From glass blowing to meringue making, the road to the mayor's parlour at Peterborough Town Hall has been an interesting one for Pat Nash.

Pat (72) enjoyed a busy and varied career before retiring 12 years ago, and clearly earned the respect of her long-term employers British Sugar, as it is thanks to them she was made an MBE in 1995.

Now, in her retirement, she is devoting herself to the community of Peterborough.

She is in her fifth year as a city councillor, and last year was deputy mayor.

But despite her dedication to the city, it is not her native home town – she moved here in the mid-'70s when British Sugar relocated out of London.

More than three decades later, she has come to think very highly of her adopted home.

"I think we are very fortunate that we have some wonderful facilities in Peterborough," she said.

"We have a magnificent cathedral right in the city centre, we have lots of countryside all around us. We have Ferry Meadows, which is quite wonderful, we have the rowing lake, we have the Nene Valley Railway, we have Central Park.

"We have a good selection of shops, we have a good selection of outlets of traditional foods and all the new foods coming in. There isn't anything I dislike about Peterborough. I don't think I would have stayed for 34 years if I hadn't been happy here."

Pat spent her formative years in London, having been born in St Pancras hospital in 1935.

She lived in the capital all through the war, being too young to be evacuated.

Her house was bombed three times, and although she lost school friends and some pets, Pat was lucky enough not to lose any family members during the war.

"I remember being taken down to the underground and to the air raid shelters. I don't really remember it fully but it's there, and also when I was in school, we were rushed out and put into the shelters," she recalled.

Pat left school at 15, and her first proper job was as a glass blower for a firm that made surgical equipment.

However, it did not end well.

"I got the sack because I made myself a little elephant," she said. "I got very severely reprimanded and I was told that wasn't the reason I was there and got the sack."

After, ahem, parting company with that firm, Pat went to work for Shandos, a photographic company.

She worked developing photographs, at a time when pictures were still painstakingly coloured by hand.

"If you were doing a wedding, you had pieces of the bridesmaids dress and pieces of the flowers and you had to then hand colour the wedding pictures," she said.

Drawing on this experience, Pat then got a job with British Sugar as a photographic librarian.

She stayed with the company in the PR department until her retirement, and her job saw her travel abroad and visit countless agricultural shows and exhibitions.

Possibly the strangest point in her career was making a total of something like 5,500 meringues at shows and fetes across the country in order to promote a product called Microwave Meringue Mix.