Rubie Richards in St Nicholas Hospital gardensLife is made up of a patchwork of moments, as told to Lesley Bates

There's not many people that can say the course of their whole life has been affected by a five-minute BBC broadcast - but Rubie Richards is one of them.

She was a teenager about to leave school during the war years, but the memory of that broadcast and the effect it had on her is still clear.

Keen to do her bit for the war effort, she happened to hear a talk on Woman's Hour in a series called Backs To The Land about gardening and dairying apprenticeship schemes for women.

"In that moment," she recalled, "I had a vision of myself, resplendent in breeches and sports shirt elegantly hoeing a garden bed, or perched in an apple tree nonchalantly gathering the fruit."

A month later, she found herself, breeches packed, on the train to Wiltshire and Woodyates Manor, near Sixpenny Handley, intent on becoming a lady gardener.

Little did she know that her afternoon off, spent having tea at The Moonrakers in Salisbury, would be her first introduction to the city that in late retirement Rubie would make her home.

Two years ago, she moved to St Nicholas Hospital in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral from Portsmouth, where she was Honorary Secretary of the Friends of Portsmouth Cathedral, and where she first met the Rt Revd David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury, then canon residentiary, and his wife Sarah.

It is because of her strong associations with both church communities that she decided, when she came to write her memoirs Patchwork of a Life, that any profits would be divided between the Friends organisations at each diocese.

Rubie would probably say that "memoirs" is too grand a description of her book, pointing out that it's made up of moments that have shaped her life.

But Sarah Stancliffe says in her foreword: "Good patchwork is made up of small, separate pieces, each worth looking at alone, but infinitely more interesting when joined together," and she's right.

Some of these moments have seen the light of day before as broadcasts on Woman's Hour.

Rubie was with the Children's Society for 20 years after she trained in social work, starting as a home advisor and then working in fostering and adoption.

"I loved doing adoption work and getting to know people," she says.

"It was a huge responsibility saying someone is or isn't right for fostering."

While there, she took herself off to Wales for a week of solitude,

"I wanted to climb Snowdon on my own and ended up having an enormous adventure," she says. "I thought I'd write about it and send it off."

Eventually, she was called into the BBC's Manchester studios to audition for talks producer Geoffrey Wheeler

"So I bowled along and he shut me in this glass box," she laughs.

After a few minutes of listening, he stopped her.

"He said 'you're a natural' and asked if I had written anything else."

She got eight and a half guineas to tell the story of her Snowdon adventure - more than a week's salary - and after that was to make regular radio broadcasts.

The pieces of the patchwork, she says, are the accumulation of bits of writing from the last 50 years.

Some recall her years running a conference and training centre for the Children's Society in Warwickshire and others her time as lady warden of a retreat in Portsmouth. The church has always been important to her.

"There's one rule here - go to prayers every morning. I thought it was a pity on Sundays because the Cathedral is so close, but then we'd have to leave some of the old dears behind and that would spoil the sense of community.

"This is such a happy place because we pray together every morning so we're not going to fall out with one another half-an-hour later.

Patchwork of a Life by Rubie Richards is available, price £5, from SPCK Bookshop, Sarum College and Ottakar's Bookshop.