Taking the tube, I arrived on the doorstep and walked in. I look back now in wonder at the kindness this company showed me, an inexperienced British-Rhodesian “foreigner”, totally lost in this strange land. I was a qualified high school teacher of French with one year of experience, true, but had no other skills at all. None! Yet this agency took pity on me. I can’t explain any other reason for agreeing to hire me, since I couldn’t type, nor do much else in the way of office work. Because it was for just a few weeks and the firm wouldn’t have to pay taxes on me, the agency agreed to hire me at minimum wage for the few weeks I needed. I spent my days opening and sorting the mail, reading incoming applications from parents seeking placements for their children in one of several private schools which came under the umbrella of the agency. Many of these letters came from parents living abroad, who wanted their children to attend UK boarding schools.
I learned a lot from being at the agency. I discovered that private schools didn’t pay their teachers as much as did schools in the regular state system, and that not all privately educated students were highly academic and well adjusted. The only thing such students had in common was that their parents were rich.
So, by March 1972, I was searching through the Times Educational Supplement newspaper for French teaching positions. To my mind, I needed a coeducational Grammar School, preferably in the south of England.
One day I noticed a classified advertisement asking for a French teacher to begin in April in Havant Grammar School, Hampshire. I thought this would be perfect. It was not far from Portsmouth where my grandmother and her husband lived, and even nearer still to the mother and new husband of my friend, one of the young ladies with whom I shared the London apartment. If I applied for this position and was asked for an interview, I knew I could stay at either my grandmother’s place or with my friend’s mother, all of which would make life much easier for me. My friend who visited her mother regularly could also drive me down to Hampshire.
So, I applied for the post, and much to my delight I was invited to an interview. I remember to this day that I wore new clothes which I had bought mainly because my own clothes were now far too big for me, let alone up to date. So decked out in my British clothes, a navy-blue skirt, a pretty blouse, and some black shoes, I arrived at the school. I was amazed to find nine other ladies and gentlemen of various ages sitting in a long line of chairs outside the Headmaster’s Office, also waiting to be interviewed. What chance did I have, I thought?
The interview process was lengthy. The Headmaster and his Deputy-Head, along with the Head of the Languages Department, sat behind the Head’s big wooden desk, conducting the interview, asking me about my previous teaching experience, and testing me for my fluency in French. I knew I was bilingual, having lived and worked in France for a year.
