Green lady is 'accidental politician'
The girl who left home at 17 to live in a squat, paid her way through her A Levels working as a barmaid and then worked her way through university as an Isle of Wight ferry hostess, had not a single politically ambitious bone in her body until she moved to Totnes, which she was once told was the town where old hippies go to die.
After just one week she had re-joined the Green Party. A few months later she was Green candidate for Totnes' county council seat, and a year later she was making history by becoming the first Green ever to be elected on to Devon County Council.
Now she has set her new-found, Totnes-inspired political sights even higher, with the aim of becoming the first Green MP in the country.
The 43-year-old county councillor has been selected by her party to challenge Labour's culture, media and sport minister Ben Bradshaw for his Exeter seat.
Paula, who lives with her husband and three children in Totnes, explained that until her arrival in the town she had never had anything to do with local government or Politics with a capital P.
She said: "In many ways I was a primary school teacher with four children who never had any more ambition than to be nice to the children and give them a good education in a fun situation.
"I am the accidental politician."
She and her husband, Steve, had just set up home in Copland Meadow with their sons Jake, 14, Sam 12 and Indra, four, when she ended up outside the Green Party stall outside Totnes Civic Hall and decided to rejoin.
"I had been a member but I had lapsed. I rejoined the week I moved here when I got stopped at a stall in the High Street. I became involved in developing strategy to increase membership," she said.
"We decided to target Totnes as a county council seat to try to win. They asked if I would like to stand and I said yes."
She said 'deep down' she did not expect to win but one nail-biting election and two recounts later she had ousted veteran Liberal Democrat Geoff Date on a majority of just 17 votes.
Now she sits on the county's environmental scrutiny body, the member development committee, the Devon Conservation Board and the county's procedures committee.
She is a member of the non-aligned group on the county, made up of herself, one independent and a former Conservative turned independent.
She said while a group of three may not sound many, it was only one less than Labour could muster.
"The biggest thing I have found out is local politics is probably more important than national politics because it is providing a service people use every day," she said.
"People discount it and don't vote in local elections but local politics is really essential."
Paula said not only is she in the minority as a Green but she is also in a minority on the county council, as a woman.
But she has a Green hit list she is pushing to achieve, which includes a better public transport system, an alternative to incinerators and an answer to the inequality which sees local people left homeless while rich outsiders snap up homes at prices no one who lives here can afford.
Her work with her party and possibly her own election has also meant success in the job she started before standing for election became any kind of issue.
"The Green Party here was quite small 18 months ago when I arrived. Our membership in South Devon has gone up by 400 per cent in that time.
"I think people are fed up with parties which all sound the same. We offer them a choice. I also think the expenses row had something to do with it."
Paula was born in South London but at 11 years old moved to the New Forest where her father worked as a gardener.
She left school at 17 when she was still in the middle of her A Levels and went off to live in a condemned house in nearby Christchurch, earning money by collecting glasses in a pub until she turned 18 and could work there as a barmaid.
She studied to become an accountant and when that proved boring she moved on to geography and history with the intention of becoming a teacher.
In the meantime she worked on the Lymington to Yarmouth ferry as a kind of 'hostess' looking after the passengers, met her husband-to-be, who was actually studying catering but ironically ended up becoming an accountant, and went on a 'year out' type student tour of Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.
Four years teaching primary kids in Devizes was followed by 10 months in Malta after husband Steve was sent there by his Unilever bosses.
Paula, by then with a one-year-old child, was not impressed with the Mediterranean island which is just 15 miles from end to end.
"It was slightly claustrophobic," she said. On top of that 'it was the wettest year they had ever had'.
When she came back she completed a masters degree in ecology and began a PHD in environmental studies – which she abandoned as a second child came along and she ran out of cash.
So it was back to teaching in Bath and Bristol until February 2008 she decided to quit and come to Totnes 'on a whim'.
Disillusionment over school league tables and the race to try to push primary school children to ever higher standards left her deciding she had had enough.
"I came home and said I'm going to give up my job and Jake said: 'Let's move to Devon' because he likes surfing."
Not that the Blacks were any strangers to Devon. Paula had come on holiday to Bigbury on Sea with her grandmother as a child and the family regularly travelled down to South Devon, Bantham breach in particular, for the sun, when there was any, and the surfing.
"I think I always intended to live in Devon so you could surf in the morning and walk over the moors in the afternoon. I have been too incredibly busy to do either," she observed.
The family ended up in Totnes because it has a railway station and Steve has to commute to Bristol at least three days a week.
"Totnes is unique. A friend told me it was where hippies go to die but it's nothing like that. It's a fantastic place full of dynamic, creative and caring people," she said.
During her student days Paul had been a member of Friends of the Earth, marched for CND and protested over the poll tax.
In Bath and Bristol she campaigned against waste dumping, for safer streets, against an unwanted quarry extension and against the controversial redevelopment of Bath town centre.
She reckons she got her sense of justice and feeling for politics with a little help from her grandmother, a former communist party member and the neighbour of a notorious 'Red' spy.
Winifred Eagles was the neighbour and fellow member of the same rose association as the Bexleyheath Bolshevik, Melita Norwood.
By the time Norwood, who worked for the KGB for 40 years passing on Britain's nuclear secrets to Moscow, was exposed as a spy in 1999, Paul's grandmother had died, explained Paula.
"My grandmother played an enormous part in my life and was probably one of the most intelligent and political people I have ever met," said Paula.
"She was a moral atheist with the real sense of justice. She was a very creative woman and she inspired me to want to help protect this planet."
It was her grandmother's influence which helped send Paula off the Greenham Common to support the women protestors outside the US airbase when she was just 16 years old.
Now at 43 she is hoping to do more than shout about things. She hopes to make a real difference as Exeter's, and the country's, first Green Party MP.
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