Fiona Hill

But, you know, I used to go around pretending to be a nurse.

I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy.

And I used to read this.

And, you know, kind of that was one of the formative ideas.

We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area.

And, you know, I'd be out in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers, you know, with their animals and I'd see vets coming along and, you know, watching people deal with the livestock.

And there was a kind of a famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot.

It became here in the United States as well and was a sort of a TV miniseries.

He'd written a book and he was the vet for my

one of my great aunt's dogs and people were always talking about him and I thought, oh, I could be a vet.

And then one day I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field and he got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him.

And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe not actually.

No, I don't think I want to be a vet.

So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you had to apply your education.

It wasn't an education for education's sake.

It was an education to do something.

And when I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school.

And it was one of these, you know, pep talks for kids in these, you know, deprived areas.

He had been quite prominent in local education.

And now he was a member of parliament.