My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.
I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn't blame Cambridge alone. I wasn't ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock.
Going to Cambridge was a bit of a culture shock, I was a working class lass from Batley who hadn't been anywhere apart from the odd holiday on the Costa Del Sol.
Quickly, after I landed in England, I found out ways to get scholarships. England turned out to be a very encouraging place for me.
The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.
I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.
In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.
I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.
When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.
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