ABSTRACT
My career depended on chance and luck, or the lack of it. It was not planned. But when I began to think more carefully about the way it had developed, I found that I could not consider it separately from my life as a whole. It has been part of my life, and it is my family background that has been the most crucial, though not perhaps at first sight the most obvious, influence on it. I was born in 1930, the youngest of three children in a prosperous middle-class family in Leicester. My father, who was 50 when I was born, had hated his schooldays and had left school at 14 and gone into his father’s business. By the time I was born my grandfather was semi-retired and my father eventually succeeded float, keeping the business profitable even during the depression of the 1920s and 1930s. My mother, twelve years younger than my father, had trained as a teacher. After a brief and very unhappy period teaching in a small school in a South Yorkshire mining village she had joined the Bank of England as a clerk just before the outbreak of the First World War. In the absence of so many men who had joined up she was promoted rapidly, reaching a position that had never previously been held by a woman, and managing to retain this even after the end of the war until she left the bank in 1920 to marry.
