I went to the local Primary school where my teachers were Miss Hawtin, Miss Phoenix and Miss Sumner. Miss Sumner's parents were killed during the bombing of the Whitehall Cinema in East Grinstead. In 1942 I moved on to East Grinstead County Grammar School. I left school in 1949 and spent the next two years at Whitelands College in Putney, then taught in Tenterden in Kent and Lingfield in Surrey before marrying Maurice May in 1956. Maurice had also been at East Grinstead County Grammar School. We moved to Whitstable, Kent in 1962 with our two children where we ran a hardware shop for twenty years. In 1984 we moved back to Sussex, to Hailsham where we lived until 1999 when Maurice died. I moved back to Whitstable in 2003.