Margaret had close links with Geneva where she had spent some years as a student while her parents had been wardens of the Quaker Hostel there and where she had gone back as secretary to Gilbert Murray.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of 'Seventeen' and later one of the creators of 'Mademoiselle.' She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic - they feel that fashion and art are vanities - because she loved fashion.
I have to tell you that June Cleaver had a job in 'The New Leave It to Beaver.' She did. Sure, she was a council woman. She went to work. She wasn't a sit-at-home grandma. She went out, got a job.
When my father died, my mother came back from being Mrs. Birkin to being Judy Campbell. She was a stunning actress. She came out of her shell. She was herself again: this very independent, funny, intellectual lady - and was able to perform again, which was her life before meeting my father squashed it out.
However, I spent most of my time in a Quaker school.
She was trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.
I was a child, and in 1942, I was evacuated to the Cotswolds with my mother, who was a teacher - she went with her school. I lived in one house in the village, and my mother was in the vicarage.
I ended up in Broadmeadows orphanage - I don't know how that happened - whether she gave me up for adoption or the church was responsible. Whatever happened, she was a single mum.
Mom worked as a school librarian, and she felt summers were for education.
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.
I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.