Celebrating friendships that began at St John's

Susan (1981) and Maria (1982)

'I came up to interview at St John’s in the autumn of 1981, just as the Brideshead Revisited TV series was ending. In keeping with this, St John’s looked imposingly beautiful, crenelated and daunting, especially compared to the environs of the London Borough of Brent. Luckily, the first person I met was Susan Nolan (now Barrington) who had volunteered to look after some of the interviewees, with much sympathy and reassurance.

We became very good friends when I came up to College the next year, and we still are. Susan has a great gift for friendship and was a legend in her own teatime at College - in the most literal and generous way imaginable. She entertained an enormous swathe of the college, across years, at tea parties in her college rooms. I’m sure very many people will remember this with appreciation as part of their College experience. Lovely music, and, of course, lots of tea and cake.

I am especially grateful for our conversations about hopes and dreams; it was incredible to have someone to talk to who was so insightful. This helped at times to change the course of my life, as my plans for the future slowly took form.

Susan is an excellent correspondent and has continued to be very effective at keeping in touch and linking people over the years. My world would have been far poorer without her in it, in fact it is hard to imagine what it would have been like.

We were in the third and fourth year of women being admitted to the college, and so it was changing with us, far more than I realised at the time. Neither did I then fully understand how important friendships are to the character of the college.

Out of the many exceptional people I came to know at St John’s, I also remember Steven Wiltshire, who came up in 1984. Brilliant at every academic field to which he turned, whether biochemistry, law or medical statistics, he was unassuming, with a dry sense of humour and was unfailingly kind. I recall a spontaneous jaunt around a flooded Venice and a happy, godfatherly tour across the verdant Isle of Wight, with my small child in tow and chocolate ice cream. Steven had formidable courage in adversity during his final illness in 2012, and he has been hugely missed'

Joy, Karen, Deione and Juliet (1979)

'We - Joy, Karen, Deione and Juliet - were in the first cohort of women to be admitted to St John's in 1979. Karen and Joy had been allocated rooms on the same staircase, N2, and Karen was taken aback when Joy - who had studied the list of scholarships in the press - was able to tell her what school she'd attended and what subject she was reading (Experimental Psychology). Deione and Karen met through Psychology, which Deione was reading as part of her PPP degree, while Juliet and Joy were reading English.

We all took up rowing, despite the shock of discovering this meant 6am outings on the river, and formed half of the first ever (and for a while the only) Women's VIII to represent St John's. In those days boats were made of wood and all the college's vessels were set up for men. Hauling a clinker-built wooden eight out of the water and into the boathouse was quite an effort and it was a great day when we were promoted to rowing in the slightly less cumbersome (but still wooden and still rather heavy) Third Shell. Deione and Joy continued to row throughout their time at St John's.

After graduating, Joy trained as a solicitor in Chester and Shrewsbury before settling in East Anglia where she accidentally had a twenty-five year career in local government. Since retiring she divides her time between Suffolk and her partner's farm in the Lake District and writes an occasional column for Farmers Weekly.

Karen spent most of her career as an educational psychologist, reinventing herself as a University Lecturer for the final decade of her working life. She married Tim and spent periods abroad in connection with his work. Their UK base has long been Southampton. They have two children and are about to become doting grandparents.

Deione stayed a 4th year at St John’s to do a PGCE and became a Science teacher in London for a year then returned to Oxford to work in a school for boys with emotional and behavioural issues. After she met John in Indonesia while travelling, she moved to Leicester to a similar school, John and Deione married and continued to fit as much travel as possible in between terms. She retired exhausted in 2015. She now has much more time for even more travel and especially for jaunts!

Juliet became a journalist, working for ten years on local papers and for ITV Teletext (remember that?!). She took a break to have two children then went into teaching for almost 30 years until her very recent retirement (last week). She's been married for 37 years and lives in London.

Over the years we have kept in contact, originally by letters (which now make interesting reading) and phone calls and latterly by email and WhatsApp (the joy of photos), meeting up in person whenever possible. We have attended Gaudies and garden parties at St John's, Karen being the only absentee at a Gaudy which coincided with a period when she lived in the US and had a young baby. As the demands on our time of careers and family diminished, more get-togethers became possible, jocularly known as Joy’s Jolly Jaunts as they are often organised by her as a birthday outing. There have been many trips to London for lunch and the theatre or an exhibition, most recently to Into the Woods in January and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in June. We met up again at this July's Gaudy for matriculation years 1978-1980, almost forty-seven years since our first meeting'.