Isabel

For her 70th birthday event at la maison aux quat’ saisons in Oxfordshire I wrote a little piece to go in the book and I tried to find it today, but couldn’t.  It was the first time I put in to written words how I felt about her.

She and I met over 30 years ago when she was pregnant with her 4th son.  We were both studying for an ‘Advanced Diploma in History Teaching’ at Wall Hall College of Higher Education in Hertfordshire.  She lit up the room.  I remember fiercely wanting her to be my friend.

It was a slow friend seduction.  She was busy with a young family, a full time job and all her other various money making enterprises, but we met once every month or so and we just talked our souls off.  Unlike, with many of her friends, I never did stuff with her, never went on holiday with her, although FH and I did hire her villa in Umbria one summer.  I just loved talking to her and hearing her take on everything.

She lived life to the full and when she got fed up of teaching she went to Birkbeck and got some post graduate qualification in psychotherapy – I am not even 100% sure what it was, but she counselled young people in schools and ran evening sessions at Birkbeck and gave supervision to macmillan nurses.  She lived in this enormous house in Luton which she decorated with expensive and not so expensive antiques and she took in paying guests which she loved and which gave her the resources to travel extensively in her later years.

She wasn’t exactly a go to in a crisis friend, but she gave me some excellent advice, on one occasion over the phone on Christmas Day when I was very upset.  She was also unshockable which is a plus.

Over the last year, after her diagnosis and as she became increasingly bedridden I saw her more and more frequently.  We talked as we always had – frankly, freely and analytically.  That time with her was a precious gift.

I saw her the day before she died.  As she lay sleeping I read her cards.  There was a beautiful card from a girl called Alice who lived on a boat and was writing to thank Isabel for the comfort she had given her mother when her parents were going through a split.  It  was beautifully and sensitively written and filled me with overwhelming emotion.  When Isabel woke up, I commented for the billionth time on how amazing it was to have been loved so dearly and to touch so many people’s lives in the way she had.

Amazing people are not always easy.  They would not be amazing if they were.