RETIRED Skipton music teacher Adrienne Fox draws on her own experience for her latest book, The Way We Lived Then.

It is a semi-autobiographical look at her childhood growing up in socialist Consett in County Durham in the 1940s.

"It was not a good place to grow up," said Adrienne, who used to teach at Skipton Girls' High School. "It was dirt and hard, with no money."

The book – published by Author House – colourfully describes the constant conflicts of morals, views and opinions at a time when material goods were in short supply.

Her story paints a tragic-comic picture of life in a northern industrial town in the post-war years, when old traditions battled against new ideas.

"It is a fairly true account of life at that time," said Adrienne.

Despite its poverty, Consett had a rich musical heritage – even the local Working Men's Club had a Steinway piano.

"There were lots of chapels with choral traditions," added Adrienne, whose father was a choirmaster at a local church and whose mother was a pianist and organist.

Indeed, the book tells us how Adrienne burst into the world to the sounds of Beethoven as her mother listened to the composer's Fifth Symphony as a distraction to her labour pains.

Inevitably, music formed an integral part of her childhood and, after leaving school, she became the first person in her town to win a place at the Royal Academy of Music.

But it was not idyllic. "I felt so inferior to everyone else, with my Geordie accent," said Adrienne, who will celebrate her 75th birthday in October. "I didn't really take as much advantage of the opportunity as I should have done."

After graduating, she turned to teaching and returned to County Durham because "I thought I owed them as they had paid me a generous grant and living allowance".

She moved to become head of music at Skipton Girls’ High School in 1978, retiring due to ill health in 1994.

She took up writing after the death of her husband, Charles, and The Way We Lived Then is her fifth book.

Adrienne added: "I needed something to do and writing was a type of therapy. The Way We Lived Then is different to the others as it is based on my life. It is amazing how looking back triggers other things; things that I had not thought about."