The family moved to St Andrews in the Kingdom of Fife for two years where she acquired her love of Scottish folk tales.
Following three and a half years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and winning a major prize, Lines joined a Summer repertory theatre company in Perranporth in Cornwall.
Lines then became an English teacher, working at Fox School in West London providing music for the infants and choir and running the drama club.
A now lost play from the early 1970s concerned children who break into a professor's lab and are shrunk to the size of gnats.
Lines and Roe were subsequently introduced at a party and their working partnership has proved to be prolific and popular.
Lines played a Southern Belle in the BBC production of Mrs Patterson with Eartha Kitt.
Characters included the three enchanters, Baba Yaga and the hut on hens legs familiar from Mussorsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
The poems give a snap shot of life for children in West London in the 1960s including the then recently constructed M4 flyover at Ladbroke Grove.
The Illustrator's husband, Tristan de Vere Cole, was the director of Kenilworth (the 1967 BBC TV serial),[8] in which Graham Lines played Leicester.
Starting with their initial collaboration The Barnstormers (1976), re-published with new teaching materials by ChesterNovello,[11] to Brunel: The Little Man in the Tall Hat (2006) Lines and Betty Roe[12] have had a productive partnership, writing six operas, twelve musicals for children, a pantomime, Dick Whittington (2005) and numerous pieces for choirs.