Memories of my life

I am only writing this because I realize that I wish I had asked my parents more about their lives and so feel it might be a good idea to put down in writing about mine in case my children should ever feel like knowing more.

I have been so lucky in my life. I had a lovely family with very caring and loving parents, then a very happy married life. Sadly, Nicholas died too young, but I was left in a very comfortable position financially and was able to travel and do what I wanted as a widow.

The first memory that I have is of meeting my father for the first time in my life. I was aged four and a  half before he was able to return from the desert and Italy after the war ended so I remember seeing him for the first time in my life. Not something many people can say.

My mother and I were living at 12 Chaucer Road, Broadstairs,  which was the house that my parents rented when they were married. My mother refused to be evacuated after the war started as she reasoned that my father would be able to picture where we were. He was away for nearly five years. War had broken out only 5 months after they married and my mother was 3 months pregnant with me when he left for the desert.

12 Chaucer Road was tiny. A terraced house. I always understood that it was  built for the  people working on the railways. It was not mentioned in the 1891 census but is in the 1901 so was built around 1895. As you went in the front door, you were in a tiny hallway with stairs straight ahead of you. The first door on the right went into the front room which was the lounge. This tended  to be used on special occasions as we did most things in the dining room behind it. This led into the kitchen which had a door down to the cellar and one into the larder and the third door into the back garden. The garden (just a cemented over yard) was also tiny and had a gate into an alleyway. This alley way was walked a great deal by my mother when she was in labour with me – bombs or not. Cheryl and I were lucky to be able to look over the house a few years ago. Cheryl moved from there at the age of 2 and so did not remember it but I was aged 16. I was shocked to see how small it was. I think the total floor area was smaller than the lounge at North Goodwin House and to think that 6 of us were living there at one time.

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The day that my father returned, we had spent up at the railway station waiting to meet him. However, he did not arrive, so my mother took me home and was just putting me to bed in the middle bedroom at number 12, when there was a whistle through the letter box. She disappeared and when she came back it was with my father who was in uniform and carrying a black china doll under his arm for me that I called Dinah . The next morning I apparently just went into their bedroom and climbed into the middle of the bed with them. There was never any awkwardness between my father and I, probably because my mother had always made a point of including him in the family. If I was given a sweet (a luxury) then we put one for my father in a bowl in front of his photo.

We did not have much money. My father had worked at Daniel’s Estate Agents,  which I believe was at Station Approach Road in Broadstairs, before the war, but they had not kept his job open for him. He started work at Blackburns furniture shop, working in the shop and also doing the book keeping. He had learned to type when still at school. He then graduated into the funeral directing side and attended classes to qualify in funeral directing and embalming. He came home each day for lunch.

Not long after the war ended, and after they removed the barbed wire from the beach,  my parents bought a beach hut which we had at Viking (then called Main) Bay close to the pier. We spent all summer down there. Often we would go down after breakfast, have lunch and tea and then families would get together to play rounders and cricket if the tide was out. It really did not matter what the weather was like. I have many memories of swimming in the sea during a thunder storm and my parents or Grandmother sitting in the beach hut. The original hut was just a wooden frame with canvas sides and roof and a sand floor.  Many years later they bought a wooden hut. We were not allowed any form of cooking in the hut so my parents would buy a tray of tea from Gay’s cafe just behind us.  This is the one facing you as you walk down Harbour street, On the right hand side they sold ice creams and candy floss. Their’s was the first candy floss in the country.

To earn money, my mother would do bed and breakfast in the summer months. As the house only had three bedrooms, one of which was tiny, they slept in the dining room on a put-u-up sofa – called a sofa bed nowadays.  I think that my two brothers and I shared a bedroom.  We did not have a bathroom so she took jugs of hot water up to their bedrooms to wash and trays of early morning tea. They had a large bowl in the bedroom with pink flowers on it and I still have that bowl. For many years I used it to make the Christmas puddings in and it is now up in my garage roof. I always understood that it came from my father’s parents.

She served their breakfast in the front room which was in fact our lounge, Looking back, it must have been a very hard time for my parents, but then after the war nobody seemed to have much money.  We had two families who came back for several years, called the Holah’s who had two daughters and the Chittie’s who had two sons.

My brother, Hugh, was born on April 20th 1946 and followed 18 months later by my brother Richard on October 29th 1947. I remember my mother being in labour with Richard and pacing the kitchen. I was obviously went to bed and the next morning, I was called into her bedroom to see the new baby.

Things were so different in those days. Isabella often asks me about things that have changed so I think I will put some of them in here.

Firstly, we had no bathroom. We just had a toilet upstairs and one outside off the garden and the only tap was over the sink in the kitchen. Each weekend, my parents would carry a  metal bath into the dining room in front of the fire and we all bathed in that. The water had to be carried in from the kitchen where it was heated by an Ascot water heater or on the stove in saucepans.

We did have an inside  toilet and also one outside which one accessed from the back garden. I remember that if money was tight, my parents would hang squares of newspaper from a piece of string instead of toilet paper. Our weekly bath was a delight and one felt so wonderful afterwards. Later – in about 1952- when we had our first television we would all sit and watch it after our bath and our treat for the evening was an orange.  However, until about 1950 we had no electricity in the house and our lighting was by gas light.

What excitement it was to have electricity installed in the house. We could just flip a switch and lights came on!  We only had about two or three  sockets in the house but then we did not have things like Hoovers and floor polishers etc.

To do her weekly wash, my mother had a copper which was basically a large saucepan which heated up the water by gas. To clean the clothes she used a dolly which was basically a large wooden stick to push the clothes around. Mother then had to remove the water from the clothes by putting through a mangle.

After we had electricity my parents started to hire a washing machine on  a Saturday as it would not be collected until Monday and so gave them the whole of Sunday to do the weekly wash. I clearly remember my father helping my mother to do it. It was  a single tub and did not spin. To get rid of excess water one had to put it through a mangle. These photos will give you some idea of the mangle and machine.

I mentioned that my father would often help to do the washing. He was great like that and my cousin, Audrey Mockett, told me that she came to stay with my parents and my father would come home from work and scrub the kitchen floor for my mother. She remembered him as being a lovely man and so different to her father Frank.

One day when I was aged about 2, my mother was doing the washing and found that I had put my hand in the mangle. As a result I lost all my finger nails on my right hand and split the little finger open.

Other differences between then and the modern world? No television until we rented one for the King’s funeral and then my father  purchased one for the Coronation. We were about the first to have a TV and that was partly due to my Grandparents dying and leaving money to my father which he used to buy the car and a TV. I remember the room being full of people from the street and my teacher who had come in to watch the coronation.

We had no phone and people had to go out to a phone box to make a call. We had one in the hall installed before others in the road had a phone simply because it was needed for my father to take calls out of work hours when someone had died. It was a party line. This meant that another family shared the same phone line and if they were using the phone, we could hear their conversations and would have to wait for them to finish before we were able to make our calls.

Shopping was also totally different as we had no supermarkets. In fact the first one in Broadstairs was Tesco which was in the shop in the High Street that it has just moved from. We had a small shop called The Vale Stores run by a couple called Partridge and who employed Lena to run it. They sold butter which was measured out by Lena and the same with other foods. All food was weighed out and not prepackaged. We did not have any plastic in those days so it was all sold in grease-proof paper or brown paper bags. One always took ones own basket to the shop.  We did not have any plastic and I remember when nylon was first made. Everyone wanted nylon clothes – cardigans and jumpers especially – as they were so much easier to wash and needed almost no ironing.

I started school at St Mildred’s School in Broadstairs a few days after  I had  turned 5. It was only a short walk there and after the first day, I walked to school on my own, coming home each day for my lunch. Hugh started there just before I left when I was aged 11, and I can remember feeling so proud when I was milk monitor and took the milk into his classroom.

My father took on other jobs to earn extra money. He worked at the Tote at the Dumpton Greyhound track on race evenings and also at Marchesi restaurant where he did the book keeping for them. He did these jobs to be able to afford for us to have some private lessons before taking our 11 plus.

When I heard that I had passed my 11 plus, I was allowed to go home to tell my parents. I ran to Chaucer Road and told my mother and then to Blackburns to tell my father (no phones in those days). I was in trouble when I got back to school for being away so long. His extra work certainly paid off as both my brothers and  I passed to the Grammar School. Cheryl, did too later on. However, she was not happy at Clarendon and eventually transferred to Dane Court. Here she said she was in paradise as they had such marvelous facilities for art, which Clarendon House did not have.

Aged 11, I started at Clarendon House, the grammar school in Ramsgate. I remember the first morning clearly. I did not know where the school was but had been told to get the 52 bus at Dawson’s Corner to Ramsgate and to follow the other girls to get to the school. I used the bus for the first couple of years and then started to cycle every day. My bicycle had a child seat on the back and so when Cheryl arrived and was old enough I would cycle home from Ramsgate with her on the  back of my bike after my mother had come into Ramsgate to meet me.

When I was 12, my Aunty Bunty and Uncle Alfred were planning a holiday in Italy. They were going to stay with people Alfred had met during the war. They then had 4 children: Paul, Mary, Elizabeth and Hilary. Hilary was a bit young to take with them so they arranged for her to stay with my parents and me to go to Italy with them. I was both excited and homesick as I had never been away from my parents for long. It was however, a lovely trip with Aunty and I going to Rome for a few days on our own. She was a devout catholic and I remember going to the Scala Sancta and having to go up those stairs on my knees. No fun when you had the bony knees that I had.

I was 14 and had always stirred the Christmas pudding wishing for a baby sister. One day the Welfare office rang my mother’s friend Dee Double who had adopted a little boy called Christopher to see if she would foster a 5 week old baby girl. Dee was running a boarding house in St Georges Road and was too busy and just happened to mention it to my mother that afternoon. Mum immediately said we would look after her as she would otherwise go into an orphanage. The most beautiful baby arrived the next morning. This was in mid June and I so clearly remember the excitement when I got off the bus at Victoria Gardens and ran along the beach to the beach hut where this baby was in a borrowed green pram. She was beautiful and I fell in love with her immediately. How lucky we were to have her and to be able to adopt her five years later. The adoption went through on my last day at University which I missed it to come home and the day after my Grandmother Alice Maud Millaar died. We all went to Pierremont Hall for it. I was not allowed in but afterwards Cheryl came racing up to fling her arms round me and said “Now we really are sisters”.  Cheryl always knew that she was fostered and when we started the adoption proceedings, she would go through my mothers purse and Dad’s pocket to save up the threepenny bits to buy it (It was free!)

My mother invariably used to come to Ramsgate on a Friday afternoon, by bus as she did not drive in those days,  to look round the shops and I would meet her at Lyons cafe (the waitresses were known as nippies during the war). She would have a cup of tea and I had orange squash with hot water. Such a treat!

One day, when cycling home with Cheryl on the back seat of my bike, a car stopped in front of me and the driver pointed out that every time I put my hand out to show that I was turning right, Cheryl was putting hers out to turn left and vice versa!

I thoroughly enjoyed my years at Clarendon House. My favourite lessons were maths and the sciences but gym and games outshone them all.  I had a lot of ballet dancing classes until I was aged 12. I had to give them up then as I had too much homework to do and so not enough time. My parents did send me to piano lessons for a few years but I am not musical and it was really a waste of time and their hard earned money.

At 15 I took O Levels and passed Chemistry with Physics, Maths, English Lit, History and Geography failing French, German and English language. (Languages do not seem to be a thing we Mocketts enjoyed as Hugh failed French and English Language and Richard failed English language too).  As I was staying on for the 6 form to do Chemistry, Physics and Maths at A Level, I resat English Language and French and had to do Chemistry and Physics separately.

We had very small classes in the sciences with only two of us doing Chemistry which was scary as our teacher, Mrs Harvey,  was so strict. She also happened to be my form mistress. Most six formers took the arts so there were only about 7 of us in the science form. Only two of us did Chemistry A Level with her and five took Maths

When I was 16 we moved from Chaucer Road to the flat above Blackburns. This seemed so spacious to us.We had a large lounge overlooking York Street with a kitchen and dining room on the same floor. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a toilet halfway up the stairs. Hugh and Richard shared the bedroom at the front and my parents one at the back while Cheryl and I had a large bedroom with a doorway onto the roof garden. This had one wall of fitted cupboards which was such a luxury. My parents left most of the furniture behind at Chaucer Road, which they had bought by then, in order to do holiday rentals with it. They bought a lot of new furniture and I remember my mother being so upset when her new bed arrived and it was black with stars on it. Being a funeral director black was almost banned from the house! We did not have a lounge suite for some weeks and had to sit on the floor to watch TV.

My father was made Church Warden at Holy Trinity, and Hugh became head choir boy while Richard was head soloist. This meant that every Sunday, we went to church for the 10am service. No coffee was ever served in those days so  a lot of us would go down to the Tartar Frigate for a drink afterwards, including the vicar. Being in the choir meant midnight Mass at Christmas and all the choir and friends invariably came back to us for a drink and sausage and onion pie and mince pies afterwards with David Raven playing the piano. They were great times. My brothers sang in the choir for the Carol Service run by Edward Heath and Richard sang the solo as a boy for Once in Royal Davids City and later Hugh sang the solo of the Boars Head. Edward Heath always wrote a letter to thank them which had the House of Parliament notepaper as Heath was Lord Privy Seal at the time.

The holiday rental went well for my parents and was the start of them making some money. A few years later they purchased a second property in Chaucer Road to rent out.  I cannot remember the exact years but they then sold these two houses and purchased 14 Belmont Road which was three flats and also one off Chandos Square which was also in flats and at one stage had a house in Belvedere road too. Saturdays in the summer months was a busy day for us all as we had to clean the properties out for the next tenants.

In summer months I worked in Gays Cafe doing washing up to earn some pocket money and then during the summer that I left school, I worked in the cafe on the end of Broadstairs jetty. I enjoyed that and could watch my family when they were at the beach hut. I started going out that summer with someone called Michael Baker. He was a university student doing a summer job delivering  Walls ice cream. That ended when college started. The day that I heard that I had the necessary A levels to go to Queen Elizabeth College, London University, I was so excited that when I arrived at work that morning, I did not turn on the gas as I usually did. Someone had not turned it off correctly the night before. The gas was supplied by cylinders and they had turned it off there but not at the heater. When the elderly woman went to light the heater, it exploded in her face. She lost all her eyebrows and the front of her hair and was taken to hospital by ambulance. Someone turned it off again at the mains after this happened and the boss lit it a while later and the same thing happened to him. I have never liked using gas cookers since.

I started at college in October 1959. My parents drove me up to London. It was in Camden Hill Road, off Kensington High Street. It was later closed and became part of Kings College.

As we drove up to the gate a beautiful Indian girl in a sari was coming out and I remember my mother commenting on how beautiful she was. You have to remember that in those days one never saw anyone like that in Broadstairs. There were very very few people in the country from abroad in those days.

I was put to share a room with Joy Newsam from Barbados and we soon became great friends and included in our group were Chitra Boghilal (the Indian girl from Mumbai), Hugi Torzs who had come to England in the Hungarian revolution having had the most incredible escape and having to lie in the luggage rack of a train. The fifth member was Jenna McGuire of Australian origin. I thoroughly enjoyed my year at the college but the study was a different matter. Where school had finished and college started were several years apart. If I had been doing the arts I think that would not have mattered so much but in the science it was impossible to make up  and to understand what they were doing and I had only studied pure maths and not applied maths which would have helped.  I failed the exams and so had to leave as did Joy and Jenna. In fact nobody doing maths qualified as they either failed in the first year or the third. Whilst I was there I started going out with someone from Imperial College called Dick Slingsby from Yorkshire. He was a friend of Jenna’s. He and his mother took a house in Newton Ferrers near Plymouth and I took Cheryl with me to stay with them for a week in the summer holidays. I never saw him again after that but oddly found him on Facebook and contacted him to see if he had any news of Jenna.  Sadly he had not and so none of us have any knowledge of her after leaving college. Joy, Chitra and I have always kept in contact since then and we saw Hugi occasionally until the 70s. I met her in Montreal where she was working but sadly cannot find out any more about her.

I was invited to a cocktail party given by John Martin of WW Martins the builders, at his home in Park Road and held before the squash club dinner dance to which I was not invited. At this cocktail party I met my old chemistry mistress – Mrs Harvey – who invited me back to her house opposite St Andrew’s church for some supper. While there I rather think she was trying to get me interested in her son and also told me the history of the house. Apparently it used to be the old vicarage and the vicar had been the leader of the smugglers. She lifted up the carpet in her dining room to show me the entry to the tunnel which the smugglers used and which went down to Joss Bay.

After leaving college, I then went to work at Smith Kline and French in Welwyn Garden City in 1960. My Uncle John and Aunty Chick lived there ( both my uncle and cousin Philip worked at SK&F (now Glaxo Smith Kline) so I lodged with them. I hated it there. My aunt was so different to my mother. The house was dirty and my belongings were not safe. She would use whatever of them she wanted to. Looking back, I feel sorry for her as she was kept short of money and had a hard life.  I enjoyed the work which was in the chemistry laboratories making new compounds to try out as medicines but I left there after a year and returned to Broadstairs as I was not very happy at their home and did not particularly like Welwyn as I missed the sea

I went for about 20 interviews for work. I was lucky enough to be offered every single job that I applied for. However, I accepted the offer from Shell Research at Tunstall just outside Sittingbourne in 1961 and worked there until 1965. This was in the chemistry laboratory where we worked on insecticides and fertilizers. It was most interesting and I was doing a lot of gas liquid chromatography and thin layer chromatography. There were 8 men in the lab and I was the only girl. Prince Philip visited us as our lab was so new. At first I traveled to Sittingbourne each day by train and then later by car owned by a man who also worked there and lived in Ramsgate. The Thanet Way in those days was three lanes and 13 roundabouts and was lethal to drive. Our driver was someone who did not like sitting behind another car and we were involved in about 3 accidents and saw many more. I think this is the reason I have always been a backseat passenger in a car.

In October 1962, I went to a cocktail party with John Martin at his house in Fig Tree road before going on to the squash club dinner dance with him. As we drove into his driveway he said that the Bennetts had arrived. I assumed that they were a married couple. I chatted for a long time with a man who said he loved ballroom dancing and we should have a dance later. He did not ask me to dance that evening. A few weeks later, Joy and I went to the Winter Gardens to a classical concert. We were waiting on the steps for my father who had gone to park the car. The same man came up the stairs and stopped to speak to us. It was the chap I had met at John Martin’s cocktail party but I could not remember his name.

The next day, at work at Shell, I had a phone call from this same man who said he was Nicholas Bennett and he had phoned round friends to find out my contact details and would like to take me out to dinner. I said yes but after putting the phone down I thought he must be married as John had said the Bennetts had arrived. I then had to  phone round  friends and found that it was his sister that John had been referring to.

Nicholas took me to dinner at the Falstaff in Canterbury before stopping at Sarre Court on the way home. I remember being nervous and had ordered a Dover sole which missed the plate and landed on the table as I tried to turn it over. We had a wobbly table so Nicholas wedged the leg with his diary which he forgot to take back and so for the rest of the winter could not be sure which girl he had invited to which dance!

We hit it off immediately. I remember being overawed by his busy social life. He had qualified as a solicitor – the youngest in the country at the time – and was working at Boys and Maughan in Margate where he had been articled to Garth Roadknight. The senior partner was Jack Maughan who only  had one eye having lost it when hit by a golf or cricket ball and who wore a black patch over it.

On February 14th 1963 we became engaged and announced it at the squash club dinner dance. In March of that year we went skiing to Serfaus in Austria. My first time on the slopes.  However on September 4th that year Nicholas broke off our engagement. It appeared that he was taking out his secretary called Gillian. His parents did not approve as her father was in gaol.  I was devastated but looking back it was a good thing to have happened as I think both of us were too young  and  immature and as a result I went flying with BOAC and Nicholas became a partner and did some traveling and so when we did marry I am sure things were much more successful.

With the money that I had saved up towards us getting married I bought an old car. A Hillman Imp registration LXM765 which cost me the great sum of £30. I also bought myself a Singer sewing machine which lasted me many years. I had to have lessons to learn to drive and was so lucky in that my father was very patient with me and took me out. I do remember him giving me a lesson in clutch control along the Western Esplanade. I managed to do this successfully and  he then stood in front of the car and told me to edge the car up to touch his trousers. I did this perfectly but unfortunately as he came back  to sit on the passenger seat, I let my foot off the clutch and sent him flying onto the grass!

I passed my driving test at the first attempt on Joy’s birthday -22nd December 1963- and then decided to drive to work at Sittingbourne. The car was old – no MOT in those days- and filled with smoke from a leaking gasket and every time I went round a roundabout (there were 13 on the Thanet Way in those days) it shot out of gear and into neutral. As I turned off the Thanet Way and went round the roundabout that joins to the M2, a police car started up  and flagged me down into a lay by. Two young officers got out and asked who owned the car and what was the registration of it. I said LXM 765 whereupon I was asked where the X was off the rear number plate. I did not like to say it had fallen off a few weeks before and that `Hugh had been stopped about it, so said it had fallen off a few days before and I had not had a chance to have it put back. I then said that I hoped it was not my driving as I had only passed my test a couple of hours before. They were both laughing so hard that one had to sit on the bonnet of my car and then they drove off wishing me Happy Christmas and safe driving.

I was sad to hear from my friend Joy in  late 1964 or early 1965 that she was going to move to California. After she had left college, she had studied radiotherapy and her boss at the Middlesex hospital was moving to Palo Alto and asked her to go with him. I decided that I would like to go too but in those days with no internet, it was impossible for me to find work so Joy suggested that I do the same job as her flat mate who was an air stewardess. I didn’t think I had an earthly chance of getting in particularly as they liked you to have catering, languages or nursing – none of my accomplishments. Joy bet me 5/- that I would get in (25p in today’s money).

I did not even know that there were two airports in London and simply wrote to the Personnel officer of BOAC, BEA and PanAm at London Airport. Amazingly I heard back from them all. I decided that I would not go with PanAm as it meant living in the US, or BEA as that was just Europe so applied to BOAC.

We had to send off a full length photo of ourselves with the application form. Mine was taken when I had a lovely black eye which showed up in the photo. I went for an interview and came home disheartened and feeling sure that I would not be offered a job as the whole interview lasted about 10 minutes. (All the way from Broadstairs to Heathrow for 10 minutes! ). It would appear that they needed to look at you and to see how you walked in.  I was at work at Shell some time later when my mother rang me to say that I had another interview with them. This one was so different. It lasted most of the afternoon and we went in to see each of three different people. They were obviously trying to upset you and see if you would stay calm as one chap basically wanted to know if I would be sleeping with  members of the crew. There were about 20 of us at that afternoon and they brought in a tea trolley for us. I helped to pour out the tea and always have felt that this helped me to get the job. They said at the end of the afternoon that about 6 of us had not completed all our forms and would we stay behind and that they would be letting us know their decisions by post. It was those 6 who were offered the job. I was so stunned that as I returned to Joy’s flat in South Kensington I tried unlocking the wrong front door and broke the key in the lock! It was the night before she left to go to Palo Alto and her brother in law took us out to dinner. When we returned later that evening it was to find that she had been burgled. I then had to go back to Heathrow for a very careful medical.  This must have been in Spring of 1965 and I left Shell in the July before going camping to Brittany with Jenny Kortwright – a flat mate of Joy’s.

We went to Brittany taking rucksacks, a small tent that we could just both lie down in and sit up in and when we first put it up it was to find it had some large  holes. It rained often while we were there – near Carnac- so we made friends with two French lads who had a larger tent. They were useful as we could sit in their tent out of the rain and one played the guitar. I do remember him playing Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

We left Brittany after about 3 weeks camping there and went to Sark where we worked in the hotel. Jenny had worked there the previous year and so knew her way around. She cleaned rooms and I worked in the kitchen. I think that the chef felt I was undernourished being so thin and often gave me desserts and tasty food.  We flew back to Southampton and my father drove me home to Broadstairs.  Later that year on 15th November 1965 I started my training with BOAC

They had organized accommodation for me in Staines so I had to commute into the training center by bus. We had six weeks of training. I remember walking in to the classroom on the Monday morning and wondering what on earth I was doing there. The instructress, Maggie Allen now Deacock, was stunning. Tall, blond and with her hair in a perfect French pleat. The other 18 girls were all gorgeous too. I felt a country bumpkin.  I really did not know why I was there and how I had been accepted.

On the first Monday morning, as soon as we arrived, we had to go for jabs. It was like being in the army as we had three – smallpox, yellow fever and cholera. By evening my arm was so painful and I had swollen glands all over my body and felt really poorly. I went to bed early that night and somehow managed to get to the training school on time the next morning. The girls were all comparing sore arms but when they saw mine which was red and swollen from shoulder to elbow they stopped. I still felt unwell three weeks later when we had to line up for the next three jabs – cholera, TABT and yellow fever.

We were taught so much in those six weeks. We had lessons on silver service, wines and how to tell what the wine was from the shape of the bottle, what food to serve with what, make up from Elizabeth Arden, air sea rescue when we had to go to a local pool and inflate a life raft. Even on the flat water of the pool we were feeling sick so I am glad we never had to use one.

We went to the fire service and were taught how to extinguish the different fires. They had a building with 2 doors only and a wall up the middle almost to the far end and a smoking fire in it so the place was full of smoke. We were all dressed in boiler suits, wellingtons and headscarves and were made to crawl along the floor with our nose to the ground and out the other door. The girl in front of me lost her Wellington boot half way round and spent ages looking for it. I nearly panicked! It was all good experience for us.

We also had to watch a colored film on how to deliver a baby. A class of stewards had joined us and at the end of the film there were no stewards left as they had either passed out or gone out and before the lights went on one girl said “No sex for me this weekend!”.  You have to remember that in those days we did not have colored television so it was a bit of a shock.

How lucky I was to have this job. It was in the days before  package holidays, teletext or internet and none of my friends had flown across the Atlantic. Some maybe to France or Spain. My supernumerary was only the third time I had flown as the first was to Italy when I was twelve and the second back from Guernsey just before I started with BOAC.

My first flight – my supernumerary- was on January 6th 1966 and also was the day that my parents moved from the flat at Blackburns into 92 Pierremont Avenue.  I flew to Montreal and Toronto for about 3 days. I was so excited to be in Canada that I woke early the next morning and no crew were awake so I went out to look round Montreal. Stupidly I had not taken note of the hotel I was staying in and so when I went to go back to get ready for my next pickup, I was lost. It was so cold there ad -10C – and I only had nylons, high heeled shoes and a lightweight winter coat so was freezing. I asked a taxi driver if he knew where BOAC stewardesses stayed and his shocked reply was ” why are you one?”. He mentioned the Montreal hotel which rang a bell so I headed there and was told by the bellhop that it was the Laurentian so I had another walk back. By the time I got to my room I was almost crying with the pain of thawing out. After that I always took a box of book matches from the hotel with me.

Being an air stewardess was a wonderful job to have in those days. We were well paid and meant to be the cream of the girls. It was a very difficult job to get into and the average life of a stewardess was 18 months as we had to leave at the age of 31, or after 10 years or if we married. If I am honest, suddenly the men were all much more interested in me. I was invited to the wedding of Gill Sykes to Nigel Gore on 30th July 1966 at Our Lady Star of the Sea. It was the day of the final of the World Cup football and there were no men in the reception as they had all gone in to watch the TV!  It was that day when I had several men all wanting to chat to me and Nicholas was there with his girlfriend – Gillian. At that wedding I was asked out by David Gore and so went out occasionally with him at the same time as I was seeing his cousin Chris Gore. David after a few months left England with friends to drive to South Africa and I never saw him again but I saw Chris for some months.

I had a couple of worrying times on flights. One with my parents which I am writing about below but between my second and third flights, BOAC lost an aircraft at Tokyo. It was the first crash in 20 years. On my next flight which was to be a three week trip going from London to Manchester, New York, Nassau shuttle and then the Caribbean, we had a problem leaving New York. It was a Saturday and the plane was full of American honeymooners. Something had gone wrong on the ground and the couples were not all sat together which caused us a great deal of trouble trying to seat them all. Shortly after takeoff, as we started to get the meal service ready, the senior steward came to tell us to lock everything down carefully as we were going back into New York. I asked why and he said it was because we had an engine on fire and then proceeded to look out the window to see if he could see it.  We had an emergency landing back in New York. The airport had been closed due to the rain and bad weather but opened for us and we landed safely with fire engines racing alongside us. After we had all disembarked, the crew were told that we could not do the shuttle due to time so to collect our suitcases from the hold. That was when we could see that the engine was completely burnt out and out of 60 fire warnings on 707s only 2 had been real fires and ours was the third.

I was lucky to be posted to Boeing 707s as BOAC had also VC10s. The VC10s went to Africa and to North and South America but 707s went all round the world. I was lucky enough to be in Teheran for the day of the Coronation of the Shah on October 26th 1967 and could walk down the road from my hotel and see the procession go past. They took a lot of guests in our London double decker buses.

I also went to Israel and as the aircraft broke down we had about 4 days there so was able to do some tours of the country. I was also on the last flight out of Israel before the 6 day war broke out in June 1967 and when touring Jerusalem I went to the site where they believe the Last Supper was held. There was a minaret outside the window with sandbags and machine guns and the walls of the room I was in had bullet holes in the walls.

My class has met up regularly each year for lunch and when it was our 50 year reunion BA invited us there and this was what they posted in the telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Being-an-air-hostess-during-the-golden-age-of-flying/

I was quoted the following in the article:

“Her former colleague Judith Mockett added: “On one flight, I somehow managed to set fire to a passenger. As I went up the aisle I inadvertently knocked an Australian gentleman’s arm just as he was putting his cigarette to his mouth. The ash fell on his nylon shirt and set fire to it immediately – I hadn’t even noticed. By the time I came back down the aisle, he and his pal were laughing hard and told me what had happened.

“I offered to get some burn cream for him and he said that if I put it on for him, he would not send in a complaint. Such flirtation by passengers towards the air stewardesses was a very common occurrence and something we all became deft at dealing with!”

Not long after Nigel and Jill Gores wedding  I was at the squash club and so was Nicholas and he asked me to go out with him again. I said no as he was still with the girl he dropped  me for and I was not going to do to her what she had done to me. He asked me out a lot of times and always had the same answer. Eventually, he had broken things off with her and I agreed to meet him in London – not in Thanet as too many people knew us. After about a year, we did become engaged again having gone to the same shop in Bond Street to buy the second engagement ring where we not only bought the first one but I had sold it. I always said that I had sold it and gone skiing on the proceeds. (I had given the ring back when Nicholas broke off the engagement but he returned it to my mother who kept it for some months. As I was going to London to stay with Joy she told me and so I took it with me and returned to the shop in Bond Street. I was so upset that as I left the shop I nearly walked in front of a bus by accident. It was the same day that Joy, Jenny and I booked to go skiing hence the story about it paying for a skiing holiday.)

When flying one could take one family member a year away paying 10% of the air fares so I waited 2 years and then took my parents to San Francisco to stay with Joy for a few days, back to New York to stay with Dad’s brother Al.  I left them there and returned home. They were then going to Bermuda and then to Barbados.  The three fares cost me £90. It was the first time that they had ever been on  a plane and both were so excited. When we were at Heathrow, I met Ros Sharp who trained with me. She told us how they had been on FH (each aircraft has its own number) into Trinidad when the undercarriage would not come down for landing properly and ended up having to circle the runway with someone standing with binoculars to see if it was down. Not something my parents were too keen to hear. As we boarded our aircraft for New York, I saw that it was FH – the same one. They enjoyed the flight and just about to go in to land at New York, I explained that they should take no notice of the loud noise as it was the undercarriage coming down. They were quite happy but I was as white as a sheet as I knew that it had gone up and down about 5 times. It appeared that a light in the cockpit was not coming on to say it was in position.

I left them in New York for a few more days with my Uncle and flew home to find that I was rostered to go to Bermuda, Barbados, and Bogota on my next trip arriving in Bermuda the same day that they arrived to stay at the Inverurie Hotel where I was. I then actually flew them to Barbados. As the plane was full, I was unable to upgrade them to first class but did provide them with free drinks and I rather think that my father flowed down the aircraft steps in Barbados.

I carried onto Trinidad and Bogota and on the return flight as we got to Barbados for a short stop, our aircraft broke down so the crew had to stay the night in Barbados  and were put up at the Hilton. My poor parents had gone away on a second honeymoon to have their daughter following them around all the time.

I was sad to leave flying but in those days one had to leave if you got married and it would have been difficult to run a home and commute to Heathrow and being away for anything from 3 days to 3 weeks. Looking back now after nearly 60 years, I wish I had decided to fly for a couple more years before marrying Nicholas but I was nearly 27 when we married and in those days it was considered old to get married. How times have changed.  When away once on holiday, we were asked which were the best five years of our lives and it was an easy decision for me. 1965 to 1970 as it include flying, marrying and having a baby.

On March 23rd 1968 Nicholas and I were married at Holy Trinity Church, Broadstairs with about 120 guests, Our reception was at the Walpole Bay Hotel in Cliftonville where we had a buffet meal. In those days we did not stay on for an evening event so Nicholas and I caught the train to London where we spent the first night at a hotel at Heathrow. The next day we flew to Bermuda for 4 days staying at the Inverurie and then flew to Barbados where we had 2 weeks at Paradise Beach Club. Joy’s father knew the manager and so arranged for a suite of rooms for us. It was Paradise!!!

We then flew to New York as Nicholas had never been there and I wanted to buy my  Paul Revere copper bottomed saucepans. Then back to our home in Northdown Park Road. It was a shock to me to  have a regular day and night after flying for nearly 3 years. Also it took some adjustment to be reliant on someone else for money after earning a good wage myself. I had £6 a week to feed us both on and to pay the milk bill. Hard to imagine nowadays but a beef joint would not cost more than 15/- or 75p then. Andrew was born while we were living there and we moved to West Dumpton Lane in the January when he was 9 months old.

This was a lovely house but in the wrong position as we had Prestige Avenue at the end of the road and it turned out to be where they housed ex convicts. We were burgled 3 times in that house in 3 years. Helen was born whilst we were living there and the car was broken into and several baby gifts stolen from the car. She was born when the coal miners were on strike and the country were having 3 power cuts a day lasting for 3 hours. It was not a good start when you have a premature baby in the house.

I had postnatal depression after she was born which lasted for 4 years and was not helped by the fact that Helen did not sleep well. Thanks to my lovely mother and an understanding doctor we survived it but I would not wish that on anyone.

We decided we would like to buy a four bedroom house with two bathrooms. We kept an eye on the market for about 18 months and went to see North Goodwin House one Saturday afternoon. I fell in love with it immediately but it was soooooo expensive. She was asking £38000! The next day we went to Cranbrook as the Round Table were playing cricket there. I kept saying what I would do with the house if it were mine. As we got into bed that night, Nicholas told me that he had rung the lady and agreed to pay her asking price for NGH. Wow. I am not sure if I was more cross he made me wait so long to tell me or more thrilled!

We moved to North Goodwin House on August 12th 1974. Helen and Andrew spent the first night with Anma and Granga and boy was I glad as I have never been so exhausted as I was that night. You all know what a lovely house it was but when we moved in the kitchen was a nightmare. All the wall backing onto the playroom was floor to ceiling cupboards with bright red doors and the wallpaper had large bunches of plums – one red, one yellow and one purple- and it was hung upside down. There was a cooker hood over an old cooker which was so low poor Nicholas banged his head on it all the time. We had it refitted as soon as we could possibly afford to.

Luckily Giles was born 2 years after moving into the house. What luck it was as it really made us a family and he was a very easy baby and I had no post natal depression

I think you know the rest of the story.