So I was a bit confused! My mum’s career was basically as a housewife/home-keeper. She didn’t seem to consider any other career for me. When I mentioned to Mum the possibility of me becoming a vet or veterinary nurse, she mentioned that it wouldn’t really be suitable for a wife/mother because the times are unsociable. When I mentioned going to art college, she said she thought that would mean me mixing with some weird people. When I talked to my dad about going into music, he was clear that he didn’t think that was a suitable career for a woman. So I ended up trying to do an HTD in Biology – but it had so much to do with biochemistry, microbiology and dissection, that I lost interest and dropped out (to cut a long story short). As a child, we mainly lived in the south-east of England – Blackheath, then Kent, Sussex and Surrey. I remember saying to my mum, age 4 living in Petts Wood in Kent, that I wanted to live in the ‘real countryside’. The first place I remember feeling really at home was when, age 11, we went on holiday to Criccieth on the LLyn Peninsular in North Wales (long before I learnt that my maternal ancestors are from North Wales). The second place I felt at home was Clitheroe, in Lancashire, where we lived when I was from age 14 to age 17. Sadly, we then moved back down south and I really struggled to fit back in to what I felt was the ‘dog eat dog’ society in Surrey. Perhaps that’s why, in my first marriage, I welcomed the opportunity to move further north, to Derbyshire, ostensibly to work for the inlaw’s succesful business. I didn’t see eye-to-eye with them. They were wealthy facists back in the 1980s – I distinctly remember falling out over a comment made about black/coloured people. I said some of my best friends from college were from other countries and were lovely. My husband’s god-father’s wife said ‘they’re OK at college, the trouble is what they do in the evenings’. I promptly ended the potential of a career with them.

When I was born in 1961, my parents lived upstairs in my Nana’s terraced house in Blackheath, London (at the time, not a posh area!).
Nana (my paternal grandmother) was a mother to her only child, during World War II. My Nana had few facilities. She didn’t have a bath-room and she washed at the sink. My parents never persuaded her to have a bath in her life, even though Dad built her a bathroom in our house when she lived with us in my teenage years.
My dad was a ‘war child’ – his childhood years were spent in the ‘Blitz’ in south-east London – and subsequently in evacuation to family in Manchester, with his mum – my grandmother ‘Nana’.
At the time, my mum was living in north London and was evacuated to be with her grandparents in the Welsh borders, at the ‘Old Racecourse’ on the hills above Oswestry.
As I understand it, Mum had two sets of grandparents, living next-door to each other – and were cousins of each other. A very close-knit family!
At least one of the two houses on the Old Racecourse was built by my great-grandparents, who had returned from a life as missionaries on the South Sea Isles – specifically Western Samoa – towards the end of the 19th century. The story goes that they went out to Western Samoa to replace missionaries who were eaten by cannibals. My mum has always insisted that, as missionaries, they are still remembered in a good way by the Samoans.
My maternal ancestors have it seems, for centuries, documented as much as they could, in words and pictures – including a whole chest of ‘magazines’ my great aunts and uncles, created when they were teenagers in the 19th century.
So my mum brought my up with a love of art and writing – though for fun rather than as a career choice.