Try being "the doctor's wife" in a tiny village. People (including the retiring partner in the practice) were quite shocked when they realised I had my own career and was not queuing up for the various charitable committees that they had me ear-marked for even before I arrived!
And people expected that I would know their medical details and ask how their piles/sore throat etc were going on - and get offended if I didn't! - of course I knew nowt! - and had no desire to. But I always knew when someone had something embarrassing wrong with them because they would start to avoid me!
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Life in a vicarage
Moving from Newcastle to a smaller, tight-knit mining town at the age of seven, Barbara Fox quickly found out what it meant to be "the vicar's daughter". While new friends were fascinated with the comings and goings of the vicarage, Barbara found herself fascinated in turn by the workings of a small, insular community.
Barbara sitting on her dad with her sisters on Embleton beach, Northumberland, where she still spends her summer holiday. Barbara is on the right.
I never intended to write a book about my childhood. It seemed ordinary by the very fact that it was my childhood, even though I was aware that others found things about it unusual.
When I was seven years old we left our suburban home in Newcastle to move to Ashington, Northumberland, 17 miles north, where my father had been appointed vicar of the town's largest parish. Ashington's fame then lay in its coal mines - there were five in the town alone at the time of our arrival in the late 1960s - and its footballers, its most famous sons being the Charlton brothers and their relative Jackie Milburn.
Though a large town it was close knit, united by its common profession. Like most north-easterners, we had miners in our family too, but that was irrelevant. In our big house that stood next door to the church, in my father’s job, in the way we spoke - not Geordie enough - we stood out as being outsiders.
One of my earliest memories from then involves calling on a neighbour with my mother at one of the terraced houses that most people lived in, not realising that front doors were rarely used. I remember a great kerfuffle of things blocking the doorway having to be moved, a harassed voice asking who was there, and finally a laboured opening before the polite smile of the owner. Oh, the shame of getting something so wrong! I just hoped that no one I knew had witnessed it. We used everyone's back doors after that, walking straight in, as our own regular visitors did when they came to the vicarage.
Everyone in my new school seemed to know who I was and to have some claim on me. It was like becoming famous overnight, but not in such a pleasant way.
Everyone in my new school seemed to know who I was and to have some claim on me. It was like becoming famous overnight, but not in such a pleasant way. My teacher expected me to know all the answers in our scripture lessons. I didn’t understand why. For the first time in my life, I had a label - "the vicar’s daughter" - and I hated it.
While my friends were fascinated by life in the vicarage - by the constant comings and goings, the ringing phone and doorbell, the extra guests to be accommodated at the table - I was just as fascinated by theirs. By the back lanes that were their playgrounds, by the outside toilets and the kitchens with the old-fashioned ranges.
Our town was grimy with smoke and soot but it was also a magical place with the possibility of adventure. An abandoned mining village lay behind the churchyard (I was sure there were fairies at the bottom of the garden), and a ghost lived in our gloomy attic. We sometimes heard her footsteps on the stairs, though Mum insisted it was "just the pipes".
Ashington has changed. The pits have closed, people have come and gone, and a new estate has been built on the old village. But almost four decades after leaving, the voices from those days are as clear as ever.
Barbara's book, Is the Vicar in, Pet?, is published by Sphere and is available from Amazon.
By Barbara Fox
Twitter: @Gransnet
I really enjoyed reading your blog Barbara - partly because I live not far from Ashington and partly because the feeling as a child of being different resonated with me - in my case, my Dad taught at the school I went to until I was 11 and I was very aware of being regarded differently - something it took me years to get over.
I'll look forward to reading your book 
Quite possibly, granjura, it just didn't feel like that at the time 
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