I want to tell you about my first term at Dr. Williams School for girls in North Wales. It was a well known school and I was to have gone there when I was 11 but my mother's death when I was 8 years old, accelerated the process.

I felt it was a privilege to go there and I was excited about starting. All these parcels of uniform were arriving in the mail. I had never had so many clothes in my whole life! Sports shirts, Sunday dark green serge dresses which we called green sacks, a brown velour hat with a green and white hat band......... Going to DWS meant I could have official piano lessons. My mother had been teaching me since I could sit on the piano stool but this would be a proper teacher with a syllabus from the Royal Academy of Music in London.

I was the only New Girl in the January term and was placed in a dormitory with five other 9 to 10 year olds. The Junior School was called Tremhyfryd (later Llys Mynach) and an aunt had given me rose scented soap as a going away gift. To this day the smell of rose scented soap brings back memories of that first term. I would never in a million years buy myself rose scented soap.

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