Teaching

Like many of her generation, Coral married young, and in 1970 she started secondary school teaching in Wellington, a job she continued doing for almost a decade.

I doubt I was ever the right personality to be a secondary teacher. I think I cared too much about the subject: I hated it when some sixteen-year-old pronounced Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas ‘bor –ring’. I also had never fitted into teen culture in my own life; coming from a rather unusual immigrant family put me on the outer.  However, it was through teaching that I became involved in publishing. I have always been interested in communicating, and presenting information, and much of the teaching material used in the seventies was abysmal – smudgy mimeographs or later grotesque, badly photocopied images.

Coral and her golden cocker
spaniel puppy, Buff,
in the early 1970s.