I liked chemistry, because I was allowed to play with pretty crystals and chemicals that behaved as if they had magic in them. Any academic discipline that is expressed and interpreted through words I could conquer, but math was bewildering and foreign, a maze of numbers and ridiculous symbols with which I had nothing in common. I was a very good student in everything but mathematics. My father had his first parish in Oxford, so in 1956, having passed the eleven-plus exam, a torture now fortunately defunct, I attended what was then the Oxford Central School for Girls. I grew up surrounded by countryside that I observed, played in, and grew to know and love passionately, and I wrote lyrically of its many moods. We lived in an ancient and very dilapidated cottage in the heart of the English Buckinghamshire woodland, and later in a small village in Oxfordshire called Great Haseley. Six years later my family emigrated to England where my father, an ex-policeman, wanted to study for the Anglican ministry. I was a very good student in everythin I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 11, 1945, the first of three girls.

I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 11, 1945, the first of three girls.

The eagle and the raven pauline gedge