Fitting in a new career...

While her peers prepared for retirement or settled back to wait for their children to produce the third generation, Pip Hazell was kipping down on friends' floors and burning the midnight oil writing essays.

For this mother-of-three and grandmother-of-two was fulfilling a lifetime's ambition - studying costume design. In order to so do, she had to leave her secure and settled life in Leigh in order to live and work as a student.

Four years after taking the plunge back into full-time education at the prestigious Wimbledon School of Art in London, Pip's tenacity and drive paid off.

She graduated this summer with a Double First in her BA Hons degree - the highest mark in her year, she tells me, a trifle embarrassed - and has begun a burgeoning and lucrative career working in the theatre.

The 54-year-old is currently touring the country with the Carla Rosa Opera Company, an outfit based on the Savoy Opera of the 1800s and which is dedicated to authentic productions - and that includes the costumes, right down to the tiniest detail on exactly the right kind of fabric.

She's also making costumes for a professional panto performance of Mother Goose and she's been asked to become costume designer for a musical which is soon to make its West End debut.

"It's so exciting," she says. "Sometimes I think: 'Hang on, I'm a grandmother. I should be having lunches, that sort of thing.' "

The decision to turn back the clock career-wise came when she turned 50, although Pip had wanted to do something in the art world ever since she was a child.

As a schoolgirl at St Bernard's Convent in Westcliff, she had always been the one who made the costumes for the school pantomimes, and her potential was spotted and encouraged by the nuns.

However, family circumstances meant Pip couldn't complete her A-levels in art and French, so she left school at 16 to go and work in a bank, and then moved to Ford's at Basildon where she became assistant paymaster, only leaving to have daughter Mandy, now 30.

She didn't give up her dream, however. While expecting her baby she had studied A-level English and went on to do A-level needlework while expecting her second, Jonathan, now 28 and a banker in Hong Kong.

By the time her third, Bethany, came along, Pip was running a flourishing knitwear company, Pipknit, from her home in St Clements Avenue, supplying outlets such as Harrods and Dickens & Jones.

It was an often chaotic life. "Friends would say to me 'How can you work with the children making a mess?' and I'd never notice, because it never mattered to me," she says.

The business evolved into a knitwear shop, also called Pipknit, in Leigh Road, but 11 years ago Pip left it to work as a fabric buyer at Keddies, and then with another company after the Southend department store closed.

However the desire to go back to college was still there, and no-one was happier than Pip when her request for redundancy was granted. "I loved my job, but I wanted to get out of the rat-race of the high street," she explains.

It was a big step. Pip and husband Rod, who works mainly in Belgium, had only just finished financing Jonathan's seven years of higher education. Daughter Bethany was studying in Paris. "My husband said 'Oh, not another student,' " she says.

Pip then began a foundation BTEC course in art and design at Southend College. She took to it like a duck to water: "I loved it; it was like being let out of prison."

She secured a place to study theatre costume at Wimbledon School of Art, known in the costume business as the best. However, the college was a three-hour drive away, and so Pip decided to live away from home during the week, renting a room, and to come home at weekends.

Adapting to becoming a student was a struggle with around 90 per cent of the course students under 25. Although Pip says she never isolated most of them would spend their evenings in the pub.

And whereas her fellow course members caught up with their studies at the weekend or pleased themselves, Pip was heading off down the motorway to her family in Leigh.

"There was a real pull here," she explains. "It was a very intensive course and if my husband and family hadn't been so supportive I don't know what would have happened."

Indeed, it was nothing for Pip to work all night producing a costume to meet yet another deadline. The Ice Queen extravaganza gown was made for costume designer Sean Barratt, who has worked on such films such as Shakespeare in Love.

Pip's dress, modelled on a portrait in the National Gallery, required all the roses to be hand-painted on silk. The entire outfit, including underwear, took around six weeks to make.

The job with Carla Rosa is, she says, a dream come true. While many would throw up their hands in horror at the attention to detail all costumes require, Pip relishes it all - from her research into costumes of the time to ensure authenticity, to hours and hours of fiddly needlework.

She was approached by Carla Rosa's head of planning during her graduation ceremony and offered the job there and then, and now sees a whole world of opportunities before her.

She is rightly proud, but not big-headed, about her achievements. "I think it was Margaret Thatcher who said that it's easy to be a starter but hard to be a finisher," she says.

"I don't give up easily."

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.