Valerie Ayres has numerous local contacts garnered during her days of working for Teignmouth Post during the 1980s and ’90s, writes Viv Wilson.

After closing her specialist lighting shop in Fore Street, she stepped into a new role, eager to expand the opportunities working as a sub in the spacious ground floor room in Orchard Gardens.

It was a steep learning curve wrestling with selling advertisement space and creating designs. Soon, her welcome desk got busy with previous customers who tracked her down and made use of her new-found ability with marketing and announcements.

A strongly empathetic person, Valerie often brewed restorative cups of tea, shedding tears with the recently bereaved. At the other end of the human see-saw, she shared the joys of those who arrived to book the happiest notices of ‘hatches and matches’.

There were no computers, everything was hand done and as Valerie’s skills developed, her squiggles and arrows were correctly interpreted by the lay-out experts in Plymouth. Still employing basic techniques of cut and paste, their input kept the weekly paper rolling out from the print works.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE TEIGNMOUTH POST, FRIDAY, APRIL 13