I was At King’s College, Newcastle from 1951 to 1951. I lived in Easton Hall on Eskdale Terrace in Jesmond for my three years at university. My life as a member of the Arts Faculty involved a daily shuttle between lectures in outreach departments, the library, and the Bun Room coffee shop in the students’ union building. The Bun Room transposed to a bar on Saturday evenings when it overflowed with students - in those days mainly male. Saturday entertainment was in the hands of the student union and it’s Saturday Night Entertainment Committee - SNEC for short. Dances (or hops) were held in a room at the top of the building which served as a restaurant during the week and frequented largely by 3rd year students, with waitress service befitting maturity or purse. I graduated from the dance scene during my second year when I grew tired of waiting to be asked to dance when the bulk of the males arrived from the bar and congregated at the back surveying the talent. The Debating Society met downstairs and there I went on a Saturday night. I was then asked to stand in as a reporter by the editor of the college newspaper. I wrote incognito under the name of Digenis, a medieval Greek hero. I have no idea why.

When I graduated I taught French for some years in Manchester after studying for a diploma in education at Sheffield. In 1960 I married an Irishman, an engineer, whom I had met in Manchester and I went to live in Dublin.

After he joined a British firm of Management Consultants we spent four or five years living in Waterford, Cork and in Kerry with only the occasional assignment back home. We spent two spells in Belfast, the last one shortly before outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s. I tried my hand at journalism mainly writing travel articles for newspapers and magazines in the UK and occasionally on RTE – the Irish Broadcasting Company. On returning to Dublin I studied for a Diploma in Career Guidance in the psychology department of University College in the year of student protest all over Europe. I worked as a guidance counsellor in a school in my locality on the Howth P:eninsula until my retirement in 1993.

When my husband retired in 1995, and our daughter had grown up and gone to live in London, we would spend a third of each year in Cyprus where, in 1979, we had bought our holiday home in a village in the Troodos foothills above Limassol. The purchase of this and its predecessor in Khirokitia had caused us some problems. I wrote about it and our life in the village in a book published in the year 2,000.

Easton Hall students and Warden Dr. Faulkner 1952/53	Easton Hall Floats Rag day
Easton Hall Floats Rag day	Cast of Revue