Profile - Pat Saunders 1937 to 2018

Established 23 years, The Letting Centre is a local, dedicated letting agency based in Melbourn. With long-standing clients some of whom have been with us for 20 years or more, we aim to provide a personal, tailored service covering Cambridge, Royston, Buntingford, Saffron Walden and surrounding villages. We offer discounted fees for multiple properties, as well as those located in any of the villages around Melbourn. Call us for a free market appraisal and comprehensive landlord pack.

Profile

Pat Saunders 1937 to 2018

In the last issue we had a piece about Pat and here is a bit more of the interesting life she led in her own words. “Growing up in Brazil was quite an experience. My father worked for a British company that had a huge cattle farm and soap factory in Brazil, and as my mother had herself been brought up in Argentina she was more than happy for us all to move out there.

We lived mostly in a place called Frigorifico but initially were schooled on the cattle farm near Rio Preto by a private governess. Every morning we had to get up and ride before breakfast and if we didn’t ride, we didn’t get any breakfast. Horses were a big thing in Brazil so we soon learned to ride. It was an amazing place to grow up in – we once found an alligator egg in a swamp and when we cracked it open on the kitchen table a baby alligator came out! We would go into the swamp at night to catch alligators too and they were served in the stew.

There was quite a strong ex-pat community and all my memories of being there are very good, we were always happy. My father insisted we spoke English in the house but we soon learned to speak Portuguese. The farm was miles and miles out in the country. To ride right around the perimeter of the farm on horseback would take you two weeks and when it came time for us to go off to boarding school in Sao Paulo the train journey to get there took my brothers and I 12–14 hours. My maiden name was Nunn, and at school my elder brother, Ron, became known as Nunn the First, the next brother, Bunnie, was Nunn the Second and when I arrived as the youngest, I was christened Nunn the Less.

When I was 17 my parents returned to England and although my brothers were old enough to stay in Brazil and find work, I was forced to move back. I really wasn’t happy about this, so my father decided the best thing for me was to join the British Army. During my basic training I made friends with a girl called Barbara who almost immediately asserted I should marry her big brother, Peter and that is just what I did!

He too was an army man and after we had been on three dates, he was posted to Singapore. We corresponded and as soon as I could I joined him out there and we were married. He was 23 years an army man in Belgium, Germany, Aden, Bahrain and Northern Ireland during the trouble and we travelled a fair bit during his career.”