Cautiously optimistic is how the Rev Canon Sue Booys is feeling. She is reflecting on last week’s historic decision by the Church of England’s governing body, which voted overwhelmingly in favour of women bishops.

It’s barely a year since the legislation was defeated by just six votes amid bitter recriminations and both sides are still licking their wounds.

Hence her muted reaction, despite being a strong supporter of the ‘winning’ side.

Quoting the Archbishop of York, who has warned against cracking open celebratory bottles of champagne too soon, she joked: “Mine isn’t even in the fridge but I’ve definitely taken it out of the wine rack.”

For the past eight years, she has sat on the Church’s ruling body, the General Synod, giving her a front-row seat to the, often heated, discussions.

She said: “People have been unpleasantly rude about the other point of view and that has been, at times, uncomfortable to sit through and demeaning.

“If you look at the life of Jesus, he was about solving problems and accepting of all the people he met and that’s what I try to be mostly.

“But for some people when they feel very strongly that others are going in the wrong direction, they feel a strong compulsion to call them to order.”

The Rev Canon Booys is also Rector of Dorchester, a position she was appointed to in 2005.

That puts her in charge of Dorchester Abbey plus its team of 13 churches in places that include Stadhampton, Warborough, Toot Baldon and Drayton St Leonard.

And she was made an honorary Canon of Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral five years ago.

She was one of the first women to be ordained as a priest, in 1995, after training on the Oxford Ministry course.

A life working in the church was a childhood dream but the reality is strikingly different to how she imagined.

“When I was 13, I wanted to be a vicar’s wife because all my role models connected with the church were vicar’s wives.

“It never crossed my mind I would be a vicar myself.”

While in sixth form, she learned there was a debate going on about women being ordained and she remembers being “very interested and excited about that” and writing a piece about it for her local parish magazine.

She studied medieval and Tudor history at Bristol University, went into teaching and married Richard, an engineer who works in Wantage and is district commissioner for Thames Chiltern Scouts.

The couple, who have been together for 35 years, have three grown-up children — David, 30, who works in the film industry, Jenny, 28, a surveyor and Luke, 24, an actor.

When she started training to be a priest, just three in her year group of 13 were women and of those, she was the only one planning to be ordained.

It was during that time the first episode of the TV comedy series The Vicar of Dibley was broadcast, bringing women vicars into the public consciousness.

She said: “The late Canon John Fenton, a Professor at Oxford, said ‘This will do more for women priests in Church of England than anything else,’ and he was right.”

She was ordained in the lofty surroundings of Christ Church, in front of her husband and children, the youngest at the time being just six years of age.

She recalled:”It has lots in common with that sense of being married.

“My husband said afterwards ‘Gosh, it almost felt as though you were marrying someone else.’”

She acknowledges the pressures of being a vicar, let alone a rector and canon, are often difficult to balance with family life.

“My family has been and is immensely supportive but it’s very hard not to answer a ringing phone when you are in the middle of a family meal.

“It is one of those things that is infuriating for my family when I do insist on answering.

“If you have a calling to do something, you do it to the best of your ability.

“If you are called to be a priest and a mother and a wife, you have to work out what that means.

“To some people, it means differentiating their mother time and for others, finding ways where the two can overlap.

“For me it means having a mobile phone that is only for my family and answering the phone in the rectory always when I am at home.

“If I am here, I am absolutely here and absolutely around.”

Has she ever suffered from a crisis of faith?

She said: “I grew up in a household where faith was, in a gentle way, taken for granted.

“I went to Sunday school, so I learned all the stories from an early age.

“At university, I had my downs as well as my ups, then from 1980-1991, there was a push-and-pull or game of hide-and-seek between God and I about whether I was going to be ordained.

“There was a time where I felt as though someone had picked up all the pieces of my life and thrown them on the floor, like a jigsaw.

“I have fallen out with the Church more often than I have fallen out with God.

“I have plenty of time for God and Jesus but sometimes get very impatient with the church but mostly, I dig in and get stuck in.”

The year she was ordained as a priest was only the second where women had taken on that mantle and some parishioners were unconvinced by this turn of events, as she explained.

“Twenty years ago people would openly refuse to allow a woman to conduct a funeral service.

“People wrote letters to the church warden saying I shouldn’t have been appointed.

“It’s very different now. On the whole, people are still a bit surprised but rarely openly offensive about finding a woman priest.

“But there are still some people who genuinely and honestly are convinced in their heads that it’s right that women are priests but in their hearts they can’t quite accept it. They grew up expecting priests to be men and I don’t think they can help that “On the whole, my attitude has always been that I am Sue Booys and I am priest to the best of my being and I hope that’s what will make people realise it’s OK for women to be priests not because I argue and debate.”