MOIRA gesticulates as she talks. Her hands are long-fingered and expressive and she uses them to emphasise her point. You find yourself looking at them as she talks. They resemble the finely tapered fingers of an artist or a musician, used to holding bows and plucking strings.

Indeed, they give her original vocation away. She tells me she's always considered herself a musician first and foremost. She taught music at various schools for the first decade of her professional life, after training at Manchester's elite Royal College of Music.

But ironically enough, her hands were the very instruments of her musical undoing. They are what got her here today, gesticulating expressively, rather than staying ensconced in the world of music lessons, county orchestras, local symphonias and her beloved double bass.

For it was only when she discovered she had a degenerative ailment which affected her hands that she re-thought her career.

Born with a natural love of anything musical, she was appalled to discover the tendons in her hands were gradually seizing up and forcing her fingers to curve inwards. After a series of operations, she was told they were never going to get better and playing the piano, cello and double-bass was increasingly proving unrealistic.

She gave up work as the head of department at Stokesley Comprehensive School not because she was urged to - quite the opposite - but because she felt she couldn't go on giving her best to teaching music. Her condition was sometimes so painful that she could not play the piano with both hands. The lowest point was selling her beautiful bass, a sale which represented an admission of the inevitable, which left her in floods of frustrated tears.

"It was absolutely devastating because music was all I'd ever wanted to do, but I had to find something else and start over. Music is a way of life for a musician. It's not a job or a hobby," says Moira, 54, who was born in London.

"But looking back, taking up a second career in your thirties is something I would now heartily recommend. You have to rethink your life and it forces you to question what your skills and strengths are. It was uncharted territory so I had to be really clinical about it. I made a list of all the qualities I'd built up as a teacher and they seemed to match the description of a prison governor."

Many of her friends baulked at the idea of her going into the prison service and didn't rate her "hard" enough, whatever that meant.

"It did hurt me when some didn't have any faith. And if they didn't think I was hard enough, they obviously hadn't seen me on school dinner duty," she snaps humorously.

Though her knees were knocking when she first walked into a prison, due to the many misconceptions an outsider has of prison life, she soon realised it was an ordinary world in its own right.

Five prison posts later, she had only governed in male institutions and Moira came for her first all-female experience to the infamous wing a year and a half ago, after working for the Women's Policy Group at Prison Service headquarters in London. "There's a lot more emotion involved with women in prison. Many of them are mothers first and foremost and they tend to try and run their homes and their family lives from in here whenever possible," she says.

"It's hard for many to come to terms with the fact that someone else is looking after the children, not them."

Anyone looking at Moira wouldn't readily imagine her to be a prison governor but it makes sense when glimmers of her personality are revealed.

Meticulous in appearance, she has a natural, maternal authority which compels you to spit your chewing gum out and check your fingernails aren't dirty as you meet her.

She has a "Mary Poppins" style quality which you respond to with a mix of admiration and trepidation on first meeting her. Perhaps it is an authority that's been inherited from being a school teacher and department head.

But the aura is benign rather than austere and beneath it she has a wicked sense of humour and warmth. She sits in the office and discusses the smaller triumphs of the women inside with a slow smile and frowns over bad behaviour or a prisoner's depressing family news, showing the same concern a mother would to its brood, or a teacher would to her class.

Their concerns are her concerns. Whether it be part of her brief or not, she makes it her job to know about the lives and moods of the women inside, to know the changes they are going through, the pains they are experiencing.

Women on the prison floor of the wing shout familiar "hellos" at her as walks past. She's been known to have sat at the ends of prisoners' beds and listened to them pouring their heart out about their latest trauma.

But at the end of the day, she's known to them as Mrs Bartlett, not Moira. It's not a rule she's enforced. It's a line that the prisoners have drawn for themselves for a sense of clarification. Moira may be friendly but she's also their "guv".

Part of her job description is protecting the public from these prisoners and she is a stickler for rules - as she has to be - refusing to deviate from them one jot. No, I cannot bring in any chocolate for the women, it could be laced with anything and I had been told at the gate Christmas cakes were ideal for smuggling in Semtex, and sandwiches could be used for bringing in hash because they were or- ganic.

And she draws her own careful line around her role as both a figurehead in the women's wing and a caring confidante. While she fully acknowledges them as convicted criminals, she is fiercely protective of their privacy.

"Some of the things that have been written about this wing have been utter lies, they've been made-up for the sake of it," says Moira.

And to do her job well, she must remain non-judgemental. A committed Christian, she follows a morality that does not allow for a belief in inherent evil. Men, as well as women, perform seemingly evil acts after a complex process of events, often abuse and cruelty, which lead them to become so themselves.

"How many of us can say categorically that if our husbands beat us up every night for ten years, we would not lash back? I'm not excusing anyone. I'm merely stating that as an open question. I don't think anyone can afford to be holier than thou."

She knows from experience that notoriety and bad behaviour don't necessarily equate, as sometimes others like to think they do.

Most people believe in the prison system but some like to belittle it for treating prisoners with too much humanity. But to reduce the risk of re-offending, Moira points out it is vital the women inside go through a process of talking, understanding and re-comprehending the world outside, as well as their crime. You can only do that by opening them up and gaining their trust. She feels there is so much demonisation around female prisoners because it defies the social stereotype of a male baddie.

"The idea of women in prison is more taboo than a man behind bars. It's always a man."

It is self-evident as she strides down the corridor of the female centre, she's not governing the wing with Porridge-style austerity.

One Asian woman runs up to me, recognising a cultural ally, and starts to tell me what a lifesaver Moira's been in Urdu, interspersed with excited, broken English.

"Mrs Bartlett she is a good, lovely woman. She has done very much for me," she says.

As the only Urdu speaking prisoner, she is isolated from any conversation and cannot build the vital intimacy needed to get through prison life, so Moira's been working hard to relocate her.

Another woman tells me how Moira's helped her out of emotional black holes more than once.

"She doesn't seem happy today," says another, with some concern. "Maybe she's got a lot on her mind."

For all the time Moira's put in studying them, they have studied her too and pick up on the subtlest of mood changes. It's a delicate balance but Moira and the prisoners have struck one of mutual concern and affection. Moira may be their governor and spend hours worrying about their concerns but they, however imperceptibly, are worrying for her too.