About Sylvia, who runs the Salamanders Young Burn Survivors website

Hello, there! My name is Sylvia Joyce. I'm married, with five grown-up children, eleven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

My parents' only child, I was born in Wales, and lived in a little village there until I was nine years old. In 1966, my father got a different job, and we went to live in Cheshire. We weren't there for very long, because the company my father worked for sent him abroad to Portugal, and my mother and I went with him.

From 1967 until 1970, we lived in Cascais, a town near Lisbon in Portugal. For those three years, I went to a little fee-paying school which was close enough to our house for me to walk to and from school each day (but not quite close enough for me to go home for lunch, so I used to take sandwiches and eat them on the nearby beach or in the local park).

There were about sixty pupils altogether at that school, but there were only a dozen or so between the ages of nine and sixteen, so, although we were taught as a group in some subjects (art, general science, geography, history, and Portuguese), we studied English, French, Latin, and maths from text-books, each pupil working at his or her own level. I liked studying from text-books, and did much better in those subjects than I did in the others!

It was in Portugal, at the factory where my father was working, that I first saw a computer. It looked something like this. I was very impressed, and never imagined that, thirty years in the future, I would actually have a computer in my own home!

When I was thirteen, we came back to the UK. For the next three years, I went to a an all-girls grammar school, where I passed GCE O-levels in English language, English literature, French, Latin, maths, biology, chemistry, and physics (and failed my German O-level). I didn't much like being at an all-girls school, because I'd always been a bit of a tomboy and didn't fit in very well there, so I didn't stay at the grammar school to study for A-levels. Instead, I enrolled at a college of further education in 1973, leaving there two years later with O-levels in geology and statistics and an A-level in maths.

After leaving school, I worked for varying lengths of time on an egg-farm, as a housemother in a residential home for disabled children, as a stage-hand, and in an office as a clerk/telephonist. Then, when I was twenty-four, I got married and became a full-time housewife until after my youngest child had left school. In 2009 (when I was fifty-two) I started work as a part-time cook and cleaner at a Nursing Home just a couple of minutes walk away from where I live, and continued there until I retired in 2021.

Since my marriage in 1981, I have lived in the same Victorian house overlooking the River Tamar, in the Cornish town of Saltash.

My first child, Francesca, was born in 1982. Over the next eight years, I had four more children: Wayne, Quinn, Amanda, and Gordon. Gordon is an award-winning tattoo artist, and lives on the other side of the River Tamar with his daughter. Amanda and her partner Kerrie have a son and two daughters between them; they live in Saltash. Quinn also lives in Saltash with his partner Emma and their three daughters. Wayne and his partner Natalie live in Oxfordshire with their two sons and one daughter. Francesca works in a local restaurant; after ten or twelve years of living elsewhere, she moved back into the family home with her daughter Carina (which is good for me, as my arthritis now confines me to the ground floor of our home). Carina now lives elsewhere in Saltash with her partner (who works in the same restaurant as Francesca); they are the parents of my great-grandson.

My two main hobbies are reading and the Internet (not necessarily in that order). I have loved books almost as long as I can remember, and now have almost a thousand in my home library. Since my introduction to the Internet in 1999, it has become my main source of information and entertainment. In fact, the Internet changed my whole life because, after the breakup of my marriage, I met my present husband in an online chatroom. He was then living hundreds of miles away from me, and we got to know each other via an online private messenger. He even proposed to me online!

At one time, I had three websites up, and was working on a couple of new ones, but coding websites and running them properly takes up a lot of time, and I've become rather lazy since I retired. These days, although I spend almost all my waking hours in front of my computer, I'm usually just messing around (with a big mug of tea beside me and sometimes a cat in my lap).

Thank you for visiting, and take care 'out there', won't you?