It’s never good to begin a story at the end but be warned Bessie Colman died because she was short which is terrible.  What is astonishing is that she was born poor and obscure and by the time she died (from being short) more than 10,000 people attended her funeral.  Beginning her story at the beginning is a little tricksy as Bessie tended to claim she was younger than any certificate agreed but she was probably born on January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas.  Her mother, Susan, could be forgiven if she didn’t remember what year it was as Bessie was her tenth child and there were three more still to come.  With that many kids to produce it’s doubtful Susan was ever upright long enough to look at a calendar.

Bessie was born a fine mix of African-American on her mother’s side and part Choctaw and Cherokee Indian on her father, George’s.  After all the kids were born George decided he didn’t like Texas because he found it racist so he went back to what people called Indian Territory but which these days prefers to be known as Oklahoma.  All Bessie’s brothers left home leaving Susan with four daughters under the age of nine and no one to take out the rubbish.  She and the girls were poor enough to make this a perfect story of the American dream spending their days in the cotton fields and their nights straining their eyes trying to read the Bible in dim light.  Bessie walked four miles every day to a one room school in Waxahachie, a small town whose name either means ‘fat wildcat’ or ‘cow manure’  which just goes to show how imperfectly the American Indian was understood.

All the while Bessie dreamed of “amounting to something”. She managed a term at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma but ran out of money.  In 1915, when she was 23, she moved to Chicago where her brother, Walter, a Pullman porter, lived and got a job as a manicurist in the White Sox barbershop.  Her brother, John, returned from the war in Europe and told her that French women were the best; that they were even allowed to fly airplanes.  Bessie decided to become a pilot but no white instructor wanted to teach a black person and no black pilot wanted to teach a woman.  She needed to go to France to learn but as it would be a good idea to understand the lessons she needed to learn French.  Bessie went to language school and in November, 1920 left for France ready to parlez her way to being a pilot.

The flying course at Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudon at Le Crotoy in the Somme took ten months.  Bessie did it in seven. She was now the world’s first licensed African-American pilot.  By the time she got back to America she was quite the celebrity.  She began giving demonstrations of daredevil maneuvers and getting great press.  She even gave a show in Waxahachie where she insisted that there was no segregation at the main gate.  She became famous giving lectures in black theaters, churches and schools but plenty of the white newspapers ignored her and it was not always easy.

Bessie could never quite afford the plane she wanted.  On the evening of April 30, 1926 Bessie and her mechanic went up in her plane for a test run.  Bessie was planning a parachute jump for the next day.   So here is the short bit – Bessie was too short to see over the edge of the cockpit so she took off her seatbelt to lean over and check where she would land.  Someone had left a wrench in the plane after it had been serviced.  The stray tool slid into the gearbox and jammed.  The plane failed to pull out of a dive, it spun and, age 34,  Bessie was thrown out to her death.

There were funeral ceremonies held in three cities.  About 10,000 people paid their last respects at the memorial service in Chicago.  It would’ve been no surprise to her father that Texas took it’s time to pay due respect.  It would be another 73 years before Bessie was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame.  Former NASA astronaut, Mae Jemison, wrote   “I point to Bessie Coleman and say without hesitation that here is a woman, a being, who exemplifies and serves as a model to all humanity: the very definition of strength, dignity, courage, integrity, and beauty.  It looks like a good day for flying.”

The word ‘Blessed’ in front of anyone’s name usually means they were on the saintly side unless, of course, it’s followed by the word ‘Nuisance’. When Hildegard was born in 1098 no one seems to have noted down the date while absolutely everyone knows she died on September 17, 1179. I don’t want to start by suggesting that Hildegard was a Blessed Nuisance, it’s just odd when no one remembers your birthday but everyone can recall when you popped your clogs.

Hildegard was also known as Sibyl of the Rhine which makes her sound like a landlady in a slight Fawlty Germanic boarding house.  In fact she was a top nun founding monasteries at Rupertsberg and Eibingen. Her CV lists her as a ‘writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath’ which was probably both impressive and a bit annoying on convent quiz nights. Apparently in her spare time she supervised ‘brilliant miniature illuminations’ which no one does any more but which involved lighting up very small buildings to music.

Hildegard was raised in a family of ‘free nobles’. (You don’t get these any more but they used to be given away in medieval cereal packets.) Her parents, Hildebert and Mechthilde, already had nine kids by the time Hildegard came along so when she began having ‘visions’ they tried to give her away. In the end they found a nun (who obviously didn’t have any children) called Jutta who was willing to take her away and raise in a place with high walls and heavy prayer commitments. Jutta also had visions so the two got along famously seeing things no one else thought were there.

  
Everyone decided it would be nice for Jutta, Hildegard and their invisible friends to be walled up together in a small room with just one tiny window. Just to show everyone what fun this was, a priest held a rather cheery funeral service while the bricklayers shut them in. Soon Hildegard was learning how to play church music and having a great time while Jutta dealt with take aways being sent in and less than holy waste being sent out. Hildegard must have been aware that isn’t easy for two women living together in box room for she began doing apothecary work devising a marvellous recipe for relieving wind.

The sad part - Jutta died. The good part - Hildegard came out of her tiny starter home and took over the nunnery. Clearly a little twitchy to travel, she asked the boss bishop if she could move the nuns to Rupertsberg. He said no and Hildegard immediately went to bed saying God had paralysed her because he was so unhappy with the decision. Why it was like a miracle because soon the girls were all off to Rupertsberg. Soon it was visions a-go-go as Hilde alternated between being too poorly to help around the place and busy writing down words sent from God.

Hildegard began writing and in fact, was the first person in the world to think of The Morality Play.   This is like any other play except the audience is supposed to feel bad at the end. One of her better known works is called Ordo Virtutum or Play of the Virtues which was packed with lessons and probably not all that many laughs. The play has parts for “the Anima (human soul) and sixteen Virtues”.  There is also, rather pleasingly, a speaking part for the Devil. Given that there were twenty nuns in the convent this must have left two of them without parts to do the stage management. Hilde was no fool.

The tunes she composed are what is known as “monophonic.” Even saying the word “monophonic” suggests something not entirely toe-tapping. It means a composition with just one melodic line. A bit like a medieval version of Justin Beiber. She also wrote a cycle of songs called the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. Again we’re in that monophonic area but apparently the tunes were soaring and considered cracking at the time. About seventy of her tunes are left behind which is about as many as any medieval composer ever managed before dying of something preventable.

Being a polymath she also wrote at least seventy poems and nine books. There are also a hundred letters but there may have been more as any correspondence with trades people has been sadly lost.  Perhaps her most interesting oeuvre (apart from the books of visions which frankly, go on a bit) were her volumes on the natural world.  Both Physica and Causae et Curae look at nature including big stuff like the cosmos and smaller stuff like stones. She the Anita Roddick of her day being very interested in the health giving properties of naturally occurring plants and animals.

By the time she was middle aged everyone must have thought she was too clever by half at which point Hildegard invented an alternative alphabet. Anything alternative seems to have been a little out of her normal sphere as she was quick to condemn what she called “the misuse of carnal pleasures.”  Despite a strong streak of the prude there is no question that Hilde was a corker for her time. She preached when women hardly spoke, she wrote when no one else had thought of it and she was New Age before they had even finished with the Old one. Blessed.

The irony for artists and writers who wish to be avant-garde or ahead of the game (a mode of life recommended for any creative wanting to be remembered) is that the ideal time to do so is behind us.  Early twentieth century Paris was terribly avant-garde with artists turning urinals into important works of art (Marcel Duchamp), painters deciding everything looked better in cubes (Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso) and writers who liked nothing better than popping into a salon (literary not hair – Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder).   At the heart of all this desperately forward thinking was an American woman called Gertrude Stein and at Gertrude’s own heart stood Alice B. Toklas.

 
Alice was born in San Francisco, California in 1877.  She grew up to study music and in 1907 went to Paris.   On her very first day she met Gertrude Stein.  Gertrude was also American and brilliant.   So brilliant that she spent all her time saying clever things to other clever people.  This devotion to the intellect left her very little time to do the cleaning or check whether the milk had gone off.   Soon Alice was busy about the place being Gertrude’s cook, secretary, editor and, presumably when she wasn’t too tired, her lover.

Wives in history so often get overlooked.   It is a little known fact that Karl Marx would never have written Das Kapital if his wife, Jenny, hadn’t been fed up with their own lack of Kapital and not being able to feed the kids.   Alice was in effect Gertrude’s wife and enabled her to be brilliant at all hours.  As Alice once said of a successful night of salon chatter -  “This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her 10 years to understand.”

Gertrude’s life in Paris was full of creativity and critique which left Alice getting the croissants in and entertaining the wives of great men who came to call.  Indeed had she written her own memoirs she intended to call the book ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With’.   It wasn’t all fun.  Picasso may have thought his lover, Fernande Olivier, was worth painting sixty times but according to Alice she was ‘not at all amusing’.

Gertrude’s intelligence didn’t stop her going through a less than attractive period when she thought Adolf Hitler was good for world peace.  Despite this hiccup she and Alice nobly stayed in France during both world wars.  World War One seems to have been their best war.   Madame Matisse taught Alice to knit while her husband Henri banged on to Gertrude about being a wild beast of art.   Even Gertrude must have got bored because eventually she ordered a truck from America and the two women spent the last two years of the war ferrying medical supplies about the place in the name of The American Fund for French Wounded.  They named the truck Auntie after Gertrude's aunt Pauline, “who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was flattered.”

Although it would be many years before The Village People would make being gay something to sing about Gertrude was the first person to use the word ‘gay’ to refer to her same sex inclination.  Indeed in her story Miss Furr & Miss Skeene, published in 1922, she used the expression a hundred times until it possibly became a tad tiresome.  “They were . . . gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, ... they were quite regularly gay.”

They were also, quite possibly, regularly stoned.   After Gertrude passed away to the great salon in the sky Alice published her own literary memoir under the title The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.  The artist, Brion Gysin, provided her with a recipe for 'Haschich Fudge,' which he described as “an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.” The DAR or Daughters of the American Revolution is an American women’s group of eye watering conservatism who might well have been enlivened by the mix fruit, nuts, spices, and cannabis. Today Alice is remembered for her enlivening cakes and indeed some say that the slang term ‘toke’, meaning to inhale marijuana, is derived from her last name.

Alice and Gertrude parted in 1946 but only because Gertrude died.   Alice carried on gamely writing recipes until she passed away in poverty, aged 89.   She is buried next to her beloved in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  In keeping with a life dedicated to supporting her partner, Alice’s name is engraved on the back of Stein's headstone.

            The trouble with a lot of women in history is the minute you find one whom you really like some stuffy historian will shake his head and declare, “Oh her!  She didn’t really exist, you know.”   This occurs most frequently in the category of females known as ‘The Tough Cookie’ because there is nothing more annoying than a bold woman who becomes a hero.
            Take, for example, the first known person to have a false leg.  A few thousand years ago someone put together a splendid collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns called The Rigveda which pretty much means ‘Praise Verse’.   (If you haven’t read them I think you can be forgiven as they were written a few thousand years ago and poetry trends are tricky to keep up with.)  Amongst the people praised in the poems was a Queen who lost her leg in battle.  This is the kind of dreadful event that might make anyone think the fighting game was up but instead this regal warrior had the world’s first prosthesis made to replace her limb. This fledgling false leg was made of iron so I can only imagine she may have sat a little skew-whiff on her horse but nevertheless she carried on battling.
            History being what it is we don’t know the name of the iron leg lady but we do know about Kublai Khan’s niece.  Kublai was the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire in the latter part of the thirteenth century.  This was quite a job covering as it did one fifth of the world’s inhabited land.  Kublai needed people he could trust and, according to the great traveller and tell all Marco Polo, that included his niece Princess Khutulun.    Apparently she was his finest fighter and could do things with a bow and arrow that could literally have your eye out.   Naturally Kublai wanted her to be happy so he tried to get her to marry.  The Princess, however, seemed to like fighting and wasn’t crazy about domestic chores so she declared she would marry according to the following simple rules - any man who could wrestle her and win could claim her as his bride.  Any man who lost had to give her 100 horses.  Princess Khutulun concluded her life unmarried with 10,000 horses.
            All this brings me to Maid Lilliard and The Battle of Ancrum Moor, a battle fought in 1545 during the War of the Rough Wooing, which sounds like a description of so many people’s teenage years.   Henry VIII wanted his son Edward to marry Mary Queen of Scots.   I don’t know why.   Edward was only eight and Mary was three so even the chances of them playing nicely together would have been slight.  Anyway, not the man in history most gifted with the sensibilities of romance, Henry decided to send troops to knock the Scots into giving up their Queen to marriage.   In the name of love many Scottish places were razed and pillaged.
When the English attacked at Ancrum Moor it is said that Lilliard’s lover was killed and this made her more than a touch irritable.   She attacked back and after some monumental fighting the Scots won the day.  Go to the Scottish Border town of Lilliard Edge and near Dere Street you will find a monument to that ancient fury that tells you everything you need to know about what women can be like if provoked.   The inscription reads:

Fair maiden Lilliard
lies under this stane
little was her stature
but muckle was her fame
upon the English loons
she laid monie thumps
and when her legs were cuttit off
she fought upon her stumps.

            Is it true? I don’t know but I do know I wouldn’t have wanted to challenge the maid on anything she claimed.

This naughty schoolgirl attitude to life led Stella to become a novelist, a poet, a short story writer and a journalist.  In 1932 she wrote her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm.  It was great which is lovely but sadly it rather overshadowed the twenty-four other novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry she went on to write.  Perhaps if she had known that she might have stopped writing after the first book and taken up some other hobby.

Stella was born in 1902 to the delightfully named Telford Gibbons and his wife Maude Phoebe Standish Williams. You don’t get many Telfords these days and Stella may not have been thrilled with hers.  Her father, the Telford in question, was a doctor whose kindness to his patients allegedly led him to take laudanum and whiskey, a combination even out-of- date physicians rarely recommend.

Sadly, his self-medication meant he was never likely to be put up for either Father or Husband of the year. It is said he once threw a knife at his wife which, even with Stella’s love of things rhyming, can’t have been fun for the family. He was also a womaniser who was ‘unfaithful with a number of governesses’ which is commendable only in that he seemed to pick a target for his dalliances and stick to it.  When Stella’s mother, Maudie was 48 she had had enough and died.  Telford did not take well to this and, ever the family man, declared at her funeral. “Oh, she was a bitch! She never cooked properly! What I had to put up with!” before dying himself later that same year.

With a pleasingly dysfunctional childhood to kick-start her creativity Stella went on to become a writer first for the Evening Standard newspaper and then The Lady. Stella began publishing poetry which Virginia Woolf is said to have liked.Perhaps spurred on by this favourable critique Stella began work on a novel originally entitled Curse God Farm.  Her Lady colleague, Elizabeth Coxhead, probably thought the title a tad vulgar and came up withCold Comfort Farm. The book was a hit, Stella left and Elizabeth took her job so everyone got something. 

Everyone raved about Cold Comfort Farm and Stella won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse and forty quid at the Institute Français in London.  Sadly fame can be a curse and a possibly jealous Virginia Woolf turned on her fuming,  “I was enraged to see they gave the ₤40 to Gibbons . . . Who is she? What is this book?”

This book was one of the funniest books of all time. So funny it overshadowed all of Stella’s other work which, rather dishearteningly, simply  ‘sold solidly’.  Stella married, had a baby, wrote more, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature but it is Cold Comfort Farm that endures as a legacy. They say the book and the notion that there might be “something nasty in the woodshed” was based on the offices of The Lady which may explain why many modern contributors write from home. 

 

There is a lesson in the life of Hester Thrale for any woman who wishes to be remembered for her own talents – don’t make friends with famous men.  It is all anyone will talk about.   Hester was friends with Samuel Johnson who knew enough words to write a dictionary and who some people say was the ‘most distinguished man of letters in English history.’  Anyone who mentions Hester has to talk about clever clogs Sam which frankly casts a shadow over her own brilliance. 

Hester was very bright.  This was clear from the beginning when she did the one smart thing every woman should include in their life – she was born into money.  Hester (née Salusbury) entered the world in Caernarvonshire, Wales on January 16, 1741 somewhere ‘between 4 and 5pm’,   The Salusbury family may have been one of the ‘most illustrious Welsh land-owning dynasties of the Georgian era’ but clearly not one of their clocks was in great working order.      Hester’s lineage was impressive.  She was the 8th great granddaughter of King Henry VII on both sides on her family line which suggests a long history of relations who didn’t bother with a very wide social circle. 

Hester married a rich brewer called Henry Thrale who can’t have had enough to occupy him at the office as he had both the time and the energy to provide his wife with twelve children.   If anyone wonders why it wasn’t Hester who was the most distinguished person of letters in English history they might like to consider what a dozen children would do to anyone attempting a cogent thought.

Hester and Henry lived in a big house in south London called Streatham Park where they made the happy discovery that London Society can be bought.  Soon Henry’s money enabled Hester to make friends with famous literary people like James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith and the young Fanny Burney.  Samuel Johnson became such good friends that he came for a week and stayed for seventeen years.

Hester began keeping a diary called Thraliana (an ‘ana’ is, of course, a collection of miscellaneous information as no doubt Sam Johnson could have told you at some length).  Her diary is now seen as a great place to look if you want to find out about both eighteenth century life and the verbose Mr Johnson but there is so much more to Hester if you look.   Despite her years as a baby production line she retained a glorious zest for life.

After husband Henry sipped his final pint and headed for the great snug in the sky, the newly widowed Hester fell in love with her daughter’s piano teacher, Gabriel Piozzi.  He was a shocking choice.  Not only was he foreign (Italian) but he was, and I hope you are reading this sitting down, Roman Catholic.  Everyone was appalled except Hester who couldn’t stop smiling. 

Samuel Johnson was furious about the wedding and the two old friends fell out.  When he passed away Hester published Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson and her legacy as a Johnson appendage was set in stone.   Hester published her letters, wrote a travel book called Observations and reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany.   She followed in Johnson’s linguistic footsteps but she couldn’t escape his shadow.  When she published The British Synonymy or an Attempt to Regulate the Choice of words in Familiar Conversation critics said it must have been based on work left by Johnson.

Nevertheless Hester lived life to the full deciding, for example, to  learn Hebrew at the age of 65 to “divert Ennui & pass the Summer Months away”.  When she was nearly eighty they say she took a great fancy to an actor nearly fifty years her junior called William Augustus Conway and thought of marrying him.    She died in 1821 and was buried in the churchyard of Corpus Christi Church, Tremeirchion, Wales.   A plaque inside the church reads “Dr. Johnson's Mrs. Thrale. Witty, Vivacious and Charming, in an age of Genius She held ever a foremost Place”.  Not foremost enough, however, to stop Dr Johnson coming first even at the end. 

 

Here is a funny thing about fame.  You may not have heard of Fanny Burney but no doubt you will know Jane Austen.  (If you don’t know Jane Austen then well done for being able to read this.)   Fanny was a huge hit in her lifetime but is not so well known now.  Jane, on the other hand, was not a roaring success when alive but a box office smash much later.  If you love Jane then you should know Fanny for she inspired young Austen and indeed the title “Pride and Prejudice’ was taken from one of Fanny’s novels.

 

Fanny was born in 1752 in Lynn Regis in Norfolk.  The place is now called King’s Lynn which is much the same name but with less Latin.     Both her parents were musicians with her father, Charles, being a very good organist.  Fanny was the third of six children.   She was a book worm and either shy or simply desperate to get away from the noise of the other kids and indeed, the organ.

 

Eventually the Burneys realised there was more to do in London than Norfolk and moved to the centre of town.  Here their house was always full of theatrical types like the actor-manager David Garrick who would pop in show off.   Sadly, when Fanny was ten her mother died.  Charles then married a widow who Fanny disliked.  Unhappy and a teenager Fanny began keeping a diary of her private thoughts.   Soon she found she had ‘an incurable itch to write’ and, when she was twenty-six, she published a novel calledEvelina, in which a young woman rises above the bad manners of her cousins and does what she was born to do – marry a nobleman.  The book was published anonymously because young women of the eighteenth century didn’t want their reputations sullied by naughtiness like writing.  It was such a success that word got out Fanny was responsible and soon many famous people were knocking at her door.  They included Dr Johnson who had already written his famous dictionary.  A useful friend for any writer to know if they ever got stuck.  

 

Fanny’s new place in society was confirmed when Queen Charlotte decided to honour her by making her ‘Second Keeper of the Robes’.   I have no idea what this involves. It sounds like sewing on buttons and keeping things straight on hangers and certainly can’t have been as arduous as being ‘First Keeper of the Robes’.     Nevertheless Fanny’s health did something that occasionally happened to women of the time – it ‘broke down’ and she was forced to go and stay in Surrey for a bit of a lie down.  Here she met a group of French exiles including one General Alexandre d’Arblay who was a delight which was good but penniless which was bad.   Fanny married him anyway and cracked on with her ‘scribbling business’ writing novels and plays to make some money.    In 1794 she suffered a ‘constant bilious attack’ which turned out to be a son, Alexander, who she spoilt rotten.

 

Fanny and the Alexanders went to France where Fanny famously underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic which no one should read about if they are feeling at all light headed.   Sadly both chaps eventually died and Fanny lived out her retirement in an Austen like manner in Bath.   Fanny was ahead of her time berating men ‘who would keep us from every office, but making puddings and pies for their own precious palates!’.  Virginia Woolf called her ‘the Mother of English Fiction’ and clearly it is time that she was famous again. 

 

Cicely was a celebrated actress, suffragist and feminist. All perfectly splendid things today but sadly, she was born in 1872 and grew up during a time when these occupations were unlikely to amuse anyone particularly the Queen. Our heroine did not have the happiest of childhoods. For little Cicely this was a good thing as she also grew up to be a writer and there is little more beneficial to the professional scribbler than a dysfunctional upbringing. She was born in Paddington, London but I have no further details and so am going to presume it was at home and not whilst waiting for a train.

Cicely began life as Cicely Hammill, daughter of a Captain in the Gordon Highlanders (who revelled in the name of Danzil) and a mother (Maude) who may have been less than stable. Fairly swiftly Pater went off to Egypt, Mater went off to an asylum and Cicely was landed with foster parents. She finished her education and with no parents to warn her against it, proceeded down a route many Victorian girls knew to be naughty – she took to the stage.

Cicely joined the repertory company of Edmund Tearle. Edmund was a professional ‘tragedian’ who prided himself on keeping the whole of Shakespeare in his head. Indeed the company once famously did eight (including Saturday matinee) different Shakespeare plays at Blyth Theatre Royal in a single week. For ten years Cicely toured the country playing parts such as Gertrude in Hamlet, Emilia in Othello and one of the witches in Macbeth. The latter role was probably a fairly clear clue that she wasn’t really leading lady material so she started writing plays instead.

Her work was a huge success particularly the play Diana of Dobsons which was produced in the West End by one of London's first actress-managers, the suffragette Lena Ashwell. In their spare time Lena and Cicely campaigned away for women to be allowed to vote with Cicely joining our other great woman of history, the composer Ethel Smythe (you remember. Do pay attention.) to write The March of the Women.

When World War I rumbled into view Cicely wanted to do her bit. She joined the Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit and in 1916 helped nurse soldiers wounded at the Battle of the Somme. In three days her unit treated 300 new patients and yet Cicely was champing at the bit. Despite her skill with a triangular bandage she knew there would be nothing better for the men in the trenches than a bit of Shakespeare.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world Cicely and Lena Ashwell formed a repertory company that toured the Western Front. It was not easy. As Cicely herself explained “The leading lady will wrestle with the mechanism of a refractory curtain while the acting manager collects the properties and the comedian knocks in nails.” The shows were a trial as leading men were usually drawn from the ranks and were often called away just before the curtain went up or only had costumes available in khaki colour. The company were instructed “…owing to the limited dimensions of the stage, the presence of unnecessary furniture is not encouraged… only in cases of extreme urgency is an extra armchair permitted.”

Cicely was a wonderful writer and her novels remain a cracking read. She concluded her life as a journalist campaigning for free birth control advice for women. All great stuff but I shall always see her dressed in her finest on a makeshift stage spouting Shakespeare while all around her war raged.