It’s October 1978 and at last Sally is starting an English Literature degree at New Hall Cambridge. She is full of anticipation, having got herself a place against the odds, at the second attempt, after taking A levels at a Portsmouth technical college. Restless and ambitious, and so far ill-at-ease wherever she goes, she is hoping that at university she might ‘find herself’ at last.
Her family meanwhile has moved from her childhood home in rural Hampshire to a large rented house outside Aix en Provence, France, where her father, a social scientist on sabbatical from the LSE, has a job at an academic institute. The two younger children, Becca and Matty, have been enrolled in the local French high school, while her older brother Daniel commutes with Sally across France to his final year at Oxford.
This diary is a continuation of A Teenage Diary 1976-1978 with a three-month overlap.
A Student Diary 