Polly Wood primarily, but with occasional help from Piggy Prior, spent four years teaching me French. It was then over twenty years before I met a Frenchman at lunch at Rolls Royce and was able to pass him les petit-pois! I judged that to have been a waste of effort which eventually needed remedying.

After I retired in 1982 I resolved to discover for myself, and with my wife, some of the intriguing characteristics of France and the French which Polly cleverly and intrinsically included in her teaching. She really did love her subject, as did many other of our teachers, and they strove to make their subjects interesting. This is now an often forgotten skill of imparting knowledge.

For the next twenty years we travelled extensively in France during summer holidays absorbing their atmosphere, countryside and customs from which I feel that I did really cash in on dear old Polly's lessons. She would not have been proud of my French accent but perhaps happy that she had engendered an inert desire and I found the French natives responsive to my attempts to converse, sometimes assisted by their local wine!

Collioure is one of the idyllic little French ports we found near the Spanish Mediterranean border.

Would you believe it?- the British Gas maintenance man who last year serviced our central heating boiler and commented on our address when he called., knew it well.

If you ever get the chance, look it up.

See Polly Wood in our 1948 staff picture.