We [with Alix MacKenzie] had decided we needed further training, and certainly Leach was the one we turned to. So we went to England this summer and we took examples of our work along with us and showed them to Bernard Leach and told him what we were trying to do. And of course he took one look at our work and he said - very quickly he said, "I'm sorry, we're full up," and this was his way of politely saying, you just don't make the cut.

We benefited from living with [Bernard] Leach, because suddenly all of his friends became our acquaintances.

Alix [MacKenzie], on the other hand, found that her painting would translate much more readily into decoration, and she could play with the spacing and the intensity of imagery on the form in a way which I could not. So that when we established our pottery, I was most unhappy with my decoration.

Bernard [Leach] knew Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Johnny Wells. I can think of a number of people that we met there just because we were living with Bernard. Some of them became our friends, particularly the younger artists, but we were privileged to at least meet and talk with the older artists also. And they would come to dinner, and we would simply be included in the conversation, which was quite fascinating.

Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.

Every day we'd trudge up the hill - it was a three-quarter-mile walk up this steep hill to the Leach Pottery, and we would take our lunch with us and generally, I guess, make a nuisance of ourselves.

Some years ago I was working on some forms which were vase forms with a fairly narrow base, and it was after [Hans] Coper had died that I saw an exhibition of his, a catalogue from an exhibition, and he was showing some forms which were made by cutting and joining a lot of different parts together to create what he called a spade form, which you can imagine looks a little bit like a shovel upside down.