Henry

 Sir Henry approached her

“So tell me”, Henry asked, “what drove you study so extensively?”

Dr Bigg blinked. “ I’ve never been asked that question before” she told Sir Henry.

And she thought. She knows the answer and a song begins to play in my head; 

“So where do you come from my lovely where do you go to when you’re alone in your bed? “

Reasons unbeknown to her, perhaps due to age balance menopause, who knows Torill chose to answer truthfully,

“Interesting question. To me the past, feels like a book. I want to read one where I know the characters really well. But it’s not me.”

My mother told me ‘get an education. It’s the one thing that they can never take from you.’ where I grew up was squalid and scary. There was a lot of violence I wanted to get out I wanted to leave I want to escape. Education seems an opportunity to do just that - a way out.

When I was 13 Childline started, and I rang them in the hope that there could  be help for me, living in my dangerous, frightening squalid home. And they told me to go to university. So my quest started then, with five years to find a way to get an education and get a place at university. I worked jobs and did all the necessary things that girls do to put away some money to get hold of supplies like books and pens and a pass exams and to find the £10 needed to set my UCAS fall off. I’ve posted details for estate agents to the customers throughout the town. I delivered newspapers that and eventually I was able to get a job at the petrol station where was also able to provide my work with my studies so I could take my textbooks to the petrol station and work there. Once I finished with School and taken the exams, I was able to get more work commuting daily into London and working at one of the big banks there.