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Rosemary Taylor - a personal memoir

Up to the age of 12, I had a happy childhood. My father, Henry Angus Milne, known as Harry, was the manager of the Leicester branch of Rayner & Keeler dispensing opticians. My mother, Ethel, was a full-time housewife, which was conventional in those days.

When I was 11, I passed the scholarship exam, which meant I could go to one of the girls’ secondary schools in Leicester (later called grammar schools). My parents chose The Newarke School which had recently moved to new premises. Like many girls’ schools then The Newarke had an all female staff. I started there in September 1939 when the war had just begun and for the first term we shared our premises with a city-centre school while their cellars were strengthened to make air raid shelters. Our shelters were built on and partly under one of the hockey pitches and we had an extra week’s holiday while this was done.

I was happily settled at school, but things were not so good at home. First my father, then my mother died of tuberculosis, which in those days was incurable. After my father died, my mother sold her house and we moved to a flat close to the school. While my mother was in the sanatorium, a specialist hospital for TB, I was cared for by Aunt Mary, my father’s sister. Willing to help, she was a dour Scottish lady who was single and called upon for any family emergency; she normally worked as housekeeper/companion to a school headmistress. There was no doubt much family discussion, but the result was..................

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