Breaking Free

Spanning six decades from the 1930’s onwards, this is the story of an indomitable woman, born into abject poverty in the grim ghetto of East London, whose driving ambition was to escape from her humble beginnings; from a feckless Irish mother and a father with an ungovernable temper. Her early education was disrupted by constantly warning parents. Evacuated twice at the age of 10, she returned as an adolescent to the war-ravaged landscape of East London. She traunted constantly from the harsh elementary school, until the local education authority offered the scholarship exam to twelve year olds. There, she discovered a love of learning which fuelled her desire to escape from the cycle of poverty and ignorance. There were many further difficulties, not least her mother’s refusal to let her stay on at school after sixteen, but she surmounted them all with resilience. By the time she was twenty-one, she was a qualified teacher, but sexually inhibited, and fearful of men. All this changed when she applied for a teaching post abroad. The journey round her life from this time on included hilarious years spent in Paris and Germany; spells of pure happiness when she fell in love, (several times over), and her first sexual experience. She married and had children, but later discovered that her husband was a serial womaniser and a drunkard. Even a move to New Zealand to help save her marriage was a disaster. She escaped again to Wales, but encountered there the stifling conservatism of a Welsh village, sexual discrimination and the near death of one of her daughters. Yet through the prism of her ironic sense of humour and feisty nature, shown in her amusing anecdotes, she was able to surmount all the vicissitude and emerge a happy, contented person.