Fiona Hill

My mom thought of her nursing as a career, though, and it genuinely was.

And she was out there trying to help women

survive childbirth.

My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table.

I wish she'd stop.

She'd leave out her nursing books.

And I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet.

It was just these grim, horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my God, you know, what?

Please stop.

So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that direction.

But it was the timing that really cinched things for me.

I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, deindustrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintained money for education.

And they also paid for exchanges.

And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany, in France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar, you know, down in its kind of region, but, you know, quite historic in the Russian context.

In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham, you know, was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context.

So it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages.

I studied German, I studied French.

And then in 1983, there was the WASCA.

basically provoked by the Euromissile Crisis.

So the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.