BACK in 1942, teacher Ivy Starkie was advised to write a book – and almost 60 years later, she has.

Chalk in My Hair, dedicated to her family, charts her life and career in the classroom, but is not for sale.

Born in Padiham in 1922, Ivy said: “It’s taken a while to write my book, but I now have – at the age of 88.”

Her work is also dedicated to the memory of her first love, Philip Spencer, a young RAF officer, killed in World War Two, who had encouraged her to write.

“Philip was my friend, my school love, my mentor, without whose influence my life and this ensuing story would not have been written.

“May this be a tribute to all like him who lost their lives and their youth to a war.”

For the Starkie family, Sunday centred round the Wesleyan Chapel at the top of Padiham, where her dad Thomas, a science master at Padiham Technical School, was a lay reader and mum Ivy was in the choir.

The family moved to Whalley, opposite the abbey, when she was 10 and Ivy enjoyed climbing Pendle Hill where, in 1939, she met Philip, a handsome blond youth from a cotton manufacturing family in Burnley and their attachment grew.

When Ivy went to train as a teacher in Scarborough, and Philip went to Oxford, reading English Literature, the couple exchanged letters and poems.

“He had been writing poetry since the age of 11 and had a volume published, titled The First Hundred – but war was waiting outside the classroom door, ready to pluck him away.”

It was in 1942, after Ivy became a teacher at Higham School, that Philip volunteered for the RAF and the two got engaged over the phone as he waited to go abroad. He was posted to South Africa.

Ivy remembers Whalley being bombed once during the war years, when a German plane, thought to be heading home after a mission, aimed at a train standing in the station, but missed. The explosion smashed the contents of her father’s garage.

Then, in December 1943, while waiting at the bus stop for work she heard the devastating news from a mutual friend that Philip had been killed in a training accident, after his plane crashed into a forest.

He was 21.

A memorial service was held at St Peter’s, Burnley, and a carved wooden screen was commissioned by his family.

Ivy spent two years at Higham School, where Mrs Stephenson was head, and pupils included refugees from Mousehole, in Cornwall.

With her sister Alice, she also set up a YMCA centre in Whalley for the many military camps based in the area, to meet and chat, as well as a magazine titled Contact.

One day, while travelling to King George’s Hall in Blackburn, she met her future husband, Capt Jan Wojszcz, a Polish officer who had fought at Monte Cassino and received the Military Cross for bravery.

They were married at Whalley Methodist Church in 1948, with a reception at The Swan Hotel, and while Ivy became head of Read Congregational School, her husband, who took the name John Starkie, went to work for Accrington Tile and Brick Company.

He built their first home, Witch Elms, in Whalley.

Then, in 1954, the couple, who now had a son Tim, crossed the border into Yorkshire, Ivy to continue getting chalk in her hair as a village school head, while her husband was appointed a surveyor by the county council.

But he was also ‘the wind beneath her wings’ as she went into public life with the Federation of Business and Professional Women.

He died a year before their golden wedding, and today Ivy lives in Cambridge.