"Shorthand, typing and bookkeeping – those are the subjects for the six-month secretarial course you will be taking." Thus commenced my first day of the course at Loreburn Secretarial College, in the center of Manchester, England.

This was in the 1950s, 10 or so years after the end of the Second World War, and austerity measures were still a big part of everyday life. Petrol rationing ended in 1950, sweet rationing in 1953 (oh, joyful day). I clearly remember the excitement of entering Greenups sweet shop on Cheetham Hill Road and being able to buy all the licorice allsorts and Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate my pocket money would allow. Rationing officially ended in 1954.

 Back then, teenagers mostly did what they were told. Elder brother Eric was destined for university and a prestigious medical career and there was no money in the family in the postwar frugal times to keep a second child at grammar school. It never occurred to me to object when I was taken out of school (and school uniform). I was actually quite thrilled to become a young lady overnight, wearing stockings and high heels, lipstick and powder. And so my professional career was mapped out and secretarial work has supported me. Whoever would have thought, all those years ago, how very useful typing would become worldwide!

Of course in those days “technology” was not a word that was bandied about. Office equipment was vastly different from the huge array of hi-tech found in modern offices in these sophisticated times. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, breezing along at 60 words per minute. Fortunately the Tipp-Ex company began marketing their famous correction papers in the 1950s – but still, too many mistakes and you had to start all over again. I had never even worked on an electric typewriter until I came to live in Israel in 1979. There was no such thing as fax machines, which were introduced for general use in the mid 1970s - we used telex machines – so different from today's “instant” computers with email and phone texting systems.

Way back then, my very first job after secretarial college, earning three pounds and ten shillings per week was in the office of Lipshaw's shirt factory. Those days, my view from the window in the heart of Manchester overlooked the Central Train Station (it closed in the late 1960s), a grim and dismal outlook that, together with rainy, miserable days, does not bring back particularly fond memories and certainly not compared to now - where the view from my office window, in the heart of a major Tel Aviv hi-tech area, is of fabulous buildings, bustling restaurants and teeming employees enjoying the sunshine during their lunch breaks.