Retiring after spending decades teaching children, the writer savours every second of her leisure time, even as she reminisces about her past.

I looked at the heads bent over the desks, the sunlight shining on dark, fair, brown and even, I smiled, pink hair. How many times in many different places, I had looked at similar sights in countless classrooms. In a sunny room in Tanzania, overlooking the Rift Valley, packed with flamingos, on a humid monsoon afternoon in Kolkata, on a freezing morning in North Yorkshire, so many memories crowded into my mind. For the last time that afternoon I would answer a pointless question, ask someone to straighten his tie, tell someone else to ‘speak up’ and among all the routine, discover a spark of imagination. That spark fed the fire and made those sixty odd years worthwhile.

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I had no sooner officially retired, than I found myself on a Boeing 707 en route to India. The Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose airport did not seem to have changed that much since my first arrival in 1968, except it had this new name. The humid air which hit you like a wall, was as much of a shock as ever. The colourful, cosmopolitan crowds milling around in the departure zone were just as frantic. Women veiled, women unveiled, in rainbow saris of all shades, men in turbans, men in crisp white dhotis, men in smart Mumbai suits and children everywhere, from tiny, swaddled babies to recalcitrant teenagers.

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I found the taxi ride into town as frightening as ever. The driver wove in and out between dangerously swaying rickshaws loaded with cauliflowers, cooking oil and garlands of white jasmine. Avoiding a large pothole, the taxi just missed hitting a cow and calf wandering lazily across the road. Driving in Kolkata itself, the traffic was even more hazardous. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands, weaving in and out of lines of cars and lorries with horns at full blast.

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So many memories of my teaching days came back to me as familiar sights and noises returned. The highlight of my visit was a meeting with many of my old students. One had become a feted poet, another an artist. One of the cheekiest had founded a well-known restaurant. To me they were still schoolgirls in their starched uniforms, complaining about the frequent power cuts and rushing out of school to buy forbidden, but tasty street food. In my memory they would always be a room of schoolgirls, heads bent over their desks, however high the mercury climbed.

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On my way back to UK, I stopped in Paris to see my three grandsons. Friends and colleagues had said while I was still teaching, ‘You must be so fed up with kids by the end of the day, you have no time for your own grandchildren!’ Of course, this had never been true, but time had been limited. My elder daughter lived in Paris with her lawyer husband and three sons. They were the first boys on my side of the family for several generations. They lived very near the Eiffel Tower and from their terrace you felt you could reach out and touch it! It looked magical, lit up at night. One terrible April day in 2019, we could see from the terrace, the beautiful Cathedral of Notre Dame in flames. My youngest grandson was in tears.

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My favourite part of the city is the old artists’ quarter with its cobbled streets and small shops, Montmartre, leading up to the Church of Sacre Coeur. The view from the dome is superb giving a panoramic view of this elegant city. In the small cafés and shops, I found it easy to picture Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani or Georges Braque at work. One afternoon, we walked to the wooded area of the Bois de Boulogne with its elegant houses overlooking the racecourse at Longchamp. I promised myself a trip to the classic Arc de Triomphe race the next autumn.

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Of English cities outside of London, I have always loved Cambridge. My grandmother’s family had run a pub called The Priory Tap, sadly demolished after the First World War. Strangely enough, my father’s family also had links with Cottenham, a village close to the city. I had obviously been delighted when my younger daughter’s son had become a chorister at King’s College and a pupil at King’s College School.

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Retirement had allowed me to attend many of the services at the magnificent King’s College Chapel. In the evening, as the light is fading outside, the sixteenth century, stained glass is lit by the candlelight at the side of the choir stalls. The medieval figures of kings, shepherds, merchants and ploughboys are then reflected in turn onto the congregation and the choristers. To me it seemed a living link with the past and the foundation of the chapel in the troubled reign of Henry VI. I also never tired of looking up at the exquisite stone fan-vault ceiling.

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The river Cam of course gives the city its name. I now had time to enjoy a leisurely punt up the river to Grantchester.  The poet, Rupert Brooke, would be pleased to know, yes, the clock still stands ‘at ten to three’ and there is ‘honey still for tea’ at the famous Orchard Tearooms. With my son-in-law doing the punting, I could sit back and enjoy watching a duck with its trail of tiny ducklings and the cattle grazing in the water meadows. If you were lucky, you might even see the brilliant flash of a kingfisher’s wings.

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I certainly didn’t miss getting up early on dark mornings or marking endless essays, often with the same mistakes. Yet I still treasured memories of that sudden smile when a student grasped an obscure line from ‘Hamlet’ or appreciated the irony in ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I now had time to sit in the garden with my begonias and enjoy the memories. All the rest was now ‘someone else’s problem’!