I’m proof you CAN become a model at 80

. . . says retired primary teacher and grandmother BEATE HOWITT, who was spotted while out shopping in Oxford

Beate. ‘In England I found freedom and space and education. It was a land of opportunity.’

Beate was adopted by Peter and Mary Brown, the estranged sister of her late father, who lived on the outskirts of Hertford.

‘Peter was old-fashioned and wanted to turn me into a Victorian lady, so I had to learn to draw and play the piano,’ Beate says. ‘The most important thing to him was deportment. I used to have to walk around the house with a book on my head.’

Beate credits this for her strong posture and elegant walk, now so impressing photographers.

‘I’ve been told I walk exceptionally. I glide along with my head held high. Modern models don’t know how to walk. They slouch.’

But when she mentioned modelling to her guardians, they disapproved.

‘They felt modelling was too precarious a profession and that I needed a steady income,’ she says. ‘I also thought of being an air hostess, as that seemed glamorous. But, again, they said no. So I shelved my dreams.

‘Peter encouraged me to train as a teacher. He said I was suited to it and it would fit around family life. When you come from a broken home, as a refugee, having a family unit is what you really aim for.’

So Beate spent her life teaching in village primary schools around Hertfordshire. ‘I was very happy and it was a career I enjoyed,’ she says. ‘I love children.

‘Later on, I was headhunted by a boarding school to be matron to the girls, and lived there for 11 years, as a mother figure really, until I was 70.’

It was in 1959, at a friend’s party, that Beate met her husband, Claude (the English son of a Belgian girl sent to school in Hertford during World War I).

Claude, an engineer, ran a servicing garage, the family business. He and Beate married eight months later and moved to Datchworth, where they had three children, Tania, Lydia and Nigel.

But in 1978, Tania, aged 18, collapsed in the street in a fit that left her severely disabled. She died 11 months later.

Claude could not bear the loss. ‘He went to pieces,’ says Beate. ‘But women have no choice but to cope. As a mother, I couldn’t just grieve for the child I’d lost; I had a 16-year-old daughter and 14-yearold son to care for. I wasn’t going to neglect them.

‘I’d been a refugee, I’d fled from the Russian advance with bombs flying around; a lot of death, destruction and injury. My husband had never experienced anything except living in a country village. I understand death is a part of life.

‘Tania was severely disabled, and when you love someone, sometimes it’s easier to let them go than to see them struggle.’

AS CLAuDE was unable to manage, Beate went part-time at her teaching job and took charge of the family business along with a friend.

‘But Claude almost resented the fact I could come to terms with it. He was so absorbed in his loss that he got it into his head I didn’t love him and walked out.’

Having always loved France, Claude moved to Avignon in 1990. ‘I was very unhappy about it but I had to let him go,’ says Beate, who remained in the uK, still working, but travelled to see him regularly until his death in 2007.

When she was widowed, Beate thought again of modelling, having always been slim and tall. ‘I

thought: “Maybe now”,’ she says. ‘People have often said I would make a good clothes horse. But I didn’t know how to go about modelling. I hadn’t any connections.’

In 2016, she moved to Oxford as ‘there is so much going on there — lectures, cinemas, evensong’. Now her already very active retirement is even fuller.

‘I got a call from the agency on Monday evening asking if I would go for a casting the next morning in London for a TV commercial.

‘I love new experiences. I had to pose in different positions and climb around with a man with a very long beard and long hair down to his waist. I’ve never seen such a hairy man.’

Beate is waiting to hear whether she’s been picked.

‘I’m down to the final two for a TV commercial! I can’t get over it,’ she says. ‘Filming would be in Germany, but I didn’t even ask when — that’s how excited I was. Though I know it was my first attempt and I’m a realist.’

The potential work is particularly welcome as Beate has barely any pension. When she had to reduce her work hours to help out with the family business after her daughter died, it was at a time when part-time teaching didn’t count towards a pension.

‘So I am always looking for work,’ she says. ‘Modelling could prove a very big blessing.’

It isn’t how most people top up their pensions in retirement. But, then, Beate isn’t retiring — she’s launching a wonderful new fashion career.