I joined the Surrey Comet aged 16 straight from Molesey County Secondary. I started off doing time and motion studies of the print workers. I very quickly learned that the men didn't like being watched and timed and, after a month, decided to leave. By coincidence another girl from my school had started in the Editorial Department at the same time and also hated her job, mainly because she was scared of one of the subs, John Vivian. Together we went to Mr Jenkins, who I think was one of the Directors, and asked to swap jobs, which we did. Mr Jenkins always wore dark suits, with a white shirt and braces, and was a rather tubby figure. He wore those little half glasses on the end of his nose. He would be out on the stone helping to make the pages up with his jacket off but never his tie. He looked fierce the way he peered over his glasses but I found him charming.

My editorial job consisted of collecting very wet copy pulls from the print works, checking that corrections had been done and then taking them up to the Editor, Brian West, for final approval. I would then collect them from him and take them back to the works for the final making up on the stone. I knew when copy was waiting for me as there were two lights positioned over my desk, one for the works and one for the Editor who was nicknamed Batman. This was due to the speed that he flung open the door to the Editorial, flew down the steps in one leap, and passed through the department into the works like a bat out of hell. I remember him as wearing rough tweed suits and with a bright ginger beard.

The aforementioned John Vivian was a short tubby Welshman with a mop of grey curls and a wicked sense of humour. I wasn't scared of him, although I think he did his best to scare me. He called me ‘Florence' as in Nightingale, on account of the lamps above my desk, and would yell at me “Florence, your lamps burning” whenever one went on. When I first started he sent me out to the local ironmongers for some ‘sky hooks'. I was obviously a bit thick because I went. However, when I got there I found a long queue so went to Woolworths instead where I found a shop assistant just as thick as me, which saved me from being laughed at. John was a very competitive table tennis player in the works rest room at lunchtimes, despite having one leg shorter than the other. He also used to collect names he thought were silly – Gladys Higginbottom etc. - and pinned them up around his desk. When I married I swore I wouldn't give John the satisfaction of having red roses in my bouquet, because I knew that every bride who did had the headline ‘Red Roses for the Bride'. Despite all this I really enjoyed working with him.

As well as joining the regular pub crawls I spent quite a bit of my free time with the two photographers, John McDonald and Jeff Edwards. John was a tall, dark, well-built man, while Jeff had a really bad curvature of the spine so was probably less than five feet tall. They were both great fun to be with. I remember that Jeff took me out for my first Chinese meal in a restaurant in Kingston on my seventeenth birthday, and I even went camping with John and his family.

One of the junior reporters at the time was Jill Arthurall who went on to become the womens page editor at the Comet. She lived with her sister on a houseboat on the Hogsmill River, and was always coming into work looking like she had been dragged through a bush backwards, due to spending the night baling water out of the boat all night. Boats were cheap though and I recall how the juniors never seems to have any money. I even gave some of the fellas a haircut one lunchtime to save the coppers. During the late 1960s we all wore miniskirts but one press day Jill came in wearing just a rugby shirt as a dress. There she was bending over the page makeup table trying to hold her shirt down so as not to show her knickers – she had quite an audience. In the end the Editor sent her home to change as he said she was distracting the men from their work.

I distracted the men quite a bit myself one press day when my cotton minidress got caught up on one of the metal hooks at the stone. The back of my dress tore neatly away and I ran back to Editorial amid catcalls and whistles trying to cover my panties with my hands. None of my clothes lasted long though anyway as they were always covered in wet printers ink from the pulls.

Another embarrassing incident I remember was when, having pleaded boredom, I was given the cricket fixtures list to compile. Unfortunately nobody told me that the home team had to be listed first and Monday morning saw a string of complaints come in from irate cricket fans that had gone to the wrong ground.

Life at the Comet was never dull. There were parties almost every weekend, many hours in the various pubs local to the office and much coffee drunk in the Kenko Coffee place opposite the Comet. I was always being sent over to drag reporters out when they should have been working. I can't really blame them though - the coffee from the machine in the office only offered one beverage - coff-tea-choc.

When, at nineteen, I decided to move on, the Editor offered to arrange for me to join the Surbiton Borough News as a junior reporter, which had been my ambition since a child. I didn't have enough GCEs to join the Comet NUJ training scheme. Foolishly I declined his offer as I had just got married and my new husband didn't want me to work unsocial hours! I just thought I could do it later, and went to work as an invoice clerk at a local garage instead. There I found out that not all work was exciting and fun and that not all workmates wanted to live it up at weekends, drinking, bowling and partying until they dropped.

I never did become a reporter but I have written newsletters, community guides and PR material for a living for a number of years, and have had quite a number of freelance features published. I've even done work experience with the Guardian recently, when they were at Cheam, as part of a journalism diploma course I'm studying at Birkbeck, University of London . See, it's never too late to qualify as a journalist! I did enjoy my recent work experience but I'm afraid it could never come anywhere near the exhilaration of working in the noisy, dusty, bustling, haphazard Surrey Comet Editorial Department of the 1960s.