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;y father worked for J&P Coats Thread Manufacturing Com- pany, in charge of interna-
tional mills, so as a family we moved
around the world—a lot. Eventually we
settled in Freiburg, Germany.
My interest in aviation was apparent
at an early age, and I remember at sev-
en or so going with my father to watch
airplanes, just the two of us. That was
in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I went to a
myriad of primary schools in different
countries, and learned a lot of languag-
es in the process. Ultimately my parents
sent me back to England, to Greenacre
School for Girls in Banstead, Surrey, in
1965 as a boarder. All the girls there
knew I was nutty about airplanes and
they would bring me everything they
could collect from their travels home,
such as boarding passes, sugar sa-
chets...and most of them lived in really
interesting places such as China, Zam-
bia, and Singapore; so I had a nice col-
lection. I would also lie in our school’s
lacrosse fields and watch the aircraft go-
ing into Heathrow—and I could identify
every one of them.
It was perfectly clear that when I
grew up, I was going to be traveling
around the globe in an airplane, how-
ever, it was the 1960s, and, having nev-
er seen a woman pilot, the only way I
could imagine doing that was as an air
hostess. At 15 I wrote to all the big inter-
national airlines and expressed my de-
sire to be a part of their company when
I finished high school and every one of
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university in Germany and studied Jap-
anese. In September of 1973, I was sup-
posed to go to Tokyo to attend the Na-
ganuma School but, that summer, while
reading a magazine, I noticed a Luf-
thansa advertisement for air hostesses
and it mentioned the new age limit of
19—I was 20, so I immediately applied.
I got an invitation for the three-day
interview and was hired. I honestly
by Rosalind Heinemann
them wrote back and told me that, un-
fortunately, the minimum age for hiring
was 21. Therefore, simply to fill in the
gap between A levels and 21, I went to
couldn’t believe my luck. In those days
we had long layovers in all sorts of in-
teresting places, including Baghdad,
Iraq, and Beirut, Lebanon, and I made
sure that I went on as much sightseeing
as my budget would allow.
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