Beginnings …

When I met Maggie she was at the Portsmouth Teacher Training College and was the NUS Officer responsible for accommodation. She came to inspect rooms that I was letting out in the absence of my mother, then in Peru. I invited her round to dinner which consisted of grilled mackerel followed by soggy pancakes (I had made them in advance – it seemed like a good idea at the time …). Despite this, our relationship continued. She shared a flat (the ground floor of a house) in Gains Road with a fellow student, Barbara, who was from Macclesfield. She also had a dog (Fred, a lurcher-ish sort of beast, but quite amiable) she had adopted – quite irresponsibly, in my view! The flat was a tip, even to my eyes, and I founds myself promoted to unofficial cleaner.

Being the ground floor, the two ‘bedrooms’ were, in fact, the lounge and dining room separated only by some (thankfully) obscure glass doors. Curiously, I had already met Barbara’s boyfriend, playing rugby against Sandown & Shanklin RFC – he was their captain. His manners were, to say the least, a bit rustic, including a reluctance to get out of bed when needing to pee. He merely raised the sheet and pee-ed on the carpet! We remonstrated with him and after that he did go out of the front door and pee in the forecourt … Nobody could accuse him of being unreasonable.

Here is Maggie at about 8 months.

Maggie was a school refuser. It took about a year before she could be persuaded to stay on the premises – you start to understand how well she related to difficult pupils in later years! However she attended ‘Maesteg Grammar/Technical School before moving to London with her aunt, Yvonne, where for a while she went to Lady Margaret School in Fulham – Janet Street-Porter was a fellow pupil, although Maggie recollected that she had a much more plummy accent, then.

A college dinner. Margaret is seated opposite her flat-mate Barbara (from Macclesfield) and in the company of Michael Caine and Sigmund Freud

We think at an NUS conference (Jack Straw was then president). Maggie seems to be reading a newspaper, while her colleague is wearing the obligatory Michael C glasses (did he copy Buddy H?)