“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.” – Helen Keller

As a woman pursuing a career Barbara recognises that she owes a debt of gratitude to many individuals, both known personally to her and known only through their books and publications. “Life provides a series of ups and downs and sometimes only the help of another loving soul gets us through”.

She recognises both her headmistress at Faringdon Country Grammar School for Girls, Miss A.J. Towns, and one of her tutors, Alan Ness, at University College London where she read Physiology and achieved an Upper Second Honours Degree, as both, in their own way contributing to her developing strength of character and resolve. Always a little shy and self-effacing, at the age of 20 she was contemplating a future life as a teacher of junior children in Norfolk – not least because she had a boyfriend there. Both of them wrote highly and caringly of her in references which changed her way of thinking about herself.

But undoubtedly the most important person in her life, whom she thanks the most, is her first husband, Jim Page-Roberts, himself a prolific painter and sculptor, and writer (JIM P-R’S BLOG). As a working class girl working her way through University College London her life could have gone many different ways. Instead she met Jim, twice her age and already life-experienced, cultured, artistic, aristocratic, and with one over-riding quality that she learned from him and his mother– the ability to get on with everybody from cleaner to queen and every possible social and financial class in between.

Jumping forward some forty-odd years, and omitting much that was life-influencing along the way, she comes to Masha Malka (www.mashamalka.com). They met at a training course in Accelerated Learning in Las Vegas.  Barbara and Masha found a common language in the desire to get people of all ages and inclinations to succeed in what they want to do, indeed first to find out who they are and what makes them tick.  At a difficult transition period in Barbara’s life – the divorce with her second husband and the realisation that maybe she was less than perfect and even a ‘failure’ – Masha was the source of the mental positivity that came from knowledge and true caring.