Page 7 - Through a glass brightly

Ruth Jeavons neé Gelder (Ruth)
My professional life has been largely composed of teaching
and editing. On leaving QEGGS I went to the then new
Sussex University where I gained a BA (Hons) in 1966.
Then went to teach English in Singapore under VSO. For the
first year I was deployed at Victoria Boys’ Secondary School
teaching English to the l ‘leaders of the future’. Greatest
achievement there a production of Bernard Shaw’s play
‘Androcles and the Lion’ with a multiracial cast. We
rehearsed on the roof of the Family Planning Centre and
performed to the public in the Cultural Centre for three
nights to some acclaim, I like to think. This led to an invitation to work for Singapore Educational TV, writing playlets to teach English Language to primary school children using a limited vocabulary (about 500 words) and few simple sentence structures. We won a prize for one of them.
Met David, my husband and another VSO teaching Design and Technology at Dunearn Secondary Technical School in Singapore and we got married, at St Andrew’s Cathedral before we came home - to save our families the trouble, we said to ourselves. It wasn’t a grand ceremony and one of our witnesses was blind, which David has always thought he could use as a loophole. Travelled widely in Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia during the holidays and came home slowly via India and Nepal to a grand reunion with both sets of relations who had never before met each other, nor us them.
On our return to the UK in 1968 I took several temporary jobs: teaching music at Christchurch Secondary School, North Finchley, and working as an assistant at North Finchley Library. Then got a job as a Desk Editor at Pitman Publishing in Long Acre, London where I worked for a couple of years before getting a job teaching English at St Albans Girls’ Grammar School for three years before first child, Katherine Laura, was born in 1974. (Change of career made to keep pace with David’s twelve weeks holiday a year to my four.) Our second daughter, Caroline Amy, was born in 1976. While the children were small and I was at home I did lots of exam marking for the Chartered Institute of Secretaries in conjunction with Edgar Baker, a Pitman author whose book on grammar I had helped him sort out. Also taught English courses at Borehamwood, Potters Bar and Welwyn Garden City, De Havilland F.E. colleges.
When the girls were a bit older I taught English for a time at St Albans Girls’ High School, then at Bowes Lyon Secondary School in Hitchin, finally deciding that teaching was not for me and took a job at the Ableman Employment Agency typing up financial reports before returning to publishing as a desk editor at Routledge. Stayed there 15 years, eventually becoming editorial manager supervising the work of a team of desk editors working on the Social Sciences list. We survived regular takeovers and changes in management – not to mention updating from typewriters to computers. When the company moved to Abingdon from London, I became freelance and still work occasionally on various academic titles, though prefer to work on local history projects.
Have lived in Wheathampstead since 1972, in two different houses, but in the same old Victorian road. We moved to our current house, next door but one to the one we first bought, with a wheel barrow. Am currently leading a rather Dickensian life in our old Victorian house – bottling and preserving fruit and vegetables from our big allotment like a worthy member of the WI, though I’m not a member. Rooted and grounded, you could say – bit like a turnip? We keep three families in potatoes, onions and raspberry jam and enjoy being aged grandparents to our four grandchildren, Henry (15), Ellie (12), William (8) and Poppy (7) all of whom live within easy reach. Have produced and published a few local history books on Wheathampstead and hope to do a few more before I pop my clogs
6