How I became one of the first women in the Hong Kong civil service – via Oxford University

My roots are in rural Buckinghamshire (southeast England), which is where my parents’ families come from. My mother’s side were farmers and my father had been part of a family brickmaking business. He managed to quarrel with everybody in both families, so we were rootless for the first eight years of my life, going around the country looking for new ways to make his fortune and by and large not succeeding. My younger sister, Alicia, and I had minimal contact with the (extended) family and other people and were reliant on each other. We are still close. My father had a romantic idea about being by the seaside and in 1959, when I was nine, we moved to Portsmouth. It wasn’t a chic seaside resort at all but a working dockyard servicing the navy.

A fair chance

The great piece of good luck for me was that there was a very good girls’ school there, Portsmouth High School. It was a fee-paying school for the middle classes but thanks to the direct grant scheme, 50 per cent of its places were open to students to get in on the basis of exams and so I was able to go there. The teachers believed that families with not much ought to have a fair chance. I loved the artsy subjects – English, history, French – and was very studious. One of my happiest memories is of being given the new A-level books for French and thinking, “Wow, these look so fabulous. I’m going to spend two years reading these books, isn’t it wonderful!” Portsmouth High School was a life-changing thing because now and again it sent people to Oxford and Cambridge, and that was how I got to Oxford University in 1969.

Making the right noises

Foot in the door