Dawn Loves Buttercups

I was 17 and working as a secretary for the Contracts Manager of a building firm and also responsible for the liaison between the quantity surveyors department and my boss.  My organisational skills and shorthand and typing were excellent and even in those days I had good dress sense.  Yet I was naive enough to believe that the world was full of good people and everything was hunky dory.  It was 1966 and I had lost my father the year before after a long and very traumatic illness.  Having been very sheltered I was (and bearing in mind this was the age of the spirit of “free love” hippidom, I had to find a way of working in a man’s world.

The contracts manager (a married man) clearly had only one intention and the quantity surveyors were teasing flirts.  So I had to learn how to be perfectly pleasant and at the same time keep it light and the men at arms length.  When the contracts manager kept pestering me, and I knew he wouldn’t stop, I knew I had to change and leave a job that I loved doing.  I knew I was becoming an adult by the way I dealt with the situation and left with fantastic references and my head held high sticking to my principles but keeping friendly with those I left behind.  I handled it well and eventually got into the legal world where I worked for the majority of my working life