Fiona Hill

And very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here.

You're going to have to, if you want to get ahead.

And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl, I wouldn't.

I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy.

There was no expectation that I would go into industry.

There was some kind of idea that maybe if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse.

My mother was a midwife.

And so she, at age 16, left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife.

I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools.

And so there was an idea that women could get educated.

And there was a kind of a range of things that you could do.

But the expectation then was...

go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave.

So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, as I was trying to sort of find my way through life and looking forward.

Yeah, I mean, there were a number of things.

I mean, I think like a lot of kids, you know, you talk to people and particularly from blue collar backgrounds.

So what did you want to do?

Boys might say I wanted to be a fireman, you know, or you got, you know, kind of at one point as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse.

I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother.

I didn't really know what that meant.