ABSTRACT
At secondary school I realised that I was good at the arts but not at science. I could learn science but I could never think about
it and be creative. I had a nice time in the sixth form and decided to do something completely different and did social anthropology at Newnham College Cambridge. It was a really lovely thing to do. It was a very lively department ± Meyer Fortes was the Professor and Edmond Leach the Reader. They were psychoanalytically minded so it was a really good start. After that I did a year as a research assistant to Meyer Fortes and then moved to London where I'd always wanted to live. My ®rst job was as a research assistant at the Institute of Community Studies, which had Michael Young and other inventive minds of the late 1950s ± looking at how people live and the interrelations between them and their social context. The work I did for Ann Cartwright was to pilot a study of patients' experiences in hospital using a questionnaire. I got a real conversation going with people even though I had to stick to the prescribed questions and at the end people would say, `Thank you I feel much better.' So that was a useful discovery in how talking about an experience could be helpful.
