When I finished my degree at Oxford, I went and acted for a bit. And I was appalling. And with each part, I thought, 'Well, that's embarrassing. I'd better do one more to show people I'm not that bad.' And, in fact, instead of a taking a year, that's gone on for 35 years.
My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.
My host at Richmond yesterday morning could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son a clever little boy to show me the road leading to Windsor.
I broke down while at Oxford was rejected by a record number of medical tribunals during the War and finally got permission to leave Oxford and do civilian work till the War ended.
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is I truly believe a genial irreverence toward learning and from that irreverence love may spring.
In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.
My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford and her own mother was a doctor.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Since my education I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford because it seemed more of an easy bridge.
Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota then Oxford College in Minnesota and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.