Passed/Failed: Claire Rayner

An education in the life of the agony aunt

Being an agony aunt was an extension of my nursing. I can't think of any occupation that wouldn't be enhanced by a nursing education: I found it to be my university. I'm very much an autodidact! I have an almost photographic memory (I could look at a page, shut my eyes and "read it"), and in 1934, at three-and-a-half, I taught myself to read, after my wonderful Auntie Nancy had taught me the alphabet.

At four, I went to Rushmore Road School, in Homerton, east London, where I discovered the horror, the misery of sums. I also discovered there was one lesson where you weren't allowed to ask questions: religion. The teacher said: "God is watching you all the time", and I said: "What - when you go to the lavatory?" My bottom was soundly spanked. (I've been part of the Children Are Unbeatable campaign since its inception.)

After two years, my father committed some crime or other and suddenly we went off to Manchester, and our mother taught us our new surname. My school was in a new building with glass everywhere. I asked: "Am I ill?" because I had seen a picture of a sanatorium which was also all glass. My father did something else and off we went to Dublin, where they used to have lessons in Gaelic, which I couldn't read.

When war broke out, we came back to the East End and my father was called up, which got the creditors off his back, and I went to a school in Jubilee Street with a playground on the roof. They did evacuate us but I kept running away: my mother used to send me back. I went to village schools with seven other children in one room: I remember nice, grassy playgrounds. The local children hated you and I was called "Jew girl".

I remember being told I had won a scholarship and I went to City of London Girls, the public school, which had been evacuated to Keighley. I had a proper uniform, looking like a character straight out of a book by Angela Brazil. I learnt Latin, French, science, and English literature and language.

I don't know why but I was taken away from a school I loved and sent to Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire, to attend a public school of equal quality, the Skinners' Company School. I missed my old friends and I missed the family I'd been staying with. I played truant all the time.

I left the school immediately after the war and my parents tried to make me go to Selhurst Grammar, in Croydon, but I refused. Oddly, in a daydream, I saw myself in a hospital, wearing a nurse's uniform. I wrote to lots of the advertisers in Nursing Mirror and Nursing Times. The matron of Epsom Cottage Hospital invited me for an interview. "How old did you say you are?" she asked. I said firmly: "Seventeen." I was 14.

In 1955, while nursing at the Royal Northern Hospital, in London, I thought it would be fun to try medicine [as a doctor], so in the evenings I went to classes for the First MB at the Northern Polytechnic. I sailed through the botany and zoology. Chemistry I passed - just. Physics I failed disastrously. I was going to take it again, then I met this chap. In 1956 there was no way that, as an attached woman, you could be a medical student. I had to make a choice and my hormones won.

jonty@jonathansale.com