Can you describe your situation?

My husband is a curate in the Church of England. That makes me one of a strange breed, a clergy wife! He spent the year in which we were engaged going through the selection process, a series of interviews to assess whether you are suitable for the task and started his training just six weeks after we got married. After three years at college, he did two years of a curacy in Lincolnshire and is now six months into his second curacy in Lancashire. So, in short, I have never really known anything else.

How does this make a difference to your day-to-day life?

I try not to let it make too much of a difference to my everyday life but it inevitably does. It means that wherever we move, people already know who we are and what we do. It also means that people see you in a certain way, shaped by people they have previously known in the same role as you. We are often compared to our predecessors.

One advantage is that it means that people within the church often make a special effort to get to know us and to ensure that we settle in well which is lovely. However, people outside the church often don't know what to make of us. When visiting our house, my sister heard a mum in our street remonstrating with her small son saying, 'if you don't behave, I'll go and tell that vicar and he'll come out and get you!'

I have experienced several cases of people thinking I am obviously holier than they are and that my family must be well behaved. In the last parish we lived in, a friend rang up to speak to me and heard my two children shouting and wailing in the background. She commented, "It's good to hear that even the curate's family isn't perfect' (as if!) As a friend of mine, I had thought that any misconceptions she may have had initially had been long shattered but obviously I was wrong.

I do spend a lot of time wondering what I ought to do. Not what I ought to do as Hilary but what I ought to do as The Curate's Wife. Perhaps I should have invited the whole congregation round for a meal at some time during each post. I wouldn't just as Hilary but perhaps I should as the curate's wife. I give myself a hard time sometimes that I'm not doing a good enough job and that I am letting people down. I don't want the church to be disappointed with me.

One practical implication is that my husband is out at all different times of day and night, sometimes at very short notice. He might be at work at 7am on Sunday morning preparing for the early communion; he might be at work at 11:30pm at a long meeting. He works at weekends, he is a slave to the phone and he goes away for several days at a time sometimes on courses. However, he is around in the daytime and can sometimes organize his day around us a little bit, like organising meetings for 8pm rather than 7:30pm so that he can help me get the children in bed.

What would you want to say to someone who was about to be in the same situation?

Perhaps the most important thing I can say is that it is a very blessed place to be. Full time Christian service is a wonderful and privileged thing. As I have been writing I have been thinking to myself, 'but it's all worth it.' The warmth of the love you feel in a place is amazing and for my husband, his whole job is to ensure people hear the gospel and to nurture those who have heard and who believe. What a job!

There are as many different types of clergy wife as there are clergy wives so don't feel you have to conform to anything. You can only be you and do 'you' things. I would also say that keeping friends who live outside the parish is good, as is making friends in the parish. You will be very lonely if you don't feel you can confide in anyone.

I have found that you have to work hard at maintaining a relationship with your husband that goes beyond two-minute snatches of conversation between him coming in and going out again. I have also had to work hard at my spiritual life. You don't automatically have a vicar you feel you can go to and a lot of the time you are listening to the preaching of your husband. If you have children they are totally your responsibility at church and your husband will be at almost every service which ever takes place, making it very difficult for you to go alone.

What would you want to say to someone who has never experienced this?

I am normal, my children are normal, I don't pray as much as I should and I would like to see my husband sometimes! But really, I don't think there is much I would wish people in the parish understood. People we have encountered have been very aware that we move house and area a lot and go the extra mile to help us settle in. They also know we don't get much money and we do receive gifts every now and then, monetary or otherwise. People are often surprised to learn though that when I say that my husband only has one day off a week, I mean one day in total, not one day plus the weekend!

Can you recommend any resources to people wanting to know more about this?

There are a lot of books that tackle this subject.

"The Curate's Egg", edited by John Martin. In this book men and women working within the Church provide personal accounts of their jobs. Curates and parish deacons attempt to dispel the mystery surrounding their working lives. It was recommended to us at college as the one book to read in our situation.

"Confessions of a Vicar's wife", by Jane Grayshon. Jane is a vicar's wife and writes of her experiences of life in a vicarage. It is humorous, sharp and hard to put down.

"Vicar's wife on the move" by Jane Grayshon. This is the follow up to 'Confessions of a vicar's wife' and is about a move Jane and her husband make from one parish to another. Equally funny and clever, it charts the uncertainties of applying for jobs and trying to seek God's will as they look at parishes.

For a real insight into life as a church leader in many situations I also really valued reading books like,

"Ten worshipping churches." edited by Graham Kendrick. Vicars of a variety of churches chart how their church has become more worshipful, what difficulties they have faced, how the congregations have reacted and how God has been leading them forwards.

"Ten rural churches." by John Richardson. This book provides fascinating accounts of different rural churches from the viewpoint of the vicar. The vicars chart how the rural church works, what the problems are, how the working days pan out and what is special about being there.

Catherine Fox, among other things, a vicar's wife, writes a witty and truthful account of life in a vicarage each week in the Church of England newspaper.