In the fifth in our series that explores the extraordinary richness and diversity of the paths taken by women Religious, Sr Anna Mary House OP of St Dominic’s Convent, Stone, talks of a life of prayer, preaching and teaching English in Dominican schools in England and Norway
My mother was a teacher, my father was a teacher, and I said: “I don’t want to be a teacher, I’ll go into the civil service.”
When I got there, I found I couldn’t cope with it at all. So I looked at the small ads in the Catholic Herald, wrote to St Teresa’s School at Minehead, in Somerset – who were needing a teacher of English – and received an acceptance by return of post. “What kind of a school accepts someone they haven’t seen?” I asked my father. “And what kind of a teacher are they getting?” he replied.
It was a small country school and I loved it. I had a sixth form of three girls and we had a whale of a time sitting together and reading Thomas More’s Utopia, Spenser and Shakespeare. At the end of their course, one went to university, one went to teaching college and the third got a job in the library downtown – so everyone was very happy.
My own school was Parkfields Cedars Grammar School in Derby and then I went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to read English. When I arrived, I was an Anglo-Catholic. But I worked my way through Newman’s Apologia in the evenings and was received into the Catholic Church before my Finals.