Bream completed an arts degree at university, before doing a year's teacher training that left her "with a fixed resolve that teaching was not for me".
[3] In her later years she wrote crime fiction, and finished up her life in a retirement village - an experience she didn't particularly enjoy.
[4] In an article published in the New Zealand Herald in 1991, she wrote of missing contact with other age groups – the girl next door, the man across the road, the people in local shops.
[5] Bream began her writing career by describing her teaching experiences in a "blackboard jungle" city secondary school in the autobiographical work Chalk, Dust and Chewing Gum (Collins, 1970).
She also wrote over a dozen detective stories when she was in her sixties and seventies, most of them featuring The Rev Jabal Jarrett.