Fiona Hill

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.

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.