It was a hot, sunny summer that year of 1964. The atmosphere in the South London council house was more than usually claustrophobic and Molly felt restless. School had ended in July, and, like the other girls from the local secondary school, she had ritually thrown away the unattractive and much hated school hat and run, yelping with joy, through the dingy inner city streets. But she was not happy, not happy at all; the future looked bleak and she dreaded the futile tedium of working in Woollies or a dreary office. She was an artist and a dreamer and knew that God had greater plans for her…

Her one chance of salvation was the Art School. There she could foster her talents, mix with like-minded students, and throw off the sense of isolation that had dogged her all her young life.

That morning in August seemed just like any other. Her elder brother sat munching toast and quaffing tea at the plastic topped, spindle legged kitchen table, an absent look in his eyes. Her parents were already at work. Mum was labouring away at a Bermondsey sweet factory and Dad would be checking the boilers or shovelling coal at the Woolwich Arsenal. Meanwhile, her little brother was off playing in the street perhaps, or, more likely, moping listlessly in the garden. Molly poured herself some tea and sat down, tugging at the print mini-dress that unflatteringly revealed her pale and chubby thighs. The letterbox clattered and the post tumbled onto the heavily patterned hall carpet. She ran out to fetch it as she had every single morning over the past few weeks. When she saw a typewritten envelope addressed to Miss M Cullen her heart pounded; she sat down abruptly and heavily, nervously ripping the letter open. She must have read the brief message ten times before she absorbed the meaning. Then she whooped and yelled ecstatically, leaping into the air. “I got in! I got in! – I’ve been accepted!” Her brother gave her a slightly bored, distant look but smiled slightly. At a stroke her life had changed, a golden future stretched invitingly before her, or so she thought on that warm day in August in the orange kitchen, the radio blaring out the nine o’clock news, the family dog barking excitedly and her little brother running in from the garden to see what all the commotion was about. She was a just a girl of seventeen with a head full of dreams…

Six weeks later she was on board the number 36 bus headed for the Art School. As always, she sat on the back seat to avoid the possibility of someone slicing off her head with a cheese wire. She had lived with that fear since she was very small and had watched, in horrified fascination, as the grocer effortlessly sliced through hard cheese. Once the thought that he could just as well have sliced off her head had taken hold she could not shake off the fear that someone might do just that. This day in late September, however, she was feeling nervously optimistic. The life of a great artist seemed to be within her reach, never mind that she hadn’t ever heard of a female achieving that exalted status she would be the first… The misery of schooldays were behind her, she was no longer a child but a student, an art student at that, surely she would now find the acceptance she craved from her peers; surely they would recognize her undoubted talents. Surely they would become friends, or even admirers.