 Travelling to her new job, at the age of 14, she travelled alone for the first time in her life.She did not know the people she was travelling to work for and she felt very isolated and vulnerable.In the 1960s after accessing her records from Cherbourg, when she found that many of the letters she had written to her friends at the mission had not been delivered, Hegerty organised a reunion of the girls she grew up with at Cherbourg.