My Life Story
Adult Life and Career
Part I
Peter and I were married on the 1st of September 1973. The wedding date was postponed twice so Pete could earn money over the summer and so we didn’t have to pay rent on any accommodation. It was difficult for him to leave before the end of August as his postgraduate course started in September.
I took the summer off, as he had done the previous summer. I had hated working in Needler’s sweet factory two summers before, making greasy orange and lemon slices. I had then worked in a hot steamy laundry the following year, which was not much better.
I had also worked as a post person in the snow. The delivery area was two bus rides. It was interesting and I did enjoy sorting the mail in the delivery office one Christmas, where I learnt about most locations in the UK and which counties they were in if I had not known before.
My parents and I planned the wedding, I think much to Pete’s relief. He did not have much to do, only organise his clothes, etc. However, he somehow managed to leave his tie in the honeymoon car which my dad had taken to the reception venue. Therefore, Dad had to go and retrieve it, taking out almost two hours of the morning of the wedding. My mother was very angry and was having second thoughts by then! His first words to me when I arrived at the altar were “Do you like my tie?” which made me laugh!
Peter had bought a car, an old Wolsey 1500, at the end of June. My dad found it for us and I drove it all summer. I also went to Liverpool to try and find accommodation which did not prove easy. We did not see each other for the last month before the wedding. It sounds ridiculous now, but travel was expensive and the logistics were difficult. Pete arrived with his two friends the evening before the big day.
Fortunately, after the morning fiasco, the ceremony, conducted by the minister of our church and Peter‘s father, went smoothly as did the reception. My dad had hired a coach to take the many non-drivers to the reception which was held at a scout venue in Raywell, run by friends of my parents. There was an article about us in the local paper, as ours was the first wedding reception to be held there.
We set off on our honeymoon to Hardraw, near Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales, where there is a well-known waterfall. We had seen a honeymoon couple there in a “just married” car a couple of years before, when we were on a camping holiday and we decided then to have our honeymoon in the same place. However, it was not the romantic experience that we had envisaged! The food was not good when we finally arrived. It was more like a station buffet and our room overlooked the graveyard. The weather was pretty awful over the next couple of days and the locals seemed not too friendly. We looked round Hawes and had a tour of the area.
We set off about 48 hours later for Morecambe to see two retired ladies with whom I had become extremely friendly. I met them at the church in Bare. Initially I had rejected their invitation to tea, but then thought “Why not?”; it was a good decision and led to a lasting friendship. I went for tea most weeks before church. Peter really liked them too and we continued to visit for about the next 20 years until they had both died. Muriel was a deputy headteacher and her sister Phyllis stayed at home as the housekeeper as she described herself. They were the generation of women who were “surplus” after the devastating loss of many men during the First World War. They described their relationship as “a type of marriage” as they had each adopted a traditional role.
When we arrived in Liverpool we had a nasty shock. The one room bed-sit, which I had eventually found, had been let to someone else and we seemingly had nowhere to go. After fruitless calls to the landlord from the local phone box, we decided that we would have to find lodgings for the night as I was starting my new teaching job the next day. It was a very rushed honeymoon! On our last attempt, we did manage to contact the landlord, who came round and found us a similar bedsit further up the street. It was very dirty as it not been cleaned since the last tenants. However, we did have bedding and basics in preparation for the other accommodation, so we settled down for the night and, when l went to my new job and first ever day of teaching the following morning, Peter went out and bought lots of cleaning materials and set to work.
Initially we planned to look for better accommodation but decided to “slum” it to save up for a house. We knew that we would be moving to Hampshire the following July, but of course I could not reveal this at school.
My job did not go particularly well. It was in a poor area of Liverpool and seemed even more deprived to me than anything that I had seen in Hull. I had a tough time with a very challenging class, but they all did very well academically and I remember slow but no non-readers at the age of 5. The management agreed that I had a very difficult class. I don’t know why they organised it like that but Sue, my contemporary probationer, had a much easier and quieter class. We are still in touch. She gave up teaching shortly after that, so in hindsight I suspect that they made judgements on our personalities, rather than distributing the classes or the pupils evenly.
The Head said that I was my own best critic so she would leave me to it! This was true. My family did not really indulge in praise so I tend to put myself down before anyone else does! Unfortunately I still do this. When I met Pete I was astonished how his family built each other up. I used to joke that it was like a mutual admiration society, but that was unfair. It was probably more the norm and certainly not excessive, just encouraging. I was not used to it.
Pete praised me too and it went down well when he said I was good at things, especially when he said that I was better at things than he was! Years later Paul told me that their dad had taught them to do things badly if they didn’t want a job. This applied to several things in our household including the night feeds and preparing for Christmas! These were Pete’s choices as he was competent at most things domestically.
The first year of our marriage was a very tough year. Pete had a wheel stolen from his bicycle so that was kept behind the wardrobe. The bathroom window was broken and never mended. We had to keep the toilet roll in the flat because if we took it up to the shared toilet, it disappeared. Every Sunday we thoroughly cleaned the bath before we enjoyed that luxury, but the rest of the week we had to make do with washing in our cramped single room. Although we were both pretty slim, sleeping in a single bed all year cannot have done much for the quality of our sleep. I was never fully free of nits throughout this year and I would frequently see lice crawling in the children’s hair when they were reading to me.
We shared the accommodation with about eight other people, one of whom came home drunk on Friday night and made a hell of a commotion punching doors and shouting. Peter stupidly went out to tell him to quieten down. I shut the door and opened the bay window ready to climb out and run to the phone box to dial 999. Fortunately, there was no need for this as, even though he was twice the size of my then thin husband, he did quieten down. It transpired that he was ex-Navy, divorced and lonely. After that, on a Friday night he would bring us all fish and chips and come home from the pub early, as he had something to look forward to. We didn’t really make a relationship with him, but he just needed to talk and have someone to listen.
I got to know some people at school, but I didn’t really settle. I joined a keep fit class and I became vaguely friendly with a nice girl, similar to me and recently married. I went to her mum‘s house which was in a very nice area of Liverpool. It was a selling “party” which were very popular at that time. At the end of the year, we left in a hurry as we couldn’t wait to leave. I still regret to this day not being able to contact her to let her know what was happening.
During the year, we eventually acquired a portable television, which was quite a luxury but made a huge difference. I had been invited to watch Princess Anne‘s wedding at somebody’s house, but I didn’t really fit in. I thought they felt obliged to ask me as some of them were people I drove to school.
I don’t really have very many happy memories of that year. When waiting for a bus, a conductor told me to get on his bus because it wasn’t safe for me to be waiting in that area.
Our trusty car saw us through quite a few years. If it was raining when we woke up, we had to go out to see if the car would start, use the starting handle, and if it didn’t start I had enough time to go and catch the two buses to work. First though, I had to use the phone box to let my “lift passengers” know.
My parents brought Pete‘s mum over for the day to visit us and they were all horrified at where we were living. We went back to Hull whenever we could. We bought a tent in March and went camping in Wales – a big mistake. It was freezing! However, we then had the equipment to go camping on many weekends and that was a welcome respite.
In May, before notices had to be given in, I revealed that I was going to be moving. They took it quite well and to my surprise I got glowing references for having managed such a challenging class.
I applied for jobs in Hampshire and to my delight I got the first one that I applied for, in Petersfield. I was appointed instead of two other much older, more experienced local women. The job was a real godsend as it came with a house in the playground. I was not aware of this until after I was appointed and couldn’t believe my luck. We had more luck when Peter was given a post in Havant, which was nearer than Winchester. He was still learning to drive and amazingly passed his test very soon after we moved, although he had not taken any driving lessons, having only been in the car with me.
We moved at the beginning of August 1974, but before that we had a week on the Yorkshire moors in a place where we had stayed with Paul a couple of years before. It was a happy week. My friend Gloria, with her baby Louise, and Jim our best man, who by then lived next door to Gloria and Lewis, came to visit. Jim brought Gloria as Lewis and Christine, Jim‘s wife, were at work. We took a trip from Goathland, near where we were staying in Darnholm, to Whitby on the newly opened North York Moors Railway. As a child, my parents had a cottage for annual holidays and Gloria used to come to stay for part of the time. Her parents brought her and stayed for the day. At that time the original railway was running and we used to watch the steam trains in Goathland station from my bedroom window. Our friends were all very fond of the North York Moors and so our day out was a memorable one for all of us.
Moving down south to Petersfield was a very new experience for us, although Pete had spent a year in Winchester. He had a job as a children’s librarian in Havant and commuted on the train. He hated it as he preferred the books to the children! My job at the infant school went well. I really enjoyed working there. My impression was that the children came from most social backgrounds, although the woman in the next classroom, who was a complete snob, disagreed. There are many private schools in the area, including Bedales where she was eventually appointed into the prep department.
On my second or third week, a child brought me some birthday cake which I took into the staff room at break time. The deputy advised me to look up the address and, if it was a council house, not to eat the cake. I said that I wouldn’t have got very far on that advice as I had grown up in a council house. The comment was met with an awkward silence and I found out later that many of my colleagues had been privately educated.
I made some very good friendships in Petersfield, many colleagues amongst them, and I am still in touch with some, although many have died. These were very happy years, but the other women were busy with their families and tended to dump things on me as I was young and they were encouraging me to be ambitious! It was quite manipulative and I was aware of it. However, I did enjoy my job and I seemed to be highly thought of, if considered too enthusiastic. I was pretty successful in my role, but wasn’t popular when I requested training for us all on child protection. We had to stay after school. There was then, as always, a horrendous case going on, but people always think that it doesn’t happen in their school. It was quite apparent to me that there were children who were suffering. I don’t think that I am being unfair when I say that most staff seemed oblivious to it. There had been ongoing child protection issues in Liverpool but it was difficult to ascertain what was being done for the children concerned.
We lived in the school house for a year and were saving for a house of our own. It was very difficult for us to get a mortgage on our salaries, as house prices are so high in that area. One lunchtime, I went to the council offices and enquired about options. I found out that we could have a council mortgage, as we both worked for the council, and the ratio was more generous than that applied by other lenders. We were ecstatic and within a couple of months we were extremely fortunate to find a lovely old cottage in Frenchman’s Road, Petersfield. We absolutely loved it because we had thought that we would have to move out of the town to afford something.
Although Pete loved and enjoyed the cottage, he was very unhappy that it backed onto a factory, but it was not really a problem, and we could park in their car park when the factory was closed. I think that he perhaps worried unnecessarily about things, but I recognised how much stress it caused him.
In March 1976 my parents came to stay with us in Petersfield. Unfortunately Mum was below par and suffering with a headache. I can remember regretting feeling sorry for my dad having to spend the holiday indoors, because the headache proved to be much more serious than we thought. While she was having a bath, she collapsed, so we had to call an ambulance. She did regain consciousness enough to speak to us at the hospital. All seemed to be OK, so we went home, only to receive a call in the middle of the night to say she was in a coma. Sadly after five days she died. It was a terrible shock for us all as she was only 56.
That year was a memorable year for other reasons too. We had an extremely hot summer with water restrictions. I enjoyed the weather and it may have helped a little during a very sad period. Peter’s dad, Fred, had a heart attack in the midst of this in July. He thankfully made a full recovery.
My mother‘s death was the beginning of an extremely stressful period for my father. Not only was he dealing with this sudden shock and all the grief, but, as I only came to know a few months afterwards, he realised that there was something amiss with the accounts for which he was responsible at work. Unfortunately, he had to call in the police as he suspected that some of his colleagues were taking money. It was a long and stressful period, although by today’s standards the court case went through fairly quickly, in about 18 months. He had to give evidence against two of his colleagues who received jail sentences of 10 years, longer than expected.
I was 24 or 25 at the time and I realised that this was very stressful for him, although I did not fully understand the implications until I was much older. Obviously, Dad could not speak to me about it and, given his wartime experiences, just got on with it. As I said elsewhere, people did not speak about things as much as they do now and there were many taboo subjects.
As a consequence of these events, I believe, my dad started with late onset asthma, which made him very ill, and he ended up in intensive care a couple of years later, just before Gill was born. Fortunately, he recovered from several episodes of that and from a major operation when he was 76. He lived until he was 85, 29 years after my mum, when he died within five months of being diagnosed with lung cancer.
When Gill was on the way in 1979, we moved to a new estate at the other side of Petersfield. I really did not want to move; it took a toll on me, but the house gave us more space and I did settle there after a while. We sold our lovely cottage to Frances and Howard. They loved it too. We met all her family just after the offer was accepted. The sale went through smoothly and we have remained friends ever since. We are godparents to each others’ children.
I had plans to return to work after Gill was born. I received a hostile response both from colleagues and parents at the school. Working mothers were certainly not the norm in our social circles; another person who did it was constantly gossiped about. It was a dilemma but, as things happened, Peter got a job in Kent. By then he was working in Petersfield library, having been on the mobiles before that, but his job prospects were not great. We had only been in our house for 18 months.
A difficult period followed, during which he was commuting from Hampshire to Kent on the train, a journey of about three hours each way as he had to cross London. He did try living in lodgings but hated it. Financially it was extremely pressured as there was no moving allowance or any expenses reimbursed. We were paying for the mortgage on our existing house at a high interest rate (15% unbelievably!), travel expenses and subsequently rent when we did move. It now seems like a crazy decision when only one of us was working. I really do not know how we managed it.
Eventually we moved in November 1980, although we were both very reluctant to go as we had been happy in Petersfield. We rented a house within the East Malling Research Station where Pete worked. A few months later, in July 1981, Debbie arrived. Then, thanks to a small legacy from my paternal grandma, we were able to move to Birling in 1983, after a long house hunt.
Pete worked flexi-time so I was sometimes able to do supply while he looked after the children. I also did tuition in the evenings, moving on to teaching children who had been expelled from school, had medical problems or had English as a second language. One of them took my car keys which I had stupidly put down but, when I didn’t go after him, he came back fortunately. Some of those pupils did end up in jail so I clearly did not turn things round for them.
I went back to full-time teaching when Debbie started school. It was the local Catholic School, covering maternity leave (still elicited a lot of negative comments) and an eye-opener for me as I had not really had any close dealings with Catholicism. I found it a bit of a shock after my Methodist upbringing and I was not allowed to teach there permanently as I was not a Catholic.
I then moved to Hadlow where the headmaster and staff also frowned on working mothers. I was asked at the interview which I would put first, my family or my job. That wouldn’t be allowed these days, but I replied that I would do my utmost to make sure that neither suffered, although I would never ever neglect my children because of fear of what the Head might say. Surprisingly, I was appointed.
I stayed at Hadlow for three years as their reception teacher. A new Head, who had been at my interview, started the term after me. At 45 she had recently lost her husband and was not in a good place; it was a very difficult time for her. She valued my work and encouraged me to go for promotions, but I was not really ready for that. The job and the family were very demanding and the only free time that I had away from young children was when I was driving the car to and from work!
In my third year I asked for a secondment to do research on children with behavioural needs. As I was the reception teacher, I don’t think many heads would have agreed to it but to my surprise and delight it was granted. It was a very successful term for me. Our lifestyle and family life benefited as Pete and I got some free time together occasionally, when the girls were at school.
Unfortunately, Pete had to go into hospital with a suspected cancer during this. Fortunately, the lump was benign. Again, the course leader gave me time to visit without question, which would have been much more difficult in school. At that time there were no teaching assistants or free periods and it would have required a supply teacher. Eventually, the teacher who took over my class for the term‘s secondment replaced me when I was promoted to the Support services. I really found my niche in this role after a problematic start. It worked out really well for us all. The teacher and the parents were happy and she remained there until she retired.
I had a wonderful leaving celebration which was more like a retirement! I was told by one rather stern colleague that I had made the best leaving speech she had heard in over 40 years of teaching. I have already said that I was not used to a lot of praise growing up and this was praise indeed! It was perhaps because I had referred to a bible reading I had read to the congregation when I was at Sunday school, aged about 7 and so of primary school age myself: “Mary stored all these things in her heart”. I said that I had not understood it as a child but I realised as an adult all the things I had learnt and was learning every day from the children. Children do not fully realise that teachers and adults generally learn a lot from them too. I also learnt a lot from my colleagues and these experiences and memories would go with me to my new job and help me to do it well. Flattery maybe, but the truth and it went down well.
Pete changed his job at the same time as I did in 1990. He went to work for the Wellcome Trust in London. We were both having work problems. He had to get up very early at 5.30 to catch the coach. The working patterns created more problems with childcare although Gill was at secondary school by then. My problems settled down eventually and I really enjoyed my job. Teachers often have a hard time acclimatising to advisers in their classrooms. They are ready to eat you alive if you don’t measure up but usually (although not always) they came to look forward to my visits and we worked well together. I got to know all the secrets!
Unfortunately Peter really disliked his job, his boss and the commute. It was a very difficult three years and we were extremely relieved when he managed to get a post with the Wellcome Foundation. He brought home what I thought was champagne, but I think it was actually sparkling wine. We did not drink much in those days!
Gill and Debbie had their ups and downs at school but they were a credit to us, both doing well academically and in other areas, though maybe not sport. We are not a sporty family!
During this period, in 1992, the girls and I had our first holiday abroad in Menorca after my godmother, Auntie Phyllis, gave me some money from a legacy she had received in her 80s. She had never had money before and having some threw her completely. She had bought us a beautiful Silver Cross pram which was my pride and joy. I have never seen one that I loved as much. I have to admit that I kept it and it has been used for the grandchildren. Auntie Phyllis was very embarrassed when I asked the shop staff to get the pram down from a top shelf, so we could look at it more carefully. She went on about it for years, but it cost an absolute fortune and I thought that we should be able to see it closely before she spent that amount of money.
Pete refused to go on holiday to Menorca. He had a thing about going abroad, but I decided to take the girls anyway. We tried to persuade him to come but he was adamant. Interestingly, most of the relatives and some friends tried to persuade me not to go, but they didn’t try to persuade him to come with us! I went because I was desperate to travel and give the girls the experience. I would have felt very resentful if I had given up the opportunity.
Gill was upset to leave her dad behind at the airport, but Debbie kept saying it was his choice. The holiday was fantastic. They both really enjoyed it and it was a very memorable one for us. The girls were so enthusiastic that they persuaded Pete to try it, so we went back two years later. He loved it and one day went off on his own and bought me an eternity ring. He had changed his job by then and was a lot happier.
We visited Gill’s exchange partner in rural Burgundy in between these holidays. It was a reciprocal visit and the start of two or three holidays with them which we thoroughly enjoyed. It was a totally new experience for us. Initially the holiday was blighted when I had an accident in the car. We were very fortunate to escape injury and had a taxi and then a hire car for the rest of the holiday in France and our camping trip to Switzerland. My O level and subsequent evening class French just sufficed with the Gendarmes! Getting all the equipment onto the ferry without a car on the return journey was a challenge to say the least!
In 1991, the girls and I also took part in a local exchange where we stayed with a family. Again, Pete did not want to join us so we were referred to as “Famille sans homme”. However, he enjoyed hearing the girls tell of the very positive experience and he was very welcoming when the family came to stay with us. He enjoyed their company and so decided to join us the next time. We had several exchange visits. Lovely experiences and they stood the girls in good stead for their future language studies. Neither studied any French until they went to secondary school so they did very well to shine in their exams and to go on to study languages at university.
These were the start of many ventures abroad. After I had visited Majorca, I persuaded Pete to accompany me on another trip. This started a love of holidays on the island. We went for our Silver wedding and we have had very happy holidays there since. We completed our Balearic Islands list with an enjoyable trip to Ibiza. We also visited all of the Canary Islands. I enjoy the warmth as an antidote to the British winter, but Pete was not keen on hot weather, so the temperature there was perfect for him. Pete and I have enjoyed many holidays, some with the girls and lots on our own. Not enough for me though!
© 2026 A L Blundred