a small paraffin heater, which sat in the hallway and took the edge off the iciness of the upstairs rooms.

Mum had a vernacular all of her own: food was ‘grub’, dessert was ‘pud’, vegetables were ‘veg’ and so on. Many of our meals came with chips and Mum always kept a chip pan on the gas hob. A popular meal was fried eggs with baked beans and chips. She also made shepherd’s pie, spaghetti bolognaise and chicken casserole. She often made a pudding as well and we would enjoy tinned steamed puddings or ‘banana custard’. I was conscious of the social differences between Mum’s house and other houses where we visited.

One example was that Mum kept her butter in the packet either in the fridge or out on the kitchen top. In middle class homes they always had a butter dish, there was a butter knife and jams or marmalade were offered with a separate spoon. Mum’s butter and jam became mixed up with each other over time. I preferred the simple approach but at the same time acknowledged the benefit of some social sophistication as long as it was not pretentious.

Sarah and I shared a room with bunk beds at Mum’s house. We were always packing and unpacking so we got used to living out of a suitcase wherever we were. Simon had a small room of his own. We visited the dentist on a regular basis while staying at Dad’s house only after prompting from Mrs Herring that we needed to be taken to the dentist. Mum naturally looked after Simon’s health, social development and progress at school but ours was effectively out of her hands. In this respect we were separate from the family that Mum had established with Simon in Kingsclere.

Often we would go for three or four hour walks through the fields and woods both in summer and in winter. During these walks Mum would reminisce about her childhood and tell us of her adventures in the countryside where she grew up. In the afternoon if we did not go for a walk, we would play cards or watch telly, which was rarely switched off in the winter months. We often sat and watched an old film together. Mum enjoyed the movies from the 1950’s and 60’s with the glamorous stars. She had a couple of tattered books kept from her youth with pictures and life stories of the film stars.

The television was black and white and some of the knobs had fallen off or did not work anymore. Eventually the rental company stopped coming to collect the rent. Mum had a small radio in the early years but it broke and was never replaced. She also had an old record player and a collection of second-hand singles. Sometimes in the evening, we would dance in the living room to classic songs from the fifties and sixties such as ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or ‘Michelle, my belle’.

In the summer months we played outdoors most of the time. There was a playing field further up the hill with a set of swings. Sarah and I were often nervous of meeting the local children especially the boys in case they decided to pick on us for being different. Sometimes one of the children would spot that Anne was mentally handicapped and start making fun of her. It was difficult for us to protect her and if things got unpleasant, we would just go home. We also went off into the countryside and played the perennial camps and adventure games. In the late summer, we would play in the haystacks until the farmers caught us.

Mum loved her garden and her houseplants, which filled every windowsill in the house. I enjoyed walking around the garden listening to her plans for this plant or that bush. Simon had a large hole up by the back hedge that he had been digging since he was little more than a toddler. He and his friends would spend hours digging in this hole over many years of his childhood. Simon had a paddling pool, which we all used to cool down. Each year Mum built up her tan slowly whenever there was a sunny day. She was proud of the fact that by early summer many people assumed she must have been on holiday abroad.

Mum did most of her own decoration inside and out. One day when she was moving a heavy ladder to paint one of the upstairs windows she hurt her back. It was to be a problem for years. Mum was a strange mix of the independent woman who was simultaneously impractical. She was proud of the fact that she could wire up a household plug. She would comment that married women were useless at practical chores because they had men around to do everything for them. However, we had a sideboard for years with broken hinges.

Mum was proud of not being stuffy or unwilling to try something ‘tomboyish’. She would attempt activities without any sense of being middle-aged or too old to try. One day as Mum was riding down the hill on Sarah’s bike, a little girl asked her “Are you a lady?” Mum may have been poor but she did not let that stop her taking advantage of any opportunity that did not require money. She joined the local public tennis club and in summer, we would go and play tennis as a family. She also joined the local amateur dramatics society and helped at the school.

Mum applied for and won the use of one of the public vegetable allotments in the village despite considerable scepticism from the male allotment community. She worked it for many years, even making friends with some of the older men. She was proud of the fact that she dug her allotment every year with a fork and spade whereas most of the men, having more money at their disposal, had rotavators. She maintained that her allotment was better for it because she could dig out all the couch grass. We would go along and sometimes help with harvesting or weeding to keep her company.

Mum was frequently overloaded during the holidays and would threaten to send us back to Daddy’s if we kept on making work for her. During our stays she had to cope with the extra load so she was often tired. I would be disappointed when she went to bed at 8pm or earlier because I enjoyed our evening chats. We were unaware of how Mum no doubt changed once we were home because of the increased workload and her tiredness. I always spent as much time as I could with her so that must have meant less time for Simon.

For us the holidays were always much the same but for Simon there was a big difference. For most weeks of the year, Simon and Mum were alone together in the house. When we came home, Simon suddenly had to share everything.

Mum was a good parent both in terms of demonstrating affection towards us and through having an even temper. When we were small, we would sit in the armchair with Mum, either by her side or on her lap being cuddled. We were always her babies and she would affectionately call us all ‘beautiful’. Mum always had some knitting she was working on. It used to be cheaper in those days to knit jumpers by hand than buy them in the shops and so she would knit jumpers for all of us. Sarah and I would knit clothes for our teddies.

During school holidays when Sarah and I were staying with Mum, she would arrange for Anne to come and stay for part of our visit. Anne was there for Christmas and a week or two at Easter and during the summer. When Anne came to stay, she slept in a bed in Mum’s room. Anne would irritate us all because she kept moaning. In her life with Mrs Peters, Anne was an only child and the whole world revolved around her. She found it difficult in Kingsclere because the environment was not engineered solely for her. While we were at junior school, she could easily join in our childish games. Once we got to senior school, it became more difficult for her to spend time with us. Simon was always very good at including her if he was not playing with his friends.

Mum told me that Mrs Peters had told her the doctors thought that Anne wouldn’t live beyond her teens. However, it was later decided that Anne had the same life expectancy as anyone else. Mum always insisted that she would prefer to have custody of Anne even when I was old enough to see that full time charge of Anne would be very trying and that the arrangement with Mrs Peters suited everyone well. Mrs Peters always accompanied Anne on her occasional trips to London to visit Dad for lunch because he would not have known how to deal with her alone.

I remember when we were lying out in the garden one summer my sister Anne (who is mentally handicapped) once rhythmically thrusting with her vulva into the towel she was lying on. The activity was apparently quite deliberate but there as no sense that she was obtaining any sexual satisfaction and there was no climax. Kinsey points out that as very young children, girls will often engage on activities that might be categorised, in the widest possible definition, as masturbation. However he also acknowledges that such activities would seldom be categorised as masturbation for the male.

One factor is that women often fail to differentiate between masturbation as a small child and as an adult. Certainly as an adult woman (having masturbated from the age of seventeen) I cannot imagine a small child having the same kind of adult sexual fantasies that I have used to reach orgasm through masturbation. The fact that the two experiences differ in such a material respect must surely indicate that we are indeed talking about two quite different experiences.

Word count 2,415

As we grew up Dad would occasionally lecture me on the importance of a good marriage and a career. I was not unaware of the irony of this since he had evidently never succeeded at either. Dad preferred the A1 to the newer M1 motorway. The road was quieter, with fewer large trucks and we could stop for lunch at one of the roadside pubs or motels.

One of his stories he enjoyed telling related to one of these lunches. He had ordered steak and one of the waiting staff apologised for the delay, which was apparently due to the freezer breaking down. Dad had grown up in a home where meat was always served fresh so he was quick to ask imperiously “And what has your freezer got to do with my steak?”

We became familiar with the roundabouts at Stamford, Grantham and Doncaster as we journeyed northwards. The huge chimneys of the power station at Ferrybridge heralded the North Country and by the time we reached Scotch Corner, our journey was almost over. Dad explained how the road split at Scotch Corner so while we continued up the Eastern road, other traffic travelled over to the west coast via Carlisle and on to Scotland.

My father’s parents had retired to a sprawling bungalow on the edge of Durham city. ‘The Close’ was a fairly ordinary brick-built modern bungalow situated above the city on Potters Bank. It had over an acre of garden and in summer Dad was keep busy cutting the two lawns. We saw little of him except at meal times. Sarah and I played in the garden on the paved areas. There was a fruit and vegetable garden outside the kitchen window and in summer, I was to be found enjoying the luxury of eating raspberries straight from the bushes.

The daily entrance to the house was around the side through a door into the kitchen. To the right beside the garage was the annex where Dad slept. This room was my grandfather’s medical dispensary before he retired. Grandpa’s hobby was carpentry and we would watch him in the garage surrounded by shelves of immaculate sets of wooden tool drawers.

The front door of the bungalow was rarely used and opened onto a spacious hallway where we played. A grandfather clock in the hall produced an echoing ticking sound and an hourly chime. Once a week Grandpa wound up the clock with a special key. In the living room a mantelpiece clock also had a quarterly chime. Sarah and I amused ourselves with our teddies, making up stories and games. We used blankets and cushions to build camps and homes out of chairs and side tables. My rabbit or bear was usually in charge and telling Sarah’s toys what to do.

In winter months my grandmother cleared and made up the coal fire in the lounge each morning. We watched her as she rolled up sheets of newspaper expertly, first into a long thin roll and then, bending this around her hand, into neat balls that she used to kindle the coal fire. In the evenings she played a complicated patience game with two packs of cards.

Grandpa was an enthusiastic soccer supporter and he let us help him do the pools and the ‘Spot the ball’ game in the newspaper. He smoked cigars and cigarettes with a filter holder. The fragrant tobacco smells, the neatly made wooden boxes and the colourful pipe cleaners fascinated us. Sometimes Sarah and I walked into Durham with Grandpa along the river below the magnificent cathedral. As we passed through shops we asked him to buy us some sweets or a small toy. Sometimes we were successful in persuading him and then he would be in trouble with Granny for spoiling us.

By now Granny’s home help Annie, had retired and her daughter Frances was employed to help Mrs Hare, as she was addressed by her domestic staff, with the housework and ironing. We often watched Granny cooking in the kitchen, especially when she made cakes, waiting hopefully for the mixing bowl and wooden spoons to lick at the end. She cooked traditional English food although she also made a sweet chicken curry with sultanas and apple, which was a great favourite of ours.

I also remember her puddings. One was a plain suet pudding, which she steamed wrapped in a muslin cloth. It would roll out onto the serving dish looking unappetisingly grey and amorphous but it tasted delicious served with golden syrup! She also made real custard with milk and eggs cooked over a second pan of boiling water. There was an open fire in the kitchen, over which Granny cooked lamb chops or beefsteaks as Grandpa enjoyed them. The table was always set with proper china and they used silver cutlery with bone handles, which was kept in a wooden canteen.

My grandparents had a Rolls Royce and when we went out in it, we would sit in the back with Granny. We enjoyed the luxurious feel of the wide leather seats and playing with the electric windows. I lived my life through my favourite bears so I was heart-broken when I was not allowed to take them with me. Grandpa wore a trilby hat and dressed in a three-piece suit with a waistcoat that held his pocket watch attached with a gold Albert chain.

On outings my grandmother was always immaculately dressed with a hat and a fur stole around her neck. Oblivious to any concern for the dead animal, I was fascinated by its legs and tail. Granny was in her seventies by this time and was always very grand. She wore a collection of rings, which Grandpa had given to her on each of their milestone wedding anniversaries. Granny also had a smart collection of travel luggage including a jewellery case. In her bedroom on the dressing table she had a matching set of ebony hairbrushes and hand mirror all with her initial ‘E’ for Elsie on the back of each piece.

Sarah and I slept in a twin room close to my grandparent’s bedroom. The beds were luxuriously soft and in the winter months, Granny would warm our beds by switching on the electric blankets before our bedtime. Having a bath in the fully tiled bathroom with an accessories rack across the bath was also a novelty for us. There was Pears soap and a real sponge. My only memories of bathing are at my grandmother’s house.

Dad was always very much in the background. Granny oversaw our daily routine. She was strict but not unkind. Once I left a toy out at the end of the garden and when Granny asked me to fetch it I stubbornly refused. I sat at the kitchen table sulking some time before I accepted defeat and went to fetch the toy.

I did not like to be reprimanded. Granny never raised her voice. She simply used a stern tone of voice or a subtle correcting squeeze of the hand. Affection never came into her handling of children. Perhaps she was afraid that any display of emotion would undermine her authority. I was fortunate that my parents were so affectionate but it made a stark contrast.

Typical of her approach was when she asked us to wash our underwear in the washbasin. It was her way of showing us that we needed to wipe our bottoms properly. The lesson was much too subtle for us to comprehend. My parents were more approachable. Dad happily admitted that he used to keep the bed warm at school by farting.

I thought it natural that everyone should care about me but now I see that Granny took on more of our care than most grandparents do. I was equally oblivious to the effects our cockney accents and unwashed bodies might have had. Although Dad was from their family, I perceived disapproval in the polite tone that Granny used to ask after my mother. Even to a young child, it was evident that my grandparents had a lifestyle that was more privileged than mine was ever likely to be. Their wealth, with its associated security and comfort, differentiated me from them.

In May 1969 we were staying in the caravan in the Cotswolds when Dad received a call telling him that Grandpa had been seriously injured in a traffic accident. My grandparents had been out shopping in the centre of Newcastle. As a bus swung past, it somehow caught hold of Grandpa and he was thrown into its path. The rear wheel ran over his leg, breaking it in two places. Despite the commotion Granny had the presence of mind to note the registration plate of the bus before it disappeared.

They received financial compensation from the bus company but my grandfather’s active life was over. They tried to save Grandpa’s leg but he was then in his eighties and the bone would not mend. He had to have his leg amputated later that year. Frank Hare had spent his life on the other side of the hospital bed and as a doctor he made a very poor patient. He moved back home where Granny looked after him until he died in November 1971 aged 85 years.

Once we started boarding school, each holiday would begin and end with at least a day spent at my grandmother’s house. After Grandpa died the bungalow at Potter’s Bank was too big for Granny living alone. She moved to a newly built bungalow in Chester-le-street, which was nearer the town and the shops. Granny was now having difficulty walking. Initially she got by with walking sticks. Later she needed a wheel chair for mobility. Frances still came as a daily help and for a short while Granny employed a live-in companion. We spent our time improvising our own amusements. Sometimes we would pile up cushions on the sofa and somersault over them. Other times we made up imaginative stories involving our teddies, which we acted out as a game.

When we were children Granny insisted that Sarah and I should have our hair cropped as short as a boy’s. While she was able Granny took us to the hairdresser but later she asked her home-help Frances to take us. For the first time the hairdresser asked me how I would like to have my hair cut. I answered truthfully that I would like to grow my hair. When I returned to Granny’s bungalow with my hair untrimmed at the back, I was already anticipating trouble. There was an awkward silence on the subject and little doubt that Granny believed that I had deliberately flouted her authority.

After a later visit to the hairdressers I confided in my diary “This morning I was extremely vexed. I felt myself practically fuming inside. Granny called me into the kitchen. She asked me if I would have my hair trimmed. No, I have had it done already. Then she said that we were always stubborn after we had been to stay with Mum.” I thought therefore that Sarah had also said “No”. I was livid with Sarah when Granny told me to accompany Sarah to the hairdresser. I was angry with Sarah who had agreed to have her hair cut “just to please Granny”. I got no support from Dad who told Sarah that he did not know what had come over me.

Dad continued to live in the house in Battersea and when we stayed with Dad during holidays, we would sleep in a spare room on the ground floor since Dad let out the other floors. I would lie in bed listening to the songs Dad liked from musicals such as ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘The Sound of Music’. One night when I could not sleep, Dad gave me a tiny glass of cherry brandy and talked to me about the stock exchange. Dad would entertain occasionally. I remember him cooking cheese soufflé and fretting about it collapsing before his guests arrived. His friends were bachelors rather than married couples with children. So Sarah and I rarely met up with any children during the holidays and had to rely on each other for company.

Dad had a friend Ted Barnes who was charming and worked as a wine buyer. Ted would come over a couple of times each holiday and we played Canasta together in the evenings. Ted was a great favourite of ours because he was always smiling. He also talked about interesting things he had noticed. Another friend of Dad’s we saw for a time was Betty Bailey. Betty had been a childhood friend and her family used to live in the road that ran along the back of Dad’s childhood home. Her father owned a chemist shop in Durham. Betty never married and later took over the shop from her father. By this time she was in her fifties and we would go and visit her with Dad. One day Dad asked me how I would like to have Betty as a new mother. I replied that I liked Betty because she was always very nice to us. Not long after this, we stopped seeing her so presumably she was embarrassed by Dad’s offer.

Towards the end of our time at The Sneep, Dad moved from Brynmaer Road to a mews house off the Gloucester Road in the West End of London not far from Harrods. The accommodation was on three floors with an open staircase and there was a roof garden. The house was brighter and more modern in its decoration than Brynmaer Road. Dad bought himself a four-poster bed that had been a prop in the film ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ so we had to go and see the film just to see the bed.

Dad said that he was thinking of taking a lodger, as we were there so little. We were used to Dad having friends around the house and he often had two or three friends visiting. Other times Mary Jack appeared and would join us for lunch or tea. Once we all went down to Brighton in the famous ‘Brighton Belle’ train to visit the Royal Pavilion. Mary was quite a character and had a good sense of humour. As a child, I was self-conscious of her tendency to talk and laugh embarrassingly loudly in public places.

Two middle-aged women lived together in one of the other houses in the mews at Gloucester Road. Rita and Geraldine were typical of the idiosyncratic people Dad tended to know in London. A friend of Geraldine’s was a fashion journalist for ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and one day Sarah and I were invited to go along to see a fashion show. We sat behind the scenes and watched the models changing. I was fascinated to watch these women applying make up and pulling on nylons and high-heeled shoes. Mum was not a dressy woman and we had no one else to expose us to the full paraphernalia of feminine charm.

Divorce was still relatively rare in the mid-seventies and there was a general perception that children of divorced parents were less emotional secure than children of married parents. Nevertheless, I was surprised when a girl at school said that she was sorry for me. I had concluded that I was not deprived of parental love just because my parents lived apart. I enjoyed spending time with them on a one-to-one basis and in many ways my relationship with each of them was closer than it might have been if they had been married, either to each other or to someone else. I replied that I could not remember my parents ever having been together and so we had never known life differently. I decided that divorce would be much more traumatic for a teenager who would have to live through the arguments.

I was an affectionate child and when we were small, I enjoyed cuddling up with each of them. Dad called me ‘sloppy’. I would sit on his lap while we talked until I was a teenager when he suggested that perhaps I was getting too big to sit on his lap. Whenever we met or on parting it felt natural to give him an affectionate hug. I appreciated being able to talk openly with my parents who were always very approachable as individuals. Dad was never stuffy despite being older. As I reached teenage years, he grew a short bristly moustache and developed a large potbelly. He had a young casual style of dressing and typically worn blue jeans and sweaters from Marks and Spencer. All this changed of course when he went up North!

I related to each of my parents as an equal because they always took me seriously. They were both even tempered and although they occasionally moaned at us, we were never shouted at. There was never any anger or even unpleasant atmosphere in either of their homes. Naturally, they never confronted any of the usual issues in raising children because we were in their care for such short periods. When we stayed with Mum and Dad, they were fully available to take an interest in us. They were essentially single so we had no competition from an adult relationship. As the eldest, I got the full benefit of this attention and perhaps it helped contribute towards my personal confidence. Dad was proud of us and he liked to accept the inherent credit for nicely behaved children.

As we were growing up, I had a much closer relationship with both my parents than Sarah had. I was older but, more importantly, I enjoyed listening to my parent’s views and stories. It was not always easy or that natural to find topics to talk about especially with Dad but I was always willing to try. My parents both struggled to draw Sarah out although I think they both tried in their own way. I do not think they appreciated how consciously I would invest effort in my relationship with them. It helped me feel loved and to feel that I knew them as people.

As a ‘retired employee’ of BOAC, Dad was entitled to travel cheaply on a standby basis. He sent us postcards from different parts of the world: Australia, San Francisco, Switzerland and the Far East among others. He was also able to get discounted tickets for us. These cost 5% of the full fare until we were twelve when the cost rose to the adult standby fare of 10%. Dad loved to travel and wanted to show us the benefits so that we might enjoy travelling when we were adults. When I was ten Dad took us abroad for the first time. He took us to Italy and we stayed in a hotel on the coast north of Rome. I learned to swim in the sea there because we had all day to spend in the warm water. I thought it was the height of decadence to order drinks by the hotel pool where they served real fruit juices. Sarah and I amused ourselves for hours while Dad read a book.

We spent Christmas 1971 with Dad at Granny’s house. I was ten years old and it was the last Christmas we were to spend away from Mum. Dad gave me a large bear and a small week-to-a-page diary. This was the start of my daily hobby of keeping a diary for the next six years.

Word count 3,325

From time to time, George Caldwell appeared in the North on one of his annual visits from Singapore. He would stay with Dad in London and then they would drive up North together as far as Scotland to see Derry Baird. Derry was a tall, shy Scot who was a friend of Dad’s from his school days. Whilst in Durham, George would stay at The County Hotel. He liked to have the comfort of a hotel room as well as a quiet refuge from other people’s homes. I would look on enviously at these family gatherings because ironically, I missed the family support that George and my father had been so eager to escape.

The front door of The Grove was rarely used and so visitors arrived at the house by a side door, through a lobby cloakroom and into the kitchen. The kitchen had a low ceiling, a farmhouse style stone floor and an oil-fired Aga stove. My memory of my aunt when we were children was of her preparing a meal in her kitchen. A favourite dish for entertaining or on family occasions would be game, usually grouse or partridge, from one of Alastair’s shooting expeditions. On our visits Barbara would show us how she went about plucking, gutting and preparing a bird for the oven.

My aunt’s home help, Mrs Dawson, had been the office cleaner for my uncle’s business for some years before she came to help Barbara in the house and to look after her two small children. Barbara looked on Mrs Dawson as “a confidant and wonderful friend” during the years when she had little other adult companionship. Sarah and I thought her rather fierce. She was a short woman with sharp-looking eyes and a quick tongue. Despite knowing each other for nearly 30 years, these two women always addressed each other as ‘Mrs Turnbull’ and ‘Mrs Dawson’.

My Uncle Alastair always kept a gun dog, usually a black Labrador. There was also a Yorkshire terrier who used to sit on an armchair in the kitchen and we were advised to give her a wide berth. They also kept cats and, long after she had gone, we were told the story behind one of their cat’s called ‘Mrs Pierson’. Mrs Pierson had been an acquaintance with a gap between her two front teeth. She spoke with a whistle that the family would mimic with a good-natured chuckle. Past the kitchen there was a playroom where the family watched television in front of the open log fire.

A wood-floored dining room led to the stairs by the front door and the drawing room at the far end of the house. The drawing room was the formal room of the house and although carpeted tended to be chilly from lack of use. During my visits I would sneak away to sound out my favourite tunes on the piano. Barbara could play well and I loved to watch her fingers pick out the chords of elegant waltzes and songs from old musicals. Despite my early interest in the piano, there was never a suggestion that either Sarah or I should learn the piano. However, I did ask a number of times and when I was eleven I finally started piano lessons at school.

Aunty Barbara was a colourful character. In some ways, she was as daunting as Granny but she was much more approachable. She had an unfailing ability to see the amusing side of life and a wonderful giggle. On our visits Barbara would entertain us with stories from her childhood as well as with tales from her everyday life. She explained how her earlier brain surgery had affected her sight and described the dangers of getting about with her disability. She had to give up driving in 1953 and so, apart from her shopping trips into Newcastle on the bus, her life was restricted to the house and kitchen. Whether on the bus or in the shops, Barbara enjoyed engaging fellow passengers, shoppers and shopkeepers in political debate.

She supported right wing Conservatism openly despite living in one of the most working class and traditionally socialist areas of the country. At breakfast my aunt and uncle sat around the breakfast table reading the paper and discussing the political debates of the day. They were both active in local politics doing much to energise the Conservative Party in their vicinity especially during electioneering. Barbara enjoyed reminiscing about the war years, particularly the food rationing and the positive morale of the British population. It often seemed to Sarah and me in the kitchen of The Grove that the Second World War had just ended. She was a royalist, a nationalist and later, fiercely anti-Europe.

Eventually Barbara and Alastair had an annex built onto the side of The Grove so that Granny could live with them. Barbara enjoyed the chance to spend daily time with her mother and to learn her tips for managing her financial affairs. The closeness between mother and son was also evident to me through their letters. After one of his visits, Granny wrote (31st January 1980):

“Daddy rang up from the airport last night to say he was on his way. I felt that I was losing a friend.”

My grandmother died in 1983 in hospital in Durham. She had Barbara, Sue, Dad and Sarah visiting daily.

Barbara was devoted to her brother and always quick to defend him against any potential criticism. She blamed Trevor’s failure to qualify as a doctor on the fact that meningitis was thought to leave the sufferer with lower levels of concentration. She was always determined that circumstances had stood against him including the fact that his twin brother had died at birth. Even the story of how as a boy Dad would take her toys and demand that she bought them back, was told with affection. Despite his lack of career success, Barbara was sure of Dad’s intelligence and she told us that he was known as ‘the professor’ at school.

Barbara had lived the life of a wife and mother whereas Dad spent his life as a bachelor in London. So they had lived their lives in very different worlds. I gained the impression that in his younger days, Dad considered visits home to be very much a family duty. By the time I was growing up, perhaps there were family ties that become more important as we grow older. Dad shared a sense of humour with his mother and sister. They liked to recount stories from earlier times that we had often heard many times before.

Barbara wrote down some of her memories of growing up. She travelled around her father’s medical practice in his Riley from an early age and so she grew up with an admiration for her father and for the medical profession. With the outbreak of war in 1939, her parents became concerned that the East Coast might be shelled, as had happened in the First World War. So aged fourteen Barbara was sent to Howells, a boarding school in North Wales. She was there for four years before going on to study Pure Science at Durham University. By the end of the first year Barbara had decided to give up her degree studies and to join the war effort. She entered the Navy and went with other WRNS recruits to London, where she stayed long enough to narrowly escape being hit by a doodlebug bomb.

When Barbara received her orders, she was asked to report to the Admiralty in Bath, in the West Country, where she drove “anything from a sack of potatoes to an Admiral and anything from an Austin 7 to a five-ton truck”. Granny had always been a confident driver and Barbara shared her enthusiasm for driving. Barbara had learned to drive in her mother’s Riley, a luxury motor car with pre-select gears. So now she had to learn how to use a manual gear box.

When the war ended in 1945, Barbara took part in London’s Victory parade after which she returned home to the North of England. She joined her parents on a holiday across Canada crossing the Atlantic both ways on luxury liners, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary. In 1946 Barbara met Alastair Turnbull the son of family friends and two years later, they became engaged. Then in 1950, aged 25, Barbara suffered a serious fit.

She had suffered a similar attack while away at school when she was fifteen. Frank Hare called the best neurologist in the North East and that same evening Barbara was in the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle under the care of Professor Henry Miller. She had to lie flat for six weeks and was forbidden even to feed herself. When she recovered Barbara was sent to see Sir Charles Symonds, the neurologist and Wylie (later Sir) McKissock, the neurosurgeon. After a number of tests, they confirmed that Barbara had what they described as a berry aneurism on the brain. Her condition, called ‘angiomata’, could cause subarachnoid haemorrhaging. Blood could leak into the brain from any one of the many tiny blood vessels on the ‘Circle of Willis’ feeding the brain.

Gradually each attack or leak was removing more of her field of vision. Given time it would render her either blind or might even prove fatal. It had recently been discovered that the condition was operable but Symonds and McKissock decided to do nothing for the time being. There was a possibility that she might never have another attack but if she did, she would have to return for surgery. The specialists recommended the marriage could go ahead. So with some trepidation, Barbara and Alastair were married on 2nd June 1951. All went well until September 1952 when the young couple were holidaying in a caravan in Scotland and Barbara had another attack. Ignoring reassurances from the local doctor, Alastair called his father-in-law.

Barbara remembered how a few hours later Frank’s Bentley pulled up outside the van and Elsie stepped out exclaiming, “I have NEVER come round Loch Lomond so fast in my life!” Frank’s advice was to stay put for another week and then make for home. There followed another six weeks when Barbara had to lie flat on her back. Brain surgery was in its infancy and a major operation of this kind was only possible at the John Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford or at the National Hospital in London. As soon as she was able, Barbara returned to London with Alastair. It was a formidable operation and so it was decided that she should have her baby first, by Caesarean, and that the operation should be carried out as soon as possible afterwards.

Barbara’s son John was born in February 1953. Barbara was 28 years old and as she set off for London in September, leaving her son with her mother to look after, she wondered whether she would ever see him again. The surgery left her with an 180-degree field of vision in both eyes so that she was effectively blind on the left side. The medical term was ‘a complete left homonymous hemianopia’. Barbara explained this as normal sight on a clock face from 12 noon to 6 pm but blind in both eyes from 6pm round to 12. In fact, the definition is so close that once Barbara has written the capital ‘B’ for her name and moved on to the ‘a’, she can no longer see the ‘B’. It was to be 8 years before the blurred vision cleared and she could see again.

Barbara and Alastair embarked on married life in a terraced house in Chester-le-Street but Barbara had her ambition set on a larger stone-built house a few miles south on the road to Durham. As a child Barbara had often noticed the house called ‘The Grove’ on the main road between Durham and Chester-le-Street. She decided that she would like to live there when she grew up.

The house came up for sale and the young couple went to view it. They decided to buy it and spent many years refurbishing it to create a comfortable family home. Barbara’s daughter Susan was born in March 1956 and life became even busier. Alastair was a keen game shot and with birds to be plucked and gutted, dinner preparations could take up much of the day. During Barbara’s absence, Granny had employed a nanny called Mary to help care for her young grandson. Mary agreed to stay on until Barbara had recovered from Sue’s birth.

John was sent away to boarding school at seven and when he returned in the school holidays he no longer wanted to play with his baby sister. Sue was devastated that she had lost a playmate. When her time came, Sue would return to school in tears and Dad used to comment how glad he was that we did not cry when we had to go back to school.

Dad had been unhappy when he went away to school and Mum told us that he had always sworn that he would never do the same to his children. Naturally his circumstances changed on their divorce but Dad still wanted to reassure himself that we were happier at school than he had been. The reason we did not cry was in part due to the fact that we had no strong sense of having a home to miss. Later Dad’s pride in our apparent indifference to returning to school ensured that we tried to hide any emotion we did feel.

My Aunt Barbara’s operation left her with a scar on the brain, which meant that in future she would be prone to epileptic fits. This condition did not manifest itself for 18 months but thereafter Barbara had to take anticonvulsant drugs every day. In a busy household it was all too easy to forget and between 1955 and 1963 she suffered a number of attacks of epilepsy. Each time she found herself in the increasingly familiar surroundings of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.

She told me how after two or three such episodes of forgetfulness, Henry Miller advised in his avuncular manner from the foot of her hospital bed: “… and, for Christ’s sake, take those bloody pills!” Sometimes she would forget to take her pills out with her, thereby causing an inconvenience to the only driver in the house. One time they left the house in a hurry and she had to summon up the courage to break the news. On telling him, Alastair simply turned the car around. She, like the chastised schoolgirl, went sheepishly back into the house to fetch them. In relating such stories Barbara made light of how intimidating Alastair’s temper could be.

The Turnbull household in which Alastair had grown up was anything but harmonious. Family disagreements were openly aired and opinions volubly expressed. The Hare household was quite different, running on more formal lines with little raising of voices. So Barbara was not used to a domestic atmosphere of army camp swearing. Early in their marriage after an argument, Barbara stormed off pettishly to the bedroom and locked the door. After a pause, a contrite Alastair came to the door and, adopting a cajoling Geordie accent, negotiated a reconciliation “Ee come on, pet… Are you all right? I’m sorry, … I didn’t mean it.” Barbara could not resist his boyish charm and so they carried on. Alastair was the son of Jack Turnbull, another colonel. Apparently he and my father’s Uncle Fred got on well together shouting and gurrumphing at each other over their whisky.

Alastair volunteered as a private in the army on his eighteenth birthday and served in the seventh Armoured Division of the British Army of the Rhine in Germany. After his release from the army in 1947, Alastair joined the Territorial Army 8th Battalion DLI until March 1954 with the honorary rank of Captain. In his younger days, Alastair had been an accomplished cricketer as well as a boxer but rugby was the game where he excelled. Later he also served as a local Justice of the Peace, presiding over petty crime cases in the local magistrates’ court. Barbara and Alastair both enjoyed entertaining and had plenty of stories, jokes and anecdotes. Alastair’s repertoire of jokes included those he had accumulated from years of rugby and TA dinners. Alastair’s older brother Ian was killed in the Second World War. So after the war, Alastair took over the family land-agency business from his father. Jack Turnbull was a difficult man and a strict father. While working together, father and son would communicate through the office secretary.

The head office was in Chester-le-Street with satellite offices in neighbouring local towns. There was a residential side to the business with shop fronts but Alastair took care of the land agency work. He advised private clients on the management of their moors and estates. On occasion he needed to employ considerable tact and diplomacy in dealing with client relationships over the course of many years. One of Alastair’s most prestigious clients was the Earl of Strathmore who appointed Alastair as his agent in the mid 1960’s. The King of Spain was among the guests invited by the Strathmores but others came as paying guests.

The grouse season starts on ‘The glorious twelfth’, each 12th August, once the young birds are independent. Amateur shots found that shooting wild birds was not as easy as it looked. Sarah and I were ‘town folk’ and so our natural instinct was to view game shooting as simply a privileged way of life for the very rich. Alastair explained that by checking the growth in the bird population all would have enough to eat. This was as necessary a part of the maintenance of the moors as the controlled burning of the old heather to allow the new shoots to grow.

My uncle was responsible for the management of the Strathmore estates in County Durham, which included Holwick, a shooting lodge and extensive estate out at Middleton in Teesdale. Alastair organised the shoot and managed the estate staff. Since the estate belonged to the Bowes-Lyon family, the Queen Mother, H.M. Queen, Charles and Philip all visited in the season. Barbara was also invited to accompany her husband on some of the social occasions. Through this association, they were both invited to Buckingham Palace to the Queen’s Annual Garden Party. As a royalist, Alastair respected the institution as well as the personalities but he knew his place. Alastair was very well thought of and when he died in 2001, the Strathmore family took an early train from Dundee to get down in time for the funeral service. At his father’s memorial service, John Turnbull said,

“My father was a good man and a kind father. He was my mother’s rock, caring for her without reserve for many years. Tough but not hard. Full of humour, a great raconteur.”

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Mervanwey Williams known as ‘Missie’ had grown up in Betws-y-Coed in North Wales. She married my father’s grandfather Sam Hare and they lived at Howlish Hall on the hill above Eldon Colliery, backside of Bishop Auckland in County Durham. The colliery at Eldon lay below the house and was by all accounts a dismal, dirty place. As colliery manager so long as he kept the price of coal below ten shillings a ton, Sam Hare had a rent-free house with servants, car and chauffeur.

The family enjoyed a good standard of living up until the start of the Great War in 1914 as well as afterwards. The Hares also had a flat in London on the Edgware Road. Sam Hare was president of the Institute of Mining Engineers and attended functions down in London. When he retired, they presented him with a canteen of solid silver cutlery. Sam Hare died in 1937 and Missie went to live in Scarborough until her death in 1947.

Sam and Missie had three sons. Victor, the youngest, was the only one not to study medicine. He took up his father’s trade and became a colliery manager down in Kent. The middle son, Jack, was originally engaged to my grandmother Elsie Walton but went to Cape Town in South Africa where he met a girl called Kitty. He wrote to my grandmother explaining that somehow he found himself engaged to two girls at the same time. Elsie was quick to release him with the telegram: “Consider yourself free”. Jack later became an ‘Ear, nose and throat’ ldspecialist in Harley Street, London.

The eldest son Francis Frederick Trevor Hare was my grandfather. He was known as Frank and was born in January 1886. Sam Hare was not a supporter of the public schools. So the Hares all went away to board first at Morpeth Grammar School in Northumberland and later at Newcastle Grammar School. In the 1890s an education of any kind was still a privilege but a grammar school was not as socially elitist as the public schools.

Frank never acquired the social arrogance so typical of the public schools and was always proud of his North Country heritage. His father had established working men’s clubs at his collieries and Frank grew up playing billiards with the miners. After leaving school he went to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne to study medicine and in due course qualified as a doctor.

The First World War intervened and he served in Mesopotamia rising to the rank of captain. After his discharge Frank returned home to Durham. Unlike his brother Jack, Frank had failed his fellowship exams for the Royal College of Surgeons. Rather than re-sit his exams he started work immediately as a general practitioner. Frank was keen to repay his father who had paid £2,500 for a practice for him. Frank had been engaged to the daughter of a wealthy man called Bartholomew.

One day his prospective father-in-law informed Frank that on marrying his daughter he would be expected to add Bartholomew to his surname. Frank did not like the implication that he would not be master of his own household and the engagement was broken off. This happened around the time that Elsie Walton released his brother Jack from their engagement. It was agreed in the Hare household that Frank should not waste any time in making an offer for Elsie’s hand. My grandparents married in August 1917 and Granny maintained later that ‘she got the one she wanted’.

As a young man Frank cut a dashing figure and he would tear round Durham in a small green Riley. He may not have been overly tactful but he put forward his views with a certain naiveté and friendliness. Frank was proud of his home and family but eager to help those less fortunate. He was keenly interested in politics, both domestic and foreign, and issues were debated avidly at home. Having a father who was a mining engineer gave Frank an advantage at the hospital where many admissions were from miner’s families. In addition to his practice and hospital work, he was also compensations doctor for local collieries. He was appointed honorary senior surgeon to Durham County Hospital, a post he held for over 30 years.

My grandmother’s family lived at Crook, another colliery town on the edge of a coalfield, with Weardale beyond. Her father Thomas Walton was born at Crook in May 1857. In those days Crook was an up-and-coming town with the arrival of the railway in 1842 to take out the superior coking coal to as far away as Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire. Thomas’s father was a building contractor but when he died from heavy drinking, there was little ready money. His three sons: Robert, William and Thomas had about seventeen guineas between them.

Thomas, the youngest son, used his knowledge of horses to make money, buying and selling them in the market place. Together the brothers kept the building business going and opened a soap factory (later bought out by Lever Bros.) as well as a leather factory that was later sold during the First World War. There was a building boom in the eighteen seventies and nineties continuing right up to the First War and all three brothers could lay bricks and saw wood.

Thomas married Mary Simpson and they had five children. The eldest Harry died in his early thirties during the First World War on a hospital ship destined for India, which they said nearly broke his father’s heart. Eleanor, known as Nellie, was born in April 1887. Fred was born in December 1890 and Elsie, my grandmother, was born in January 1893. There was a Thomas too but he did not live very long.

Mary Walton had a head for figures and she assisted her husband, Thomas, with his building estimates. Mary was one of those people who could add up three columns of Pounds, Shillings and Pence just by running her fingers down them. Mary had grown up in a family of four daughters and four sons. Having been raised on a farm, the daughters were all skilled in skinning rabbits, sausage-making and gutting birds. Mary was an excellent housekeeper and later, Elsie passed these skills on to her daughter Barbara.

The Waltons lived at ‘The Willows’ on Commercial Street, Crook. It is still there, right beside the main road, a red brick house with a conservatory on the side. Now there is a bungalow built on the land where the lawns used to be. They lived well and there were tennis parties as well as musical evenings. Both Nellie and Elsie played the piano to concert standard. Dances and balls were held in various town- and church-halls. The Waltons were at the upper end of local society and they had the first
motorcars.

In 1914 the Waltons went to War as did the Hares. Fred Walton was quickly promoted and ended up a colonel. He later became Deputy Lieutenant of the County, Grand Mason next to Lord Barnard and quite grand in other ways. After the First World War, ‘The Colonel’ very much feeling his position, suggested that his father should retire and give the firm to him. So Thomas Walton removed his capital from the firm’s account and told Fred that whatever was left ‘was all his’.

So Fred had the works, the woodworking shop with machinery and the steam engine to run it all. He also had the horses and wagons, as well as some motor wagons but no capital. Thomas Walton became partners with Sam Hare in a drift mine called Brusselton Colliery until the nationalisation of the coal mines, when the Government compensated them for their shares.

Later Thomas invested in shipping and by 1939 had five shipping lines, (Walton, Dawson, Jubilee, Edwardian Lines and another). Each line had three, four or five ships sailing around the world. These were quietly sold off as scrap to the Japanese just before World War II. The remaining sea-worthy ones continued but one by one, they were sunk by U-boats in the Atlantic. Thomas Walton was really No. 1 in Crook.

They did not have a Lord Mayor in those days but he was the Head of the local Council. Every Sunday wearing his silk top hat and morning coat, he would march down to the church for Evensong. The younger members of the family had to go and sit in the family pew in the mornings. He was a big man, six foot tall and straight backed. A non-smoker and a non-drinker, he enjoyed his food. There was always a kindly twinkle in his eye but he knew how to deal with the awkward squad.

At the time of the Great Depression in 1926, the townsfolk marched up to the house and down the long drive to ask Thomas Walton to find work for them. There was no work. Nellie’s son George later told me how terrified, he was as a small child hearing and seeing those desperate people crowding right up to the glass of the front windows. They covered the lawn as far as one could see while Thomas Walton addressed them from the front step of the house. Dad told us of Granny’s memories of her father travelling around town in a horse and carriage wearing his top hat. Dad remarked on the incredible social changes that my grandmother’s generation had lived through from horsepower to space travel. Thomas Walton died in 1948.

The two girls, Nellie and Elsie, were sent to a school run by a strict German headmistress at Saltburn on the Yorkshire coast. They detested both the school and the headmistress who was long-remembered for an unsightly fang that protruded over her lower lip. Nellie went on to the Leipzig Conservatoire of Music in Germany to polish her piano playing.

After Leipzig Nellie travelled around the world working as a governess to rich families first in Seattle and then Honolulu. Elsie left Saltburn at sixteen and was sent to Switzerland where she spent two years at a finishing school near Montreux. Despite little opportunity to practice, my grandmother would produce a French phrase from time to time with an impressively authentic accent.

The two girls were both good looking but Granny was the prettier of the two. Nellie was older by six years and as evidenced by her travels perhaps had the more independent personality. Granny told us of the time Nellie led her across the North Country moors. After walking for miles, Granny was relieved finally to be able to rest her blistered feet when Nellie announced that there was still time to walk a further ten miles. Elsie returned home from school in Switzerland in 1911. Soon after, Nellie also came home from her travels to help care for their mother.

Gramp and Grandma Walton had vacated the Willows, which became the home of ‘The Colonel’ and his new wife Olive. They moved to ‘Uplands’, a large new house, not quite finished at the beginning of the war, and built for Paul and Nora Schwarz, great friends of the Waltons and Hares, until August 1914. They were Germans and so interned. Gramp Walton had invested a great deal of money in the house having put in all the fine oak woodwork and so he bought the place. As the Saxe-Coburgs changed their name to Windsor, so ‘Dortmund’ became ‘Uplands’.

My father, Samuel Trevor Hare, was born in April 1920. He had one sister, Barbara, who was born five years later. His parents, Frank and Elsie Hare, lived in a large stone-built house called ‘The Tower’ in Durham. Years later I went looking for The Tower and was able to take a look around the ground floor. It had been a nursing home but was now a hotel. The house is built on a steep slope, with gardens below on two levels overlooking the historic city of Durham.

Downstairs at cellar level was where Frank’s surgery, waiting room and dispensary used to be. Patients would call at the house and sit in the waiting room. Often they could hear Elsie playing the grand piano above and later on the young Barbara practising. The house was set back just enough to allow space for a garage to house the two Rileys, one black for Frank and the other grey, for Elsie. There were steps up to the double front door and then more steps up into the central hall. Here they removed the old floorboards and replaced them with a new ‘sprung’ floor for dancing.

Quite often there were black-tie dinner parties in the house and dancing after. At the far side of the hall was a wide central flight of stairs going up to a half-landing and a stained glass window. Throughout the building style was ‘church-Gothic’. The dining room had large high windows looking out over the lawn and across to the Cathedral. There were new playrooms in the attics, a billiard room and table tennis. There was even a sewing room at the top of the tower over the front door.

My father’s cousin George commented that each time his family visited The Tower it seemed as if there was something new: either new decoration or new furniture and his family, the Caldwells, got the cast-offs. The morning room was at the bottom of the tower to the left of the front door. It was a smart room with a blue fitted carpet, modern wall-lights, large radio-gramophone and comfortable furniture. The suite was leather at one time, which the Caldwell family inherited gratefully.

The morning room was really the living room and business centre of the house. My grandmother kept the books. The telephone rang often and Elsie dealt with the calls. Off-duty Frank would sit with legs apart in front of the roaring fire, smoking one cigarette after another in a slim holder. This he used as a blow-pipe to get rid of the butt and, aiming badly, usually missed the fire-grate.

My grandmother had two maids while they lived at The Tower. She employed miners’ daughters who lived in the house with the family under a strict curfew. Elsie would train one girl as a housemaid to assist with the house cleaning and the other as cook to help her in the kitchen. She was always careful to treat the servants with respect and would not ask them to do something she was not be prepared to do herself. So when a patient vomited in the waiting room it was Elsie who cleaned up.

During the war years my grandfather Frank decided that the ration of one egg per week would not be sufficient for the family. So he acquired a dozen chickens and it was Elsie who had to feed and clean them. After the war the social climate changed and young women were no longer available to work as live-in maids. A local woman, Annie, had previously helped the household during the annual spring-cleaning period. Now Mrs Hare took her on full-time to help in the house. Later her daughter Frances took over. They also had a man to help in the garden later on.

My grandparents both played golf and bridge. Holidays included golf in Scotland at Gleneagles, Turnberry and other well-known courses. Once they took a caravan behind the Riley and there were some holidays abroad. Then they would spend time at Scarborough where Great-Granny Hare had a house and there was London too. They would drive down to the fashionable seaside resorts on the south coast for summer holidays.

In those days the Great North Road (later the A1) was a single-carriage road with little traffic. My grandparents stayed at the Cumberland Hotel in London to break the journey. Wherever they travelled Frank Hare always insisted that his beef should be cooked just as he enjoyed it at home. He was accustomed to getting his own way and he believed that only invalids should be fed chicken or fish. If these were offered for dinner at the hotel in Eastbourne, he would set off alone to dine further alone the front or even take the train to London.

He was a traditional husband and father and his authority at home absolute. He was reputed to say: “I may not always be right but I am never wrong!” Frank got on well with his daughter but his relationship with his son was more difficult. Whereas Frank was a keen sportsman, his son preferred spending time in the kitchen helping his mother cook. As a boy Dad’s ambition was to be a chef on one of the long-distance Pullman trains.

My father’s room at home was usually cluttered with some practical hobby he was working on: trains at one time, then making model ships with pins, cotton and bits of card. Later Dad showed me photographs he had taken of these model ships, which he had designed with meticulous attention to detail. The photographs made the models look as if they were real ships in real harbours.

My father was sent as a weekly boarder to Bow School and then later as a day boy to Durham School, both in the city of Durham. Dad was unhappy at school especially when he was away from home. The family expected him to follow his father and become a doctor. So in 1937 my father embarked on his medical education at King’s College, Newcastle. Then when he was twenty, Dad contracted meningitis. This could have been fatal but fortunately Sulphonamides had been invented (1935 Czechoslovakia) and they were able to save his life.

He struggled with his exams in some cases with extra private tuition paid for by his parents. He finally got stuck on the fourth year pathology exam, which he failed time and again. His cousin George Caldwell followed him to Newcastle five years later and his view was that Dad played around too much. My impression was that his heart was never in it.

George came back from his three years’ National Service in 1946, the year Dad was just going into the Navy. When Dad resumed his studies he still could not get past the Pathology final, by which time George was ahead of him and left in 1951. More than ten years after he started, Dad dropped out of medical school and finally moved away from home to live in London.

One of his first jobs was as a clerk for a shipping agency. He earned little and so was still dependent on financial handouts from his parents. They paid for a flat in central London, just off Park Lane as well as a variety of luxury motorcars. Dad was good looking, well spoken and charming. With ready money to spend and a gregarious nature, he found it easy to make friends. George Caldwell told me:

“He moved to London and after acting host in various night-clubs, Ciro’s was one I think, he acted a part in the ‘Arctic Theatre’ at the 1951 Festival of Britain on the South Bank. Across the stage with snow blowing a blizzard he would crack his whip and drive a team of huskies as he cried “Mooosh!” He ran a theatre restaurant with a friend for some time then it became boring.”

He eventually settled at BOAC (forerunner of British Airways) where he worked for thirteen years as a reservations clerk at the central London terminal in Victoria. The travel industry suited his lifestyle and the perks enabled him to travel cheaply all over the world even after he had ‘retired’ in his late forties. Dad explained to us that his early retirement was necessary so that he could drive us up North to our grandparent’s house and later to boarding school. The truth was that disliked the restrictions of employment and had decided to live off his family’s capital. George Caldwell wrote:

“I told you the story of his arrival in Penang, I think? Maybe not. Chris worked there for two or three years in the early Seventies. Your Dad would adventure upon the Thai Railroad and came slowly down from Bangkok to Butterworth, opposite Penang on the mainland and Chris would meet him, not having seen him ever before. So I briefed him as best I could. I said he was an inch or so taller than I and had more or less the same but nicer looks. That he might be dressed rather extravagantly and colourfully. He often was. Maybe in short shorts. Coloured scarf. He would have to be open minded.

When the train stopped, out stepped a rather outrageously dressed figure with a Florida hat and scarf, and some jewellery too. Your Pa was quite distressed and rather taken aback to see Christopher go up to this flamboyant American who had been such a nuisance all the way down from Bangkok, and address him “Are you Mr. Hare?” Mr. Hare himself of course was impeccably dressed as though ready to lunch at Harrods’ Georgian Room! But they got on famously and later, of course, Chris came to lodge with you at Gaspar Close for the year or so he worked in the West End.”

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We started the trip in Singapore which was where Dad’s cousin George lived. It was after this time that the two men became good friends. When we arrived in Singapore George Caldwell came to meet us in his chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. Domestic labour was cheap and readily available so George employed a maid, a cook as well as a chauffeur. George later confided that his Malay chauffer had banned him from driving the car after he had a small accident.

George had arrived in Singapore in the late 1950s when there was still British colonial rule (until 1965). Over the following decades Singapore grew in prosperity and George was able to indulge his life-long interest in architecture simply by observing the changing landscape from his apartment window. Over the years there were usually at least ten cranes visible from his apartment on the eighteenth floor.

His neighbours were ambassadors and the like. He enjoyed a sociable life through gentlemen’s clubs, the excellent restaurants of the city and visits to the opera. He lived well and Dad, envious of his life style, would often refer to him as ‘King George’! George also travelled especially in the Far East having a good knowledge of the history and politics of the region.

We stayed at a hotel near George’s apartment block and Sarah and I felt like millionaires. There was a large contoured pool where one night we even swam at midnight because it was so warm. Dad bought us some goggles and Sarah and I would have been content to do nothing but swim in the pool all day. Sarah and I were sharing a room on the ground floor that faced onto the pool and Dad had a room a little further along. George took us around some of the small islands on his motor boat and we collected exotic shells on a white sand beach.

He also provided a full English high tea in his apartment with a view over Singapore. George lived in a high-rise apartment block close to Orchard Road in the centre of Singapore city. and by the time of his retirement, there were many educated Chinese, Malays and Indians ready to take over the former expatriate professions.

Then we went to stay with an expatriate family who were living on a rubber plantation near Kota Tingi in Malaysia. Sarah and I watched the Malay workers making latex in the factory. It was fascinating to see the rubber trees with the little pots collecting the sap just as our school textbooks illustrated. After Singapore we moved on to Bangkok. In the hotel Dad saw a ring shaped in the form of a snake with a jewel embedded in its flattened head.

He spent a few days deliberating over buying it before he gave in to temptation. Dad introduced us to a young Thai called Hans who was to accompany us on our trip through Thailand. There was a market set up in one of the squares of the city and we went around looking at all the foreign produce. I was fascinated by the Thai language and script so Hans wrote down some simple words for me.

We went up to the beach resort of Pattaya for a few nights. Hans joined us on our trip up the coast and we ate our meals together. He shared a room with my father and was naturally included in our party whenever he was around. Back in Bangkok Dad took us to see the film South Pacific, which was set in Thailand. The time we enjoyed most was spent in the hotel pool. Taxis were unbearably hot and we had little interest in the tourist sights. However, one trip we did enjoy was taking a small boat trip up the river to the ‘floating market’.

The humidity, the exotic smells and tropical vegetation made a lasting impression on me because they were so different to the English climate. We were fascinated by the animals we saw from monkeys to a baby elephant. Our last stop was Hong Kong and we flew in over the harbour. Sarah had been moved up to first class due to lack of economy seating in the Jumbo jet. A fellow passenger pointed out the wreak of the ocean liner ‘The Queen Elizabeth’, which had burned out and still lay in Hong Kong Harbour at that time.

In later life George developed an interest in researching his family tree and wrote extensively about the family. He told me now after Elsie’s marriage and their mother’s death in 1918, his mother Nellie continued to keep house for her father at Uplands. She also helped a local widower with his household and children. Dr George Yuille Caldwell had been born in Kilmarnock in 1879.

On leaving school he had worked as an apprentice to a pharmacist in Birkenhead until a local doctor noticed his aptitude and paid for his medical education at Glasgow University. He qualified as a doctor and by 1905 was on an eight-month sea trip to the Far East. During the voyage he corresponded by sending postcards to an Elsie Lake who came from Plymouth. They married and settled in Crook where Dr Caldwell bought Meadow House and a practice. They had two children, Douglas born in 1909 and Jean in 1911 but then in 1915 Dr Caldwell’s wife, Elsie, died.

Nellie, who was now in her late twenties and in risk of being left on the shelf, was drawn in to help with the children and with the running of the household. The young men she might have wanted to marry were either dead or else far a field in the dominions. He was in need of a wife and she in need of a husband. So there was a wedding. George Caldwell (Junior) remembers a photograph of ‘a group of dour-looking folk’ in black silk hats and morning coats arranged outside the conservatory at Uplands and his mother looking very smart in a huge white hat with osprey feathers.

After the wedding Dr Caldwell, with his children Douglas and Jean, moved to live with his new wife at Uplands. They had a further two children: Harry was born in 1921 and George came along four years later in December 1924. Dr Caldwell (Senior) was fond of his malt whisky and one of Nellie’s challenges during the years of the next war was to procure his daily dram. Dr Caldwell spoke with a thick Glaswegian accent. There was no conversation at breakfast and little at other times.

The children were not to disturb him and while their father was in the house the children were sent outside. The weather had to be extraordinary for the children to be allowed to stay inside. Usually it was wet and windy. They had bicycles and rough land to explore. The pits close by gave them the timing as the tubs bringing the coal out of the drift mines started rolling at half-past eleven and they knew that it was time to turn back for lunch.

Dr Caldwell was reputed to be a good doctor but son George had no natural inclination for medicine. So in 1943 when George (Junior) went along to enlist in the Navy he thought that he had escaped. Coming home that evening, he found the ‘cat amongst pigeons’. In the morning room were his Uncle Fred, the Colonel, and his Mama looking very glum and disheartened. This was natural since there had been so many deaths of friends and relations in the First War.

His father, however, was not in the least concerned so George went. While George was away in the navy, his father died and on his return, George announced that he wanted to study architecture. Nellie stopped the car and said “One of the things your father said before he died was, ‘Get those two buggers through Medicine and then they can do what the hell they like!’”

George’s father had little capital to leave and, no doubt, he believed that with a medical degree his sons would be assured of a reasonable income. After qualifying, George spent an initial five years in a country practice in Yorkshire. Then looking on the map for the place furthest removed from County Durham, he set off on a ship for Singapore where he lived for the rest of his life.

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I also understood the concept of divorce and that other children also had parents who were separated. I thrived in the educational process once I found way to succeed. I enjoyed the positive feedback of being one of the more able students. Most of the free time I had at school when we were not playing outside I spent reading. We were given small exercise books to record the books we read during the term. Feri and I would compare our reading lists to see who had the longest by the end of term.

The school library offered a wide selection of books including all the standard children’s classics. Many of the books we read at school were not supplied by the school itself. Enid Blyton was not an approved author and yet her books were very popular with all the children. Other girls would bring her books into school and so we full-boarders were still able to read them. Naturally, we read most of her books set in boarding schools. In fiction, the girls seemed to have much more fun and adventure than we did. I was also very taken with the portrayal of the heroine’s parents in ‘Malory Towers’. I longed to have such ‘normal’ parents and often wished that my parents would get back together again.

When I first arrived at The Sneep, I found the class work difficult. There were basic classroom skills I had to learn such as listening in class. With the smaller class sizes, the teacher now noticed me and it was not as easy to sit there ignoring the teacher. I still did not know my tables and continued to cheat in tests. We would mark our own work and I simply made up the ticks and crosses. Slowly I became more involved in the work of the class and started to understand how to respond to the education process.

After the first term Feri was moved up a year but I remained in the lower class, which was inconvenient for our out-of-school playtime as the two classes finished at different times. The following term I was also moved up and initially I found the new class difficult. In English we read Charles Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’, a moral tale about a boy who was a chimney sweep. It was way over my head as a nine year old and I could not understand the formal language of this English classic of 1863. After a time all was well and I caught up with the others. I came to be an attentive pupil and even enjoyed learning.

During each lesson we took turns to read from a textbook. Once a passage had been read the books were turned over and one girl at random would be asked to summarise what we had just read. The prospect of being chastised in front of the whole class for not listening worked well as an incentive for everyone to pay attention. In this new class we had end of term exams and mothers who lived locally would volunteer to come in to help. We went in turns to the dining room where we dictated our exam answers while one of the mothers wrote for us. Even when we progressed higher up the school we never needed to revise for exams as the learning technique seemed to ensure that we remembered the subject matter simply from listening in class.

As juniors our conversation at meal times consisted of telling jokes. It was expected that you made conversation when sitting next to a member of staff. This never came naturally to me. Other children might bubble away enthusiastically about whatever they had been doing recently but I was too self-conscious to talk easily on any subject. Shyness was not a valid excuse and Miss McConchie often lectured me about how boring and selfish it was to have nothing to say.

As an adult I have come to understand this perspective. However as a child I was simply intimidated by adults. I found that I could not think of any natural topic of conversation to discuss with the teachers. Other girls went home for the weekend so at least they could talk about what they had done outside school. I felt that everyone knew too well what I had been doing all weekend. I would lie awake at night dreading the next occasion when I would have to go through the torture of talking to Miss McConchie.

If she thought that I was avoiding sitting beside her, she would move me next to her. This action in itself was not a good precursor to making relaxed conversation. Ultimately, I found a coping strategy, which was to choose to sit next to the teachers at a time when I felt there would be least pressure on me. I decided that this was mostly likely to be Monday breakfast. All week I would agonise over suitable topics and then the night before, lying awake in bed I would rehearse. As long as I had two or three sentences I could hope to satisfy the requirement that I had made some effort at conversation. Once this meal was over I could relax. Having done my duty I would not be coerced into sitting next to a teacher before the next week.

There was little concept of what boarding schools now refer to as ‘pastoral care’. We were not even offered a hug or an inquiry as to whether we were happy. Discipline was strict but there was rarely cause for more than a stern word. We did not tend to leave our rooms at night and would only talk after lights out, which rarely got us into trouble. Once when some other girls were caught out of their dormitories Miss McConchie administered ‘the slipper’. This was not a serious corporal punishment but was intended to shame the wrongdoers. When we were seniors one girl was caught swearing and Mrs Herring gave us all a lecture about the evils of swearing and told us that the punishment was expulsion. I was wary of authority and I was embarrassed about how easily I got upset whenever I was in trouble.

One of the most frightening events in my junior school life was the ritual of the flu injection, which was given to most pupils each autumn. The first year this did not bother me but the second year I was affected by the atmosphere of tension and tears among some of the older girls. Our names were called and we had to stand in a long line stretching down the stairs from the bedrooms where the team of nurses were giving the injections. They used guns that made a loud punching noise like an electric stapler and caused some of the girls’ arms to bleed. Watching girls coming back down the stairs in tears with blood dripping down their arm filled me with panic.

I started to move back in the line to avoid reaching the front. Eventually the headmistress spotted this and taking a firm hold of my arm, moved me towards the front of the queue. Just before the nurse could give me the injection, I jerked my arm away and pushed against the headmistress. There was a commotion and I was put into one of the dormitories to calm down and come to my senses. I sat there planning my escape and contemplating the injustice of my situation.

When Mrs Herring reappeared she told me how childish I was being. She asked me which I would rather have: a smack or the injection. Fully aware of sounding slightly pathetic, I nevertheless found the decision an easy one and asked for the smack. I was personally pleased with the outcome but afterwards another girl told me I should have been ashamed of my behaviour. I did not easily submit to being forced into something I did not want.

Throughout the following year I dreaded the coming of the next flu jab. I had tried to impress on my father how much I did not want to have this injection but I was not confident that he would take the necessary action. When the time came the following autumn, I listened attentively with heart banging and was relieved when I did not hear my name read out. Unfortunately I had missed my name and the head teacher marched me up the stairs to have the injection. When the time came for the TB jab, Dad had seen a programme on television about the risks of brain damage in children from having injections. He resolved that we should not have any non-mandatory injections again.

Each term we studied one of Shakespeare’s plays. My first play was ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I struggled to understand the incomprehensible poetry. However, gradually I found that once the story had been explained it could be quite enjoyable waiting to find out how some of the stories would end.

We read John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ together as a class and although I did not understand all of the religious significance I still enjoyed the story. We learned Latin and the history of the Roman Empire and other ancient civilisations, which all seemed the more real for the local ruins. There were school trips to Hadrian’s Wall and various local Roman camps. We also read the ‘Tales of Troy’ following the Greek hero, Ulysses in his quest of rescuing Helen from King Priam.

Each term we were given four or five texts that we learned by heart. There was always at least one passage from the bible, one from Shakespeare and a poem or two. I enjoyed Portia’s plea for mercy in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, the description of the night time preparations for the Battle of Agincourt in ‘Henry V’ and Mark Anthony’s speech inciting the crowd to take revenge for Brutus’s murder in ‘Julius Caesar’.

We would learn these passages by testing each other. Feri and I would compete over who could get the best mark. We often got ‘A+’ but on one occasion while I was reciting to Mrs Herring, I was distracted by my surroundings and lost my way. It was a lovely sunny day and we were sitting out on the lawn beneath the coppid beach tree. The poem was ‘The Bat’ by D H Lawrence describing the author’s sighting of a bat at dusk by the ‘Ponte Vecchio’ (The Old Bridge) in Florence.

“Bats! Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; and disgustingly upside down.”

Learning by heart highlighted the poetry in these works and as an adult, I have appreciated remembering some of the most poignant passages in the English language. Many years later when I used to take the train to Waterloo and walk across the bridge, I would console myself with the words of William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’:

“Earth hath not anything to show more fair! Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.”

After my first trip abroad to Italy when I was ten, I returned to school fired up with enthusiasm for the Italian language. We were already learning French and Latin at school so learning another formal language held little appeal. What was much more interesting was the idea of developing our own language or code that we could use in our games. What started as a simple idea grew into a means of communication. As we needed a new word, we would invent one and so we built the language up slowly.

Soon Feri and I had a vocabulary of a few hundred words and a grammar that enabled us to say anything we wanted. It was great fun to be able to communicate without anyone understanding us. Our code often infuriated the matron who accused us of being babyish. I still played with my teddy bears. I saw life through their eyes and I had a favourite daydream that one of my bears would come to life. With a live bear as a companion, I contemplated how I would enjoy being the centre of attention.

In my diary I could say exactly what I thought so some entries were not very charitable. Possessiveness and jealousy occurred frequently. We would sit around and discuss the attributes of the troublesome ones. Laura was evidently a strong personality because she was often in trouble with the rest of us. One of my early difficulties with friendships was that I was reluctant to explain my own behaviour. I would be distant with Laura when I was upset with her but was too embarrassed to say why. I never remember having this problem with Feri who was less competitive over friendships. However, Laura had a number of other friends and I was very easily hurt when she preferred one of her other friends over me.

As we were growing up our relationships and friendships with each other became a focal point for our conversations and our playtime together. In living together we were more like sisters than friends and everything was discussed. Laura was a weekly boarder and a consistent friend during the later years. Laura was more socially mature and worldlier than Feri and me. She had a close relationship with her mother who provided insights into everyday life. Higher up the school Laura came back to school with tales of finding mysterious objects in her mother’s drawers. Laura was our regular contact with the world outside school.

Laura would join the daygirls and stand around for hours discussing bras, boys and pop music. Feri and I had little experience of or interest in such things. In the summer term Laura, Kirsten and Sally all came back to school with bras. My first real knowledge of sex came at the age of 10 when other girls at school were just starting their periods. Mrs Herring gave us a book describing human reproductive biology or the ‘facts of life’. I remember being totally amazed at the crude reality of human sexual activity and found myself looking at adults in a new light. The description of sex seemed incongruous with the reserved adult interaction that I saw in real life. Even within families I saw little evidence of intimate physical contact between married adults.

In September 1972 I arrived back at school for my last year at the Sneep. We had Miss McConchie as our form teacher because she always took the senior class. Everyone said that I was teacher’s pet because she sometimes seemed pleased with me. However, I was often in trouble for losing my belongings and “Conkers blew me up” or “Mrs H blew me up” were common entries in my diary. The natural choice of senior school might have been Queen Margaret’s School, Harrogate, which was where my cousin Sue went after the Sneep. However, behind the scenes Mum had been asking that our senior school should be in the south of England closer to her. Granny decided to pay for me to go with Feri to Queen Anne’s School (QAS) in Caversham in the south of England.

Feri and I were both entered for the scholarship exam for Queen Anne’s School. We both passed the entry requirement but neither of us won a scholarship. Once we got to QAS we realised that the girls who had won a scholarship achieved A grades in every class not just one or two as we did. In our last term we got the main parts in a play directed by Miss McConchie called ‘The Gentle Rain’. The title was a reference to Portia’s speech in the Shakespeare play ‘The Merchant of Venice’ where she pleads for mercy. I was cast as the Emperor of China, a role I took very much to heart. The play was performed on the last day of term and Dad came to see it. When I left The Sneep, Sarah was still too young to go to senior school with me so she had to stay on for one more year. This was the first time that Sarah and I were separated.

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My first worry was how to make friends and gain acceptance in the year group. I was hoping for the kind of personal popularity that I had enjoyed at the Sneep. Initially when I first arrived back at school I would be overwhelmed with homesickness and depression. Although we had fun at school, there were also a whole variety of worries and stresses to deal with as well. The sight of the impersonal dormitories after a stay at home felt like returning to a prison.

I learned that the best way to deal with the emotions was to keep busy and try not to dwell on my feelings. I would unpack, have a bath and get myself organised for school life. By the time everyone had arrived and it was time to go to bed it would seem as if I had never been away from school. Despite my appreciation of home I often wrote in my diary that it was “Great to be back at school”. School was our base and defined the core of our lives.

A corridor separated our dormitory from the rest of the girls in our year. However, after ‘lights out’ it was a routine trip to creep along past the matron’s room to visit the girls in the larger ‘dorm’ of six beds. Matron kept her door ajar in the evenings and it was a challenge to get past her room without the floor boards creaking under the lino covered corridor. Miss Heggarty, a tall thin woman with black hair, was Irish and had a slightly scatty sense of humour.

I have since wondered whether she accepted a certain amount of ‘goings on’ since I am sure that she must have been able to hear us. If we were in the other dorm making too much noise matron or the house mistress, Miss Leahy (‘Leeks’ to us), would come into the room and switch the lights on. As the visitors, we had to hide under the beds and hope we escaped detection. If we were ‘caught’, we would be marched back to our room in disgrace. It all added to the sense of daring when we next broke the rules.

The dormitories had bare wooden floorboards and iron-framed beds, which had thin hammock-shaped mattresses so that there was only one position for sleeping: in the trench. We each had a set of drawers for clothes and a wooden chest at the end of the bed, called a ‘cheeser’ in which we stored our games kit and shoes. We were allowed only a fixed number of items on our drawer top by the bed. Each week before the cleaners came, we had to move these items onto the bed so that the cleaners could dust. We had a craze on jacks in my first year, which we would play on the dormitory floor. Pastimes went in phases but playing cards was always popular.

Each day we walked over to the main school building for chapel and lessons. When the teacher came into the classroom we all stood in silence until the teacher asked us to sit. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we had games all afternoon. Each evening there were lessons and homework, which we always called ‘prep’. The school day went on to 7 pm when there was a hot supper such as ‘toad-in-the-hole’ or ‘bubble and squeak’.

I enjoyed school food especially the cooked breakfast and the puddings. We always said a short grace standing at the table before each meal except for tea, to which we helped ourselves in the dining room. We would eat loaves of ready sliced white bread with chocolate spread or just white sugar sprinkled on butter. There were also various varieties of runny jam, usually strawberry or apricot, with minimal fruit content and peanut butter, which I hated.

I was no good at anything sporty, which was a severe disadvantage in a public school where we had to play competitive games almost every day. At Queen Anne’s the main winter team sport was lacrosse. I had never heard of it before and it was a little unnerving at first that the other girls all knew how to play. A lacrosse stick is about three feet long and has a triangular net at the top end. A player has to catch the ball, roughly the size of a tennis ball, in the net before throwing it on to the next player.

As the player is running along there is a tendency for the ball to fall out of the net so there is a technique for cradling the ball, by rocking the net from side to side and hence preventing the ball from falling out. Needless to say, I never exactly mastered this sport and spent most of my time either in goal or ineffectually in some defence position out on the wings of the game. Tackling was aggressive and holding onto the ball involved manoeuvring and dodging the other players.

Even in goal, I would usually simply jump out of the way, as a bigger heavier girl thundered towards me ready to shoot the ball into the goal. It often rained and I would stand on the pitch with my glasses steamed up or covered with rain drops and wonder how I was supposed to be either gaining anything from the miserable experience or contributing to the game. Each week we had to rub the leather struts of the net of the lacrosse stick with some smelly grease to ensure that the leather did not dry out. The nets became dirty with use and I do not remember what happened to mine when I left school. I wrote in my diary “Field was absolutely freezing. My feet felt like blocks of ice. I thought I might be able to break my toes off!” If I had even the hint of a cold I would try my best to obtain an excuse note off games from matron.

At Queen Anne’s there was a system called ‘cracks’. A younger girl selected an older girl to have as a ‘crack’. If you were ‘cracked’ on someone, it meant that you admired them and looked on them as a mentor. Some of the junior girls could be very silly displaying their devotion and sometimes this was encouraged by the older girl. I found the prospect of being involved in this arrangement highly embarrassing. I did not feel any inclination to dote on anyone and asked whether it was possible to opt out of the custom.

Eventually I chose a quiet girl who seemed sensible just to join in. I thought no one else was likely to select her and that she might at least have the benefit of the supposed compliment. The prime duty of a crack was to spend time chatting by the younger girl’s bed on the last night of term. This tradition was called ‘tucking up’. I was pleased when my ‘crack’ turned out to be a nice girl who could easily talk to me for the required time.

Returning to school for my second year at QAS I was in the Lower Fifth (LV), which meant that we were considered to be senior rather than junior girls. We were now eligible to be promoted onto the privilege list. Once promoted onto ‘the list’ we could go shopping in pairs, either walking down into Caversham or catching the bus to Reading. Non-lists could only go shopping on three Saturdays each term but they were not allowed out of school in the week. From this point on being ‘delisted’ was the main form of punishment.

During my years at QAS, I was forever conscious of my inability to talk at any level. I found it difficult to feel at ease with anyone whether my peers, juniors, seniors or staff. I blamed my family background for my lack of social confidence. Each week Miss Leahy chaired a meeting of the whole house in the common room. The sixth formers would assign marks to the junior girls for posture, grooming and conversation and then read them out during the house meeting. Marks were out of ten, with two or three being a low mark. It did not take long for the seniors to spot my shyness and I always received very low marks for conversation.

One time I had to report to the study where one of the senior girls lectured me in front of the other sixth formers about the need to be more talkative. I was petrified and humiliated. I managed to escape further criticism but I remained acutely aware of the need to make token conversation at the meal table whenever a member of the sixth form was around. On the last week of term we could sit next to our friends. It was such a relief for me to be able to enjoy stress-free meals.

On the ground floor of Wilkins, there was a common room for us to use during our free time. Here there was a record player, a ping-pong table, casual chairs and sofas and plenty of paperbacks to read. The lower sixth had their own study as well as a TV room where they could watch television more freely than the junior girls were allowed to. The juniors had to go across to the Webbe dining room and sit on the long tables to watch television. At the beginning of term, each year group in the house agreed on three programmes they wanted to watch each week. I took little interest in the choice as it hardly seemed worth the bother.

I continued to enjoy reading at QAS. Every now and then Dad would send me a book that he had just read. He enjoyed light historical novels and short stories, Somerset Maugham being a favourite of his. I enjoyed the relative privacy and quiet of sitting in the school library. The library was a first floor room at the end of the school assembly hall accessed via two winding stone staircases in the towers at either side. The room was wood panelled and had window seats around the circumference below the lead-latticed windows. There were two turrets on each of the towers, which were so picturesque that a new art teacher spent weeks drawing them.

With Christmas coming there were decorations to be put up in the dorm. We made these ourselves from toilet paper and the like. On the last evening of the Christmas term, the whole house would sing Christmas carols together in Leeks’ sitting room. Miss Leahy was a piano teacher as well as the choir mistress. She played the piano and there was hot ribena, peanuts and mince pies to eat. We finished the term with a midnight feast and a water fight. Sometimes each year in the house was asked to prepare a short piece of entertainment for an informal house show performed in the common room.

Occasionally I found that school life became so enjoyable that I temporarily forgot about all my worries and insecurities.

The house was performing the 1920’s musical ‘The Boyfriend’. The main parts went mostly to the senior girls but I enjoyed supporting the singing of a couple of songs that needed a high voice. Mum came with Simon to see one of the performances of ‘The Boyfriend’. Afterwards she took me out and we sat on the swings in the playing field in Caversham eating fish and chips.

I was still self-conscious of my shyness and immaturity. Conversation at meal times much easier once we had the exams to talk about. Exams kept us busy and brought us together as a group. We spent a great deal of time preparing to do revision but not so much time actually getting any work done. I wrote “We got caught with the lights on, revising. Went down to Leeks. Had to stand in the dark in different rooms for half an hour!” Water fights were quite common and very difficult to explain if Leeks or matron walked in. Another time we were ‘caught’ breaking the rules at night we had to strip our beds, remake them and then copy lines from a book.

Sometimes the sixth formers were given the job of keeping order after lights out. Some girls would attempt to fit in extra revision by sitting in the toilet after lights out. Miss Heggarty would come round and ask why people were spending so much time on the loo. One night Di went to the toilet to read a comic and Heggarty came in wondering where she was. We told her that Di was constipated. Heggarty sat on the bed and chatted to us for a while. She was always a little batty and told funny stories. Di was gone such a long time that by the time she appeared she had to agree to being constipated and she had to take one of Heggarty’s pills much to our amusement.

The only aspect of school life where I felt I could earn some respect from others was on the academic side. I was a good student although never top of the class. Maths and Latin were my favourite subjects. At the Sneep we had rarely done any revision except for the special preparation for the scholarship exams. The other girls were used to doing much more exam preparation at their junior schools. So Feri and I came across the phenomenon of revision for the first time. I concluded that “exams at QAS are rather silly. It is more of less, if you can memorise a lot in a little time then you do well.”

Another difference was the girls’ approach to prep. At the Sneep we used to do our prep under supervised conditions so that there was no opportunity for us to get help from parents or our peers. By the second year, I was shocked that many of the other girls would compare notes with each other before completing their homework. I thought that sharing or copying other people’s ideas equated to cheating. It perhaps explained why some struggled later on because they had enhanced their marks up until now by getting help.

I noted that in the first year the order of ‘brains’ in Wilkins had been Barley, Di, Feri and I and then the rest. I was always anxious before exams that the magic might fade and I would suddenly stop getting good marks. When it came to it, I quite enjoyed the exams themselves.

French was my initial worry at senior school. When I started German in my second year, I found that even more challenging. However, my most hated subject throughout senior school was English. I was not a natural English student and lacked confidence in creative writing. I was always uncertain of what to write about and dreaded putting pen to paper. Although I read a great deal, I was a lazy reader so I did not have a broad vocabulary. I would often skip over words I did not understand or sections of prose I found tedious.

The worst aspect of my English classes at Queen Anne’s was the teacher Miss Woolison. ‘Woolly’ asked us to sign up for a turn reading the parts in the play we were studying. Some days passed off uneventfully but often she would find a reason to pick on someone. I found it easy to cry especially when anyone criticised or chastised me. I always blamed my self-pity on the emotional upset of my early childhood deprived of a secure family home.

I dreaded bursting into the inevitable tears as she humiliated my attempts in front of the class. It was tempting to sign up for only small parts but this would be spotted. So it was a question of judging how little I could get away with. Mostly it was a matter of luck. I was quite angry when I later heard that she proudly admitted to some girls that her teaching style was founded on intimidation. Everyone disliked her even those much tougher than me. Di was jubilant when her parents obtained another teacher for her ‘O’ level year.

Our mis-doings at school were all fairly innocent. One escapade was to creep out of the house at night and meet up with girls from one of the houses within the old school building. There were old tunnels under the central quadrangle, which they knew how to get into. The idea of creeping along narrow tunnels in the dark did not appeal to me. There was also reason to fear being trapped in these tunnels, which were partly collapsed.

There was great excitement and trepidation about the others being caught. When we were in the upper fifth, someone found out about some black magic. In the dark after lights out, we would place a glass on a mirror and we all had to touch the glass. After a while, it would start moving around perhaps because of the static electricity but the idea was that spirits were causing the glass to move. I had a go along with everyone else but was perhaps a little more sceptical than most.

Despite the penalties there were always some girls who regularly smoked cigarettes. They would go together in small groups and smoke behind the sports huts at the end of the field. I never felt the need to prove anything with either cigarettes or alcohol because I felt responsible for my own choices. When I was seven, I tried a cigarette with the boys we played with in the Cotswolds. I took one puff and collapsed in a fit of coughing, which was enough to persuade me that smoking was unpleasant. Every adult I knew who smoked, including my parents, complained of the difficulty in giving up the habit. There seemed little point in taking up something that was expensive, forbidden and likely to become an unpleasant habit.

In February 1974 a girl in the lower fifth was expelled. She had been warned about smoking and had been caught again. Her name was Ruffy and she was in the year above me. On the day she left, other girls in the house kept playing the song ‘When the carnival is over’ for hours on end on the record player in the common room. There were tears and a general atmosphere of impending doom, which I thought a little melodramatic. Given that she had repeatedly broken the rules, I was not particularly sympathetic to any sense of her having been wronged.

Some of the girls at QAS would go shop lifting for small items just for the dare, which I thought simply dishonest and quite shocking given their privileged backgrounds. When we were more senior, everyone else in my year would sneak out of the school grounds at night to go to the funfair in Caversham. If they had been caught, they would have risked expulsion, as this was a serious breech of the school’s security. I did not go partly because I was frightened of being ‘caught’ but also because I have never enjoyed fairground rides through a combination of motion sickness and fear of speed. I often did not see the point in breaking the rules.

When we were fourteen some of the girls in my year were caught drinking. I felt slightly ridiculous when we were all hauled in for a serious lecture by the house mistress. The ‘alcohol’ involved was ginger beer with an alcoholic content of around one quarter of one percent. I was already drinking cider and wine with Mum during the holidays and would not have wasted my time breaking rules with ginger beer. Another time, some junior girls in my house got themselves drunk on a cocktail of spirits, cider and beer. Needless to say, they were caught. One girl was suspended and one was expelled.

At the start of the summer term, there was a new girl called Sarah Ward. We were curious to meet her because she came from a comprehensive school. Contrary to our expectations, she took no time at all to make herself at home. I was surprised that someone who had come from a state school could be so confident and quick to fit into a new environment. She said that they did not do any work in her last school and so she happily admitted to being ‘quite dim’. She soon had us fascinated with her stories from the real world, including boys and discos. In no time at all she learned to emulate the upper class accents of the school.

Others did not integrate so successfully. We soon realised that Louise was going to be a problem pupil. She was a chain smoker and spent all her time on the phone to her boyfriend with no apparent concern about the cost. She flaunted the rules so publicly that there was little that the housemistress could do to reprimand her. Louise did not invest much time in integrating with the rest of us and she left after a couple of terms.

A school dance was arranged at Leighton Park a local boy’s boarding school. I was most concerned about conversation with a strange boy. The expected topics of conversation were pop music (about which I knew nothing), contemporary youth culture (even less) and the usual questions about family. The question that always sent me into total panic was “where do you come from?” I never had an answer and felt socially disadvantaged for the fact that I did not belong anywhere. My father was unemployed and my mother a housewife so I also felt inadequate, as I could not give an account of a prestigious background in a privileged social system.

I danced with one boy but did not like him putting his arm around me. I was not especially motivated to become so intimate with someone I had only just met.
I could see that he was pleasant enough but I was just too shy to know what to say. He asked me whether I would like to see his room but this was too adventurous for me. I dropped out after this first dance and decided not to embarrass myself further. I just stood around the edge and felt miserably inadequate as I watched the other girls who were tongue kissing within minutes of having met a boy.

Some of the other girls were living life more fully than I was. I was quite shocked and disgusted by how openly they would boast of their adolescent sexual experiences. These experiences were used as proof of their greater worldliness and maturity as women. To me it all sounded crude and completely unromantic. When I read books about beautiful women I wondered whether I was pretty.

In the Easter holidays when I was fifteen, I had peritonitis and had to go into hospital to have my appendix removed. After twelve days in hospital, I was allowed to go home. I had missed the beginning of term and my “O” level exams were coming up. I finally returned to school just two weeks before the start of the public exams. My approach to the exams varied from day to day. Mostly, in my diary, I worried about not being prepared for the exams: “Got depressed about how little I have revised.” Another comment, “Got bored of revising” presumably indicated that some revision was being done.

“Every now and then felt like panicking.” My ultimate coping strategy was based on Dad’s advice of trying not taking the exams too seriously. “Rest of time did not think about exams.” We had to do a house party. I was very self-conscious about acting because it was supposed to be funny. Everyone was impatient with me and laughed at my attempts. I felt depressed the whole evening. In the end, everything went wrong and I really enjoyed myself.

Back at school I was sure that I must leave at the end of the year. I felt that I could not face another year with the same people. Granny talked about me leaving QAS. I assume she was becoming concerned about the effect of ever-increasing school fees on her capital. Perhaps she also assumed that we would spend our lives as wives and mothers and could not see much use for our education. Dad had appointment with Miss Challis about me leaving. Miss Challis called me in for an interview and told me that she thought I should stay on for the lower sixth. After the exams we had to choose our ‘A’ level subjects. I chose Maths, Physics and Chemistry primarily on the basis of the teachers.

I continued my piano lessons at Queen Anne’s and my teacher was a grey-haired man with an old-fashioned manner. He remarked on my quiet nature and he would hold my hand during the lesson while he was talking to me. Mr King’s attentions rarely went further than petting and stroking my hand. At school, we used to refer to the male phenomenon of ‘wandering hand trouble’. It was apparent that women were not always in control of sexual situations with men. His attentions were hardly ‘sexual’ but I felt ‘taken advantage of’ through feeling pressured into participating in this innocent but ridiculous activity. I was aware of how inappropriate his behaviour was but lacked the moral courage and maturity to know how to deal with him.

I was far too embarrassed to tell him directly to keep his hands to himself. Equally, if I spoke to another teacher I would still have to face him and that would be unbearably embarrassing. On my birthday, he once gave me £2 and tried to kiss me on the mouth. Holding hands was one thing but I considered mouth-to-mouth kissing with an elderly man to be out of the question. I managed to avoid him but I found the situation intensely embarrassing. I was determined to continue with the piano despite the difficulties. Mum was unhelpful, her only contribution being to tease me as if he were some young eligible suitor. When I told Jenny and Barley about Mr King, they were shocked. At least they had some real world reaction to such an awkward situation.

Articles and letters from Jackie magazine provided our sex education at school. The information was invaluable and covered menstrual periods, dating boys and other questions girls have. When my breasts did finally start growing I was pleased. I had always been behind everyone else in development and I was relieved to be normal. I overheard Dad talking to Granny about me and I was pleased that he had noticed that I was developing (very slowly) into a woman. I was starting to wonder when I was going to start my periods. Mum told me that she had been late starting her periods and it was likely that I might be the same. She was not coy about her own periods and I was familiar with the packets of tampons she would leave in the bathroom.

My sexual instincts did not cause me to feel that sex would be desirable above all other concerns. Sex was very much a pleasure that would be relative to the social context. It was quite clear from everything I had read, that women’s enjoyment of sex depended on a more conscious choice to accept a lover making sexual advances towards her. Similarly I had no expectation that I would achieve some satisfaction from an acknowledged need of my own. It was more that I would be a receiver from a man’s sex drive to penetrate or stimulate me that would result in me also enjoying some sexual pleasure.

My mind set was that of a receiver in sex. My role was to provide a man with sexual pleasure through offering my body for his pleasure and orgasm. My assumption was that I would somehow receive pleasure in return but it was never clear how this pleasure would be generated in practical terms. What I mean is that, for a boy, his experience of masturbation must provide him with a fairly clear idea of how he would interact with a lover to enjoy his own sexual arousal and orgasm through stimulating his penis. It was not so clear to me what I would do specifically to enjoy a man’s body in the same way. There was simply a mysterious hope that arousal and orgasm would simply mysteriously appear when he ‘made love’ to me. It was the way it was portrayed in all the accounts of sex that I read.

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