Istillregret moneywoes killedoffmy idealcareer
Jackie aDkiNS laughs as she re-reads the three paragraphs that constituted her idea of an ‘essay’.
‘i work in a hair dressers and looking for a shop (sic) when i have saved up some money i will buy one,’ she wrote. cinema trips with friends and buying clothes on a Saturday — those were Jackie’s dreams.
Today, she has been married to Paul, 63, for 35 years and has three children and one grandson. She wonders whether she wrote so little because she was so certain where she would be at 25.
‘i was always going to be a hairdresser,’ says Jackie. ‘i used to cut my own hair and my mum’s and i used to carry my hairdressing scissors in my school bag and at lunchtime the girls would say “can you do my fringe for me?” or “can you put layers in my hair?”’
Jackie loved her secondary school in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, one of the brand-new comprehensives, and was among the first year to start when it opened in 1969.
She had a place to study at hairdressing college when, aged 16, her parents moved to Sussex, and her dreams were shelved. She found herself working in a bank because her parents could not afford to support her through college.
Her father had a heart attack and died when Jackie was just 19, so her income was even more essential and thoughts of going to hairdressing college faded.
She remains wistful about the career that might have been — she still cuts her grown-up children’s hair and one of her daughters is a hairdresser — but Jackie says: ‘Once i got into the cycle of earning money, it was so hard to break away from that.’ Jackie left banking after the birth of her second child and since then has done everything from selling candles to catering for parties and working for a mining recruitment company. But today, after surgery for a benign tumour in her stomach, Jackie is ‘ enjoying taking life a little slower’, while helping her builder husband with his books from their home in Lancing, West Sussex. ‘it’s time to do the things we couldn’t do when the kids were younger,’ she says. ‘i’m off to amsterdam soon, going to do a Scandinavian boat tour in the summer and next year we are hoping to go to cuba.’