I credit Timon of Athens with getting me into the University of York. I had my sights set elsewhere, but York’s invitation to an interview arrived first. The possibility of studying music as well as English was immediately enchanting, as I’d never heard of a combined-subject degree – an innovation at that time.

Heslington Hall, where I was summoned in late November 1963, stood in splendid isolation on the edge of the village, with barely any sign of a campus – just green fields, manicured trees and a Henry Moore sculpture. Professor Philip Brockbank was head of the new English department, and during the interview, he started quoting from Timon of Athens: “My long sickness of health and living now begins to mend.” To my surprise, I heard myself finishing the line: “… and nothing brings me all things.” Brockbank looked interested too, as that play was not typically part of a schoolgirl’s curriculum. My lone attempt to understand it had been a failure, but the striking paradoxes in that line had made a deep impression. 

The inaugural year of the university had just begun, and though there were only about 200 students then, excitement was palpable. That week was memorable for grimmer reasons too. Watching TV news while staying with a great-aunt who lived in Malton, the wider world came crashing in with Walter Cronkite’s stunning announcement that president J.F. Kennedy was dead.

By Christmas, I’d been offered a place in the English and Music departments (though the latter did not yet quite exist) for the following year, 1964. York at that time seemed daringly far from my home in a small market town in Buckinghamshire, more than 200 miles away. But I accepted the offer without hesitation. My parents had not allowed my sister, older by four years, to take up the university places she was offered. My father couldn’t see the point of higher education for girls, which he associated with charmless females who put men off by thinking too much. He was also worried about the costs, though tuition wasn’t even an issue (and it remained gloriously free for many years). Luckily, my mother was almost as excited as I was, so I seized my chance.

With almost a year to go before I could start, I taught, then landed a job as a guide at the Shakespeare Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon. By chance that summer, Timon of Athens was playing at the Memorial Theatre, and I heard Paul Scofield’s sonorous delivery of the line that may have landed me my place at York. 

My first year was almost entirely centered on Kings Manor near Bootham Bar, smack in the middle of York. I was star-struck by the beauty of the building, the freedom of my days, the excitement of the curriculums, and the excellent quality of food in the gracious dining room just up the steps from the Kings Manor courtyard.

Everything was new, and the Common Room, approached up another grand, ancient stone stairway, was furnished with strikingly “mod” orange easy chairs. At the bottom of the stairs was a bar, which seemed highly sophisticated and faintly wicked. On Saturday evenings, there would be a “rave-up” in King Henry VIII’s wine cellars, which lay beneath the modern brick offices where lecturers held their tutorials. We bopped exuberantly to Twist and Shout, but I recall minimal alcohol, no drugs and never any unruly behaviour. Or maybe I just failed to notice. I did, after all, practice singing Faure’s fey love songs in those same cellars with a piano on Sunday afternoons.

My digs down the road off Bootham were distinctly less glamorous, with a landlady who scolded and charged for each piece of Ryvita I devoured when I came in - not very late but always ravenous. Two other students who had started the previous year had rooms in the same semi-detached terrace house. One, who studied English like me, has remained a friend to this day, as have several others from those first two bountiful pioneer years.

Several times a week, I walked over Lendal Bridge and up the hill to Micklegate. The Music Department consisted of a few small rooms and three teachers. Professor Wilfred Mellers was formidable, pacing up and down the classroom as he explained to a handful of students that the tritone (or augmented fourth) was banned by the Pope in 1399 because it was considered representative of the devil. How could I ever forget?

I quickly became involved in journalism, writing and editing for Eboracum, the first student magazine with a distinctly artsy flavour. Nouse soon followed –  newsier, scrappier, and more popular. I was excited to review plays at Theatre Royal and local art exhibitions, also to sing in a choir that got serious reviews in the city newspaper. Words and music were my passions since I was very young, and I sang as I penned poems and stories.

Most of the people I knew were studying English or History, as many standard degree subjects did not yet exist at York. Those taking social sciences, politics and economics were based at Heslington, where a campus was slowly rising into three dimensions. I belonged to Langwith College, but that didn’t mean much as I seldom went to Heslington, except to access the new library and for special events. Though there were only around 500 students in my first year, I felt overwhelmed by the crowds and found it difficult to socialize for more than a short time without inadvertently tuning out. I was preternaturally shy and unused to talking, either socially or in seminars and tutorials. The small, Christian all-girls boarding school I’d attended did not encourage discussion and had no expectation that their pupils might progress to a university. So in the presence of my male tutors at York, I was reduced almost to frozen silence. I encountered only two female lecturers at York and rarely saw them.

When I was preparing for university entrance, I did have one brief experience of a male teacher - a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, close to retirement, who offered to give me a couple of tutoring sessions. Hugo Dyson had been a member of the Inkwell Group, a friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkein. He was a charming and gentle guide, and after I came to York he wrote me a few letters. His script was so hieroglyphic (or one might say donnish) that I could barely decipher what he wrote but I kept the letters.

In one of them he told me that he'd left his entire library of 17^th and 18^th century writings, including many first editions, to the U. (See Dyson Collection.) I have never seen it, but hope to have the letters he wrote to me join the archive.

In my second year, I rented a tiny flat in Stonegate where I retreated often to seek solitude. It cost two pounds five shillings a week and I could only afford two pounds, so I took a job at Banks Music shop just opposite, adding up their sales of records and sheet music for the day with a pencil. Eventually I was able to buy a secondhand radiogram of exquisite tone, and a boxed double-record set of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which I played at high volume above the cobbles of Stonegate. Just behind my flat lived an elderly vocal coach who claimed to have given the marvellous mezzo-soprano Janet Baker her first lessons. Under his instruction, I practiced vocal exercises as York Minster’s bells chimed sonorously, marking the times of day. In my final year, living in Fairfax House, I worked on a long essay about early twentieth century English song writers who based their work on English folk song and poetry – though Professor Wilfred Mellers clearly did not think this a sufficiently challenging subject. 

The question of a career loomed, but female journalists were the exception in 1967 and mostly relegated to Women’s Pages. The National Book League gave me my first postgrad job, as a researcher; later I went into educational (ESL) publishing. But despite my privileged education, I felt crushed by my ignorance of the world. My remedy was to travel overland to India, relinquishing my return ticket to teach English in a chaotic school in the Kathmandu Valley. That experience broke open my perspectives, and in a narrower sense showed me what I needed to learn. So, on return to England, I enrolled in a Cert. Ed. course at Oxford. Teaching practice at Roedean on the Sussex coast yielded a plum opportunity to teach literature there. I turned it down to venture into another unknown territory, the industrial Midlands, to teach ESL to recently arrived immigrant children and women. Returning to London later, I was afforded the sheer delight of creating flimsy magazines for European students of English, then took the plunge and started writing freelance articles for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian. Eventually, a full-time job as a feature writer won me a writer of the year award from IPC. 

A 1980 trip to California to visit my sister and research some articles was prelude to another upheaval. Suddenly, I was living in Silicon Valley (near San Francisco) with my husband Charles, then two glorious and funny boys. It was a struggle to re-establish myself in this profoundly different culture, but eventually, my articles started appearing in a range of US as well as British publications, focusing on health, social issues and the arts. I later became editor for the Stanford School of Business. My children’s books (published in the US and UK) gave me a fantasy life to counterbalance the practical one. Now I’m writing a memoir of my travels to India and Nepal more than fifty years ago – a learning experience that beat even the Universty of York.

Information on Leaving a Bequest from the USA

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My first experience of the University of York came in March 1963 when I, a clueless teenager, arrived on a misty Sunday evening in the city for my interview the following morning with one Professor Alan Peacock, of whom I knew nothing. Two decades later he – seen, wrongly, as an ally of the right - would chair the Peacock committee into BBC financing, and displease Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by not supporting its privatisation.

That day in 1963 my having explained that I was then a member of the Young Liberals, the Scot, who blended amiability with a slightly scary gravitas interrogated me on economic policy. After I had completed the simple task of making a fool of myself, Peacock, with a wintry smile, revealed that he had written Liberal Party economic policy.

That October I became part of the 214-odd initial intake - one unfortunate youth having been knocked from his moped and killed en route to Heslington. There was, I believe then uniquely at York, a balance of sexes among the undergraduates, plus a sprinkling of older, black African, Asian and disabled students, and even one old age pensioner.

“What there wasn’t was any appreciation in those grant–heavy days of just how lucky we, effectively a sixth form college attached to its very own university, were.“

And no-one noticed, or seemed to care that, apart from being a deeply impressive faculty, half our teachers seemed to be war heroes. Peacock had won a DSC for intelligence work in the Arctic, the English department’s Philip Brockbank served in Bomber Command, Education’s Harry Rée was in the Special Operations Executive, working with the French Resistance.

We meanwhile, got on with it. The University was Heslington Hall, and a small new lecture theatre in the village, next to a huddle of renovated ancient cottages. Next to the Hall was what appeared to be a swamp from which some new buildings were struggling into existence. We, or at least I, had little idea of the advanced architectural theory and practice around us, or indeed the significance of Europe’s (or was it the world’s) largest plastic lake snaking around the campus-to-be. But fellow student David Phillips and I, locating, from God knows where a rudimentary raft, set out Huck Finn-like  to explore those waters. It was not the Mississippi, but it was a promised land of sorts.

It was a land where we did things that students in the early 1960s were supposed to do. Richard Rhodes, later a distinguished cineaste who died tragically young in a railway fire, set up a film society which, as I recall gathered at the long-gone cinema far out in the wild west of Clifton on Sunday afternoons. It was there that I saw Anna Karina in Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat shortly after its release.

“Cinema is truth 24 times a second”

the trailer proclaimed. Wow, I thought. In a single afternoon I had taken in glamorous French movies, the Nouvelle Vague, and Anna Karina. It may have been a cold Sunday afternoon in York, and Godard might have been barely comprehensible (and lying, as I realised many years later) but this was living! I am still waiting for that little soldier’s return.

It was a land where we could become rock stars. A small group of us set off to Museum Gardens, where English undergraduate Philippa Stratton photographed us for our first album cover. Philippa took fine pictures, but the band did not measure up to the hype. A Yorkshire Evening Press journalist, Stewart Russell,  came along for the story. Stewart was then a charismatic figure to me, (a journalist!) and generously pointed out to me that to be Charlie Watts, or even Ringo Starr it was first necessary to hold the drumsticks at the right end.

It was a land where I first tried out those dreams of journalism. The first student publication at York was born in an upstairs room in the first of those renovated cottages. Among its founders were Andrew Capes, Richard Malins and slightly later, myself. There was also David Burn, a fine cartoonist. The magazine’s name was Eboracum, York in Latin, God knows why.

Eboracum’s format was A4 (almost) and its glossy paper indicated financial support from our elders and betters. The three of us enjoyed a harmonious relationship even if I lacked Andrew’s taste for Flanders & Swann and railway recordings of Pacific class locomotives ascending the rising gradient into Hitchin station. We were not, in short, a team likely to produce cutting edge journalism, particularly with just an issue a term.

Also our two hundred strong audience didn’t particularly take to being mildly insulted by three not-very-smart alecks in a cottage down the road. So by issue two we were vaguely trying to master a don’t-insult-your-market style. It did not necessarily electrify our tiny captive readership.

By issue four in the Winter of 1964 it was year two, the two hundred had become five hundred, and a real university was edging into existence. One sunny autumnal day I had been sitting in the Eboracum office when I was visited by Michael Gray, later a respected  scholar of Bob Dylan’s work, then looking for employment.

Within about five minutes he was the editor and I was out of the door. I noted his accession in Eboracum 4, and also the birth of a duplicated paper that November, edited by Richard Mann who with Brian Merton was, I believe, co-founder of Nouse.  “Its emergence means,  however that Eboracum must relinquish one of its two original roles,” I wrote grandly, “that of a general survey of life within the university - and must in future increasingly concern itself with the existence of a world outside.”

What Michael’s takeover did mean was the recognition of the existence of another sex within the university, which the original editorial team seemed not to have noticed. Thus it was that three women made it on to the masthead, and into print. This was in an era when, in the real world of Fleet Street the likes of Anne Scott-James, Marjorie Proops and Katherine Whitehorn were stars, and the first stirrings of what would become the women’s movement in the late 1960s were making themselves felt, even if I was blithely unaware of them.

Leaving Eboracum didn’t end an involvement with student journalism. I wrote for Nouse, and edited it for a term in 1965. Leading the front page, as I dimly recall, with an extremely boring story about the Queen and the CLASP (Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme) architecture which dominated the discourse and the view from Heslington Hall briefly in those days.   Her Majesty remained as inscrutable as ever on the subject and as for CLASP – well, nobody seemed to know about asbestos then.

Then 1966 came round. Unlike many of my peers I attended graduation, and shook hands with the Chancellor, Lord Harewood, who, thanks to a messy divorce, lasted about five minutes in the job.  Then came life and journalism. Good, bad, and unexpected. But that is another story.