An Art Master
    In 1965 my father got a teaching post at Stoner School, a girls’ public school at Atworth just on the other side of the Bath-Melksham road from Corsham. The Art master there was Brian Thomas who was ex-Corsham (must have been sort of 30-ish then). I had just finished my A-levels and was fishing around for a graphic design course somewhere. I had always been good at drawing and had a pretty clear idea as to what I wanted to do. Dad had it from Brian that there was an art school just down the road, so the choice of Corsham was obvious.

Bakers Corner
    Because we lived at Milford-on-Sea on the South coast, Dad had bought a cottage at Neston as our home-from-home during the term time, 46 Bakers Corner. Nobody seemed to understand the house-numbering system at Neston but it was on a bumpy little lane up from the church. There was a newish house at the end of the lane and ours was the next one on the right. A little stone cottage with a black tin garage, a pigsty, a green shed and a well under a manhole cover just outside the back door. They said that the older part of the cottage had been built in the days of Henry VIII. I went back there in 1998 and nothing much had changed except that some of the trees were gone. There was a farm on the other side of the lane and pig fields at the back.

But Everyone knew her as Nancy
    There was a lady at Milford, a Mrs Simson, who used to play tennis with Dad when I was a kid. (Dad was a very keen and quite good tennis player and we had a tennis court which Dad always tried to keep mown and marked out). Mrs Simson also did a bit of sailing down at Keyhaven, which people said she was bad at. She was always very nice to me but I thought she spoke in a funny way, couldn’t pronounce her 'r's. She had a daughter called Betsy who was usually away somewhere. It turned out that she was at art school at Corsham and was known there as Liz. This was in the fifties. Just before I started at Corsham someone said that Betsy was now teaching there. I didn’t bump into her until a long time later. Betsy, who now called herself Elizabeth, taught mosaic work up at Monks and I didn’t often go up there. One day at Beechfield, Betsy approached me (we sort of knew each other from Milford but she was about 20 years or so older than me) and asked me whether I could take some photographs for her, of some mosaic stuff or something. I happened to be very busy just then and unfortunately couldn’t oblige but I found someone else in Graphics who could do the job. Betsy had exactly the same trouble with her 'r's, like mother, like daughter! When I got to know Margrét it turned out that Betsy had taught her how to do mosaics. And when we decided to move up to Iceland there was this huge slab of concrete-cum-mosiac that had to be disposed of. There was no possible way of carting it all the way up here, so in the end Dad agreed to house it at Milford for safe keeping. I think it must still be there, probably buried in the garden or something, because Dad died many years ago and Mum has since moved from Milford.