Thursday 26 July 2007


This is me in 1980 - dreadful! See below for an explanation..........

My first job after university (I studied English, French, Italian and Art History) at the age of 21 was as a trainee sub editor on a teenage magazine. As I loved magazines, this was fantastic for me. I wrote and answered the problem page, (although quite how well qualified to do that at the age of 21 is debatable) I wrote the beauty features, and wrote the little incidental features, as well as supplying 2 photo story ideas every week to our freelance writers and doing lots of proof reading. Because I was one of the youngest there, I was often asked to "be" the characters in the stories. I have posted some terrible chubby photos here from this inauspicious episode of my life. Obviously been eating far too many chips and sweets.

This is me in 1977 in Zambia.
I got engaged while I was at university to a man called Steve who was a mining geologist and got a job in Zambia after graduating. I spent 3 months out there in 1977. We didn't ever make it to the altar.














Monday 23 July 2007

Having been at boarding school from 11 until I was 16 - I was ready to cut loose when I continued my A levels at the local grammar school. My mother tried to imposed a "bedtime" of 9 pm with lights out at 10 pm. I was totally horrified and protested loudly. At this stage, my sisters were off studying elsewhere and my brother was at school in Edinburgh so I didn't feel I had any allies. It was strange being back home permanently and I rebelled against the home-imposed discipline with a vengeance - I had a few boyfriends, much to my parents' consternation and then fell madly in love. By this stage, I was totally flouting the bedtime and often not returning from a night out on a weekend until 3 am or later. Relations between my parents and I were frosty.

School work was fine and despite my extra curricular activities I enjoyed my studying - the only problem was I had been used in my previous school to having very vocal, opinionated fellow pupils, whereas in Berwick, you were considered a "creep" if you answered anything a teacher asked in a class discussion - even if you were challenging their views - which I was usually doing. It was considered seriously uncool amongst my peers even to engage to that depth in a lesson.

I had always been one of those infuriating people who could get away with doing very little during the term time, and then could madly swot up and learn enough to pass exams very quickly. The down side of all this was that within a fortnight of an exam, I'd usually forgotten everything again - but it did get me good exam results and into university. My French teacher suggested I tried for Oxbridge but that sounded like serious hard work to me so I politely declined. I worked reasonably hard for my A Levels, but my mind was on other things - I ended up with 2 As (English and French) and a D (German). Looking back if I'd pulled out the stops I could probably have managed an A in German too - but I didn't really work very hard at it, and our teacher had suffered some type of breakdown half way through the course and had been absent for a lot of the time. I wasn't really bothered though. Looking back (which is always far too easy) I had quite a destructive attitude to life. My own daughters (22 and 20 - elder at Leeds studying medicine, younger at Oxford studying Spanish) are lively, stroppy and feisty but somehow don't seem to have that totally rebellious, arrogant attitude that I think I probably had.

I had a Saturday job in a cafe - I loved it - zooming about with plates and dishes and pouring coffee and chatting and seeing friends. Because I was doing French A level - I was trying desperately to get to France in the summer when I was 17. The previous year, I'd been to Germany with a youth exchange (when I was 16). My father had tried to organise an exchange to France with a French client but it all fell through at the last minute - so I organised an ill-fated trip myself. It was to stay with a french girl called Marie Noelle (christoned Merry Christmas by my family). I travelled down to London by train - and then got another train to Dover where I boarded a hovercraft to Calais, a train to Paris, and then another train to Blois where I arrived at 1 am in the morning. There was no one to meet me there, so I wandered around the town until around 3 am on my own (I can't remember what I was wearing but it was probably provocative). I was enjoying meeting people and trying out my speaking French skills, until to my total surprise, I was picked up by the Gendarmerie and taken to the police station for my own safety. They were very kind and let me help them sort out lots of car registrations for them. They contacted the family I was supposed to be staying with and they eventually collected me at around 5.30 am. As a mother of two daughters, the thought of them doing something similar at 17 makes me shivver. Marie Noelle was very very grumpy, aggressive and smelly. I had to share a double bed with her and her equally grumpy sister slept in the same room. They would bicker and shout at each other all night (arrete ronfler!) and refused to open the window to let a little air in because of the "moustiques" . Worse was to come because Marie Noelle then expected to come home with me and stay for 2 weeks - but I had a summer job looking after some children so unfortunately it fell to my mother and brother to entertain her - without success.

Tuesday 17 July 2007




Managed to find a few early pictures - from the top left is my sister Tinny, myself as the baby, and my other sister Alison. In the shot of us in the garden (not a kilt to be seen sadly, as it's the summer) is Robbie, Alison, Tinny, me - and our very important and much loved Jason, badly behaved but very affectionate springer spaniel. In the school Christmas party shot we're all in our very very best clothes - I can remember most of the names of the children in this picture. I'm third from the left on the bottom row in a checky dress (one of my favourites).
Forgot to mention earlier the other, hilarious holidays we used to have. My father bought a wooden "hut" in the Cheviot Hils for £100 with his best friend Jimmy Mitchell. It didn't have any electricity or running water and was about 5 metres square divided into three "rooms" - all the children there slept on wooden bunks (8) built into the walls. Robbie who was a baby, slept in a bunk with a cage door so he couldn't fall out. We carved our names into the walls surrounding our bunks. We had baths in the "burn" and used candlelight at night. Water came from a handpump which connected directly to a nearby boggy stream. We had to put a strainer over the water spout to catch the water beetles and other creepie crawlies but we didn't mind. We would spend weeks up running wild - fishing for trout and minnows in the burn, racing up hills, using eye-spy books to chart birds and wild flowers and playing at the farm nearby where there was always a selection of collie puppies and kittens. I don't want to paint a totally idyllic picture - I can remember longing for some shops at some point - or somewhere to buy sweets - I still have a diary which I wrote when I was 10, which tells of a day which we spent there when "everybody was in a bad mood apart from Robbie and Jason" but on the whole it was really good fun. The place is still owned by the family now, but we're not nearly as hardy as our parents and have installed electricity and running water - although we still don't have a telephone there (and there's no signal for mobiles) and we don't have a tv there either.

Thursday 12 July 2007

Right - have decided the only way I can do this, is if I squeeze in 10 mins in my lunch hour every day - otherwise it won't work. As a result you'll get short items - hopefully 4 - 5 ish times a week if this system gets going. My old pics are all in boxes as I've just moved house but should be able to locate some over the weekend.

Think I left off first blog talking about rough tough primary school in Berwick upon Tweed. Most of us had head lice - as it equally common nowadays - but the treatment was different. I remember running out of the classroom to visit the nasty outside toilets when I was about 6 or 7, to find one of the scariest girls in the schools all hunched up on her own in the corner of the playground with her head in her hands - she'd had all her hair shaved off and someone had given a dirty, turban like hat to wear to keep her warm. Years later I had a holiday job in a supermarket in the town - she worked on the next till to me - I never knew whether she remembered me or not and I was still a bit scared of her but I was really happy to see she had very long, shiny dark hair.

In answer to the question about why I knew so much about God - it had been drummed into me from an early age - my father was a leading light in the church choir and we were all marched to Church every Sunday (Church always had a capital letter in those days) - I liked the singing but Dad always used to embarrass us by singing the descant to all the hymns. We had big picture bibles full of horrific pictures which used to give me nightmares - Moses parting the waters so that the Israelites could cross over, but then Pharoh's men drowning when the water returned, the crucifixion, the slaughter of the innocents - all gruesomely depicted in my bedtime reading. We also had to say our prayers every night - god bless mummy and daddy and granny and alison, tinny, robbie and then a long list of all our pets.

I adored having a birthday on 28th October, because it meant that my birthday party could be a Halloween party. It was always brilliant. Every year,my mother would snap out of frugal mode and put on the most wonderful party tea. There would be sausages on sticks, egg sandwiches, meringues, chocolate crispies, buns with icing on top in paper cases, homemade shortbread biscuits shaped like life belts with chocolate stripes and jellies. We would all sit around the table and eat and eat until our tummies could take no more. We would catch sticky buns in our mouths which would hang from the pulley, we would duck for apples, play the smelling or feeling game where we’d sit in the dark and try to guess what was being passed around - or there was the sucking up dried peas on a straw game. Thanks to my mother who always threw herself into the arrangements with gusto, my birthday parties as a child were always legendary. She once made me a gingerbread Hansel and Gretel house cake with licorice allsorts for windows and doors and all sorts of other sweets for flowers in the gardens and chimneys and curtains etc.

Sweets were big in our house. My father used to take 6 teaspoons of sugar in his tea and every Saturday he'd bring us children a great big selection of boiled sweets, creamline toffees, everton mints, lucky numbers, sherbert lemons, sour plums - which were usually all finished by Monday. Alison and I were always having fillings at the dentist, although Tinny and Robbie weren't affected. The dentist had terrible halitosis and drilled our teeth fiercely with no injections. I was terrified of going and had to be bribed with a trip to the cafe afterwards. Needless to say I still hate going to the dentist today, but at least you get a numbing injection.

My mother had 4 sisters - and a brother (who was very clever but had manged to escape to Canada - presumably so he wouldn't have to look after them all). They were all much older than her. The eldest sister, a nurse in her 60s at this stage, was asked to look after her brother's father in law who was a retired Church of Scotland minister and was in his 80s and dying. Much to our astonishment, when I was about 11, she ended up marrying him. My mother was aghast! We girls were disgusted to find they were also sharing a bed - at that age! we thought The next sister, Mary, also a nurse, had married in her 50s. Auntie Nancy, another nurse, was still unmarried in her late 50s and surprised us all by marrying a man sustantially younger than her - and younger than our father. He was a banker who lived in Chelmsford. My brother Robbie and I used to think he was slightly strange because he was always very keen to play "ball" with us, with Auntie Mary's evil tempered scotty dog who insisted on rodgering the football at every opportunity. At any opportunity when were were playing on the lawn with the dog - and strange Chris, he would lean over and say "I think that deserves a kiss, don't you" . We never mentioned it to anyone and nothing else happened but we always had him down as a bit of a strange one. Nancy and Chris eventually departed to the Hebridean Isles where they ran a bed and breakfast and Chris worked in a bank in Tobermory. The final sister lived in Edinburgh and ran a hotel until her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at 42. She had 2 daughters, 10 years older than us, who stayed frequently with us.

Holidays were always spent in damp, drafty cottages in Scotland - which allowed my father to fish - we absolutely adored our holidays - even if we were dragged up several mountains in the process - I used to like the boats and being allowed to have an ice cream and crisps every day.

Sorry getting a bit bogged down in this early section - but suffice to say had a nice, scruffy happy childhood - but suddenly - from our tartan clad background, like a bolt from the blue - all we three girls were packed off to boarding school - in Yorkshire - of all places - it was like another world - and a complete culture change. We were teased about our accents and we certainly didn't have the right trendy clothes. We were incarcarated on the Yorkshire Moors for several years (I later learnt it was because my elder sister had been gathering a bit of a reputation for enjoying the choir boys company - obviously my parents decided we were all destined to go the same way, and so would be safer in a more God fearing establishment where we couldn't escape. We wore Harry Potter type brown cloaks and had to attend chapel every night. I was very very homesick. To be continued the next time I can find a few minutes. Pics to come. Sorry this isn't proof read so possibly typos - I am getting very suspicious glances from my workmates so need to log off.

Tuesday 10 July 2007


Hurray - I've managed to post a picture but it's far too close up for my liking and I think it's time for botox - also probably not very useful to you anyway as I know you want old pics.
However now that I've got this far, I shall try to find old pics and scan them in very soon.
Not quite sure how I can link this message to my earlier one so I hope you find it.
I'll try to find time to add more tales and old pics very soon, and I will continue the story - however a bit busy with work and kids back from uni and moving house right now Many thanks for your encouragement. It's quite fun once I get going - I will persevere!