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from the nurse not Pamela. The midwife was asking for this and that. Minutes later I heard her saying, “Not so fast, Mrs. Wallis, take your time, don’t push so much.” This was immediately followed by the first cry from Anne, our lovely new daughter. It was four o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Vanessa and John were at a party and would need to be collected so I took the two workers their tea and went off to fetch our other two children.

When we returned home, there was no holding Vanessa and John, they were just as excited as we were. After managing to get them seated, I placed their brand new baby sister Anne, on their laps. This is one of my most treasured memories. I will never forget the joy of seeing our two eldest children cuddling their brand new baby sister.

How the other two loved that baby they were as excited as myself With our family now grown to five we needed to think of a larger house and a search was duly commenced around the locality. Some of the loveliest houses, at the time, were being built in Duffield, just north of Derby. We chose a house in a street called ‘Broadway’ on plot number seventy-seven, so we called our new home, ‘Seventy-seven Sunset Strip’, The title of a popular television programme of that era.

The Teaching post at the Staff College was superb, but after ten years as a Senior Lecturer I realised I could advance no further. I was also becoming lazy once I had mastered the classes and all else that was required; the rest was just a repeat performance. We all had so much free time and I did not think I was using all my skills or stretching my abilities fully.

To keep the boredom at bay and in an effort to stimulate my intelligence I began making a Portable Video Recorder in my spare time. Such machines were available but these were very large, and cumbersome using 2” wide recording tapes all of which made them very expensive. My first machine was created using surplus equipment the quarter inch sound recording tape I used had to pass the Induction recording head very fast to cover the frequencies involved it worked but the large tape reels and the tape speeds I was using gave me plenty of pile ups when the reels over ran or the tape failed!

Changing over to half inch computer tape and recording with a rotating recording head gave far better results. Better still when helical heads became available I was very successful working with a portable battery powered recorder. The recorder used half-inch magnetic tape. I used computer type at first as video tape was difficult to obtain and very expensive but I was able to obtain reject commercial 2” tape from Teddington and I cut my own using razor blades in my own home made machine. From the machine I was able to cut three good tapes but the fourth tape, would be oversized due to the stretching caused during the cutting process. I had to build a machine for this cutting process and this caused me many problems but I was successful to getting some good runs and this provided me with cheap half-inch TV quality videotape.

In due course I started looking for another post that would further stimulate me. My interest was kindled by a post I saw advertised for a Training Supervisor with Clark International at Camberley. I knew nothing about the company but an International Company sounded good to me for I always liked the idea of travel. I duly went off to Camberley, for the interview using my free rail pass, to attend this interview was a most bizarre experience.

Initially I was taken out to lunch at The Ely, after which I was shown the training school. The school occupied the first floor of a large aircraft hanger at Blackbush

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