Children of Frederick Ernest and Evelyn Weiss

We miss Evie and Elsa very much. The day they went away, Elsa pretended I was the sleeping beauty and she the Prince waking me with a kiss. When that was done,—'now we'll have tea' and then 'the Prince is going to give you a bath'! The whole thing was gone through quite solemnly, ending with going to bed. It was so funny.

. . . [Jancis &] Elizabeth lived at Heugh Folds during part of the war as Cousin Teresa had offered asylum to Elsa there in return for helping run the Mother & Babies Home—(only the babies & some nurses in fact)—which had been evacuated from Newcastle

Elsa asked me if I would move in with her in her Sydenham flat, as my parents were moving out into a residential hotel. Elsa was on her own with the children, she was divorced. I decided to do this and it worked out very well for ten years, then she retired and I went back to live in North London. It meant that I got to know Elizabeth and Jancis very well.

Elsa, too, is not so well. She developed an extremely painful leg if she stood on it or walked more than down the road & felt very despondent about it as 'walking' was really her chief pleasure & recreation. The condition has been diagnosed as 'osteoporosis' which is really arthritis & but she has been given a surgical corset which is proving a great support & help.

Elsa, now 95, has decided that she cannot stay in her own flat over another winter. She is on a waiting list for a residential home in York "Lamel Beeches" run jointly by the Joseph Rowntree Trust & the Retreat. It is for the frail elderly &, having seen it, I don't think it can be faulted. Unfortunately, it has a long waiting list & there is no vacancy for her in sight, so she is going up to Harrogate in October to live with Elizabeth (the eldest daughter) for the time being.

I am more or less living at Elsa's as she has broken her wrist & with her poor sight & also a v. painful leg really can't manage on her own: quite apart from her anxieties re: her move to Harrogate at the end of October.

I think you will know that she has moved from Upper Norwood to live with Elizabeth in Harrogate. However Elizabeth has just had a hip operation & we were unable immediately to make a suitable arrangement for Elsa in Harrogate so she came to me for a fortnight. I took her back there last week & she is staying at a Residential Hotel for the Elderly in Harrogate. She will be there for a month,—possibly longer, until Elizabeth is on her feet again properly. I am glad to say the hotel is proving quite a suitable place & she is finding some congenial souls among many whom she describes as 'sad & collapsing'.

At the end of term, with Erica, who was at Bedales at this time, we travelled to Switzerland with Emily Baker, a friend of my mother's, who had trained as a gymnast with her, and had the most glorious holiday in two different Swiss valleys. [ . . . ] We stayed a night in a hut for the sake of seeing a glacier-clad mountain the next day. I was thrilled, except there were so many fleas in the hut. Erica and I had a wonderful time, damming a stream and generally playing around.

Erica went away. She is sweet & such fun.

Erica was the shortest of the Weiss sisters, quite wrinkly, but very bright in manner. Struck me as having rather a taste for gossip and the scandalous; had a mannerism of a sharp voiced intake of breath—a sort of scandalized "Huh!". She responded warmly to the work I did on family papers, and kindly donated me a large photo of Reid's portrait of RSW, that I had on my living room wall until I inherited our old Clarence Road one.

Erica "House and Garden"

coping with bus disorganisation

attending Yoga classes—(and other)

Care of the elderly (i.e. GW.)

remembers birthdays and other matters neglected by GW [ . . . ]

We have made short visits to Holiday Fellowship Isle of Wight and to Glenthorne at Grasmere (twice) via our good friends at Penrith.

This is no more than we did last year but we should be grateful that it isn't less.

. . . Erica, who is about to be 92, has fractured her pelvis & she & Godfrey (97!) will need more care than is available in their present semi-sheltered accommodation in Leeds. Their daughter Stella lives in Stockport & has found a suitable nursing home nearby where we hope—with fingers crossed—they will settle.

"At 30, Brunswick Road, Withington, Manchester, to Frederick Ernest and Evelyn Spence Weiss, a daughter."

We had family holidays nearly always at Newlands, staying at the same farm [ . . . ] We went on terrific walks whatever the weather, but when I was very little I was allowed to play in the barn, if it was wet, with Charlie, the landlady's grandson.

Let me get back to the subject of school. I started when I was 5 or 6 and went to various nurseries. When I was 6 years old I went to Stockport High School, as did my friend Elizabeth Monkhouse. It meant going by train every day, along with other Disley children—we often behaved very badly—playing hide and seek and travelling in First Class when we should have gone Third.

I think the education we had there was excellent. [ . . . ] I think it must have been, because I am not good at Maths, but when I went back to Croham Hurst as a boarder at 12, I could hardly believe my eyes at the end of the first term when I saw I had got 90% in the Maths exam. At Stockport children tended to do very well at Maths, but not in English. I got 90% two terms running, so I was moved up—which was a bad mistake.

I had already started at Stockport High School, but I was moved to Croham Hurst School then. At first I lived with the Duncan Harrises (Quakers), who were near the school, as a weekly boarder, going back to East Sheen at weekends. Mother took me everywhere! To the British Museum, where I remember seeing the Rosetta Stone, the Tower of London, and all over the place and I greatly enjoyed this.

. . . so I went to Croham Hurst as a boarder (at 7 yrs). There were two other 7 year olds boarding at the same time. We were probably very spoilt and we enjoyed ourselves enormously and I was very happy. Theodora Clark (the Head) was very fond of us and we were the nearest to her own small children that she ever got.

At the end of term, with Erica, who was at Bedales at this time, we travelled to Switzerland with Emily Baker, a friend of my mother's, who had trained as a gymnast with her, and had the most glorious holiday in two different Swiss valleys. I can boast that I walked 25 miles one day (at 7 years old), carrying a rucksack with nothing in it but a bar of chocolate, and was not tired one bit. We stayed a night in a hut for the sake of seeing a glacier-clad mountain the next day. I was thrilled, except there were so many fleas in the hut. Erica and I had a wonderful time, damming a stream and generally playing around. This holiday made me love Switzerland for always. And afterwards I used to play at driving imaginary cows up to the Alps in our garden at home . . . .

They had meant to move me to Bedales later, but I was too happy where I was.

"The maths teaching was very weak" . . .

Mabel left. She is a splendid child, full of enthusiasm & very capable, & Ruthie, especially, will miss her dreadfully.

In due course I took the London School Certificate, hoping to matriculate with it. However, although I got Distinctions in English, French and Latin and a Credit in History, I just passed Maths and Science. As I wanted to go to Cambridge, I had to pass their Entrance Exam in these subjects, 'Little Go', for which I had extra coaching from one of my father's students, and light began to dawn. (We were terribly badly taught!) It was, in fact, an extraordinarily easy exam compared to School Certificate and I passed it.

Then, in 1930, at 16, I left Croham Hurst and, at the same time, my father, who had been Professor of Botany at Owens College, Manchester since 1898—even before it had university status—retired. We sold our Disley house. My parents, who needed to rest and reflect before they decided where they wanted to live, settled in Switzerland, in the Pension des Narcisses, above Montreux. I went with them, the idea being that I would work on my own towards Newnham Entrance.

The Pension was an elderly place and I was lonely and missed my friends and being an important person at school. My parents realised this. By rare good fortune there was an excellent English finishing school two stations up the funicular railway, 'Chatelard', which was still there after the War. It was housed in a converted hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. The pupils were mostly children of diplomats and soldiers stationed in Europe. I was accepted as a day pupil and loved it. The education was excellent, especially in languages, and was what I needed. We played lacrosse, which I had also played at Croham Hurst. Best of all, when the snow came, we skied. I was made a prefect, which meant that I was given a room of my own on the top floor of the building, with a wonderful view of Lake Geneva and the mountains beyond. So it was a thoroughly good idea.

At the end of the Spring Term I left Chatelard a little sadly, but my parents were determined to travel to Italy, where they had spent their honeymoon, including Sicily into the bargain. We started there at Palermo, Syracuse, Agrigento and Taormina, then back to Naples, Rome and Florence. This was a tremendously exciting journey for me, chronicled elsewhere. It resulted in my determination to take the Italian paper in the English Tripos, instead of Anglo-Saxon. You could take either French or Italian or both.

Returning from Italy we spent some of the summer months in the high Alps, my father botanising and my mother and I just revelling in the Alpine meadows. We also went climbing: I remember being dangled on a rope!

My parents decided to move to Guildford. [ . . . ]

My parents found a newly-built house in Merrow, just outside Guildford, which had been empty for a year and was still as dry as a bone, with no sign of damp, and the right size. It stood in a newish road leading to woods and with meadows all around, not far from the small railway station and the main road to London, along which the Green Line bus service ran through Wisley. The name of the road was Woodway, I think. It was lovely and my father created a wonderful garden there from scratch. It seemed ideal, so we moved in as soon as we could, after a stay, most eccentrically for us, in the Army & Navy Bridge Club.

I had a lovely bedroom, where I remember working for the Newnham entrance exam. I was helped by my last teacher from Croham Hurst who came every fortnight to see what I was up to, and by a quaint elderly lady classicist who taught me Latin.

It must have been that autumn that I sat the Newnham exam at home, with a retired teacher invigilating for me. Soon afterwards, just before Christmas, I was offered interviews at both Newnham and Girton. I can still, in my mind's eye, see the crucial letter falling on the hall floor and my mother standing protectively near. I was offered a place at Newnham which is what I wanted.

Nowadays it would be called a gap year or part of one. What was I to do between now and the next October, when I would be going to Cambridge? For one thing, I needed to learn Italian. My grandmother had left her grandchildren money for extra education. The suggestion was that I go and stay with an Italian family. The professor of Italian in Manchester gave us the name of one in Florence that sounded suitable. They agreed to take me for three months. It seemed a big adventure. I travelled out to Italy alone, which was a bit rare in those days, breaking the journey at Lugano to stay with my father's sister, Aunt Linda [ . . . ] She was delighted to have a niece staying with her, but felt that I should have been learning German and that that came first. I believe she was right!

I was never given a house key and was too shy to ask for it. If I went out and the little country girl, their maid, was out too, I had to remain out until she or some member of the family came back to let me in. My parents were horrified when they heard about this. However, one day in the Uffizi I met another English girl, Rachel Walker, who was in Florence also learning Italian, prior to going up to Oxford to read English. She was living with a family who clearly took posh young ladies, and had much better care. I remember joining them on an exciting excursion to Milton's Vallombrosa, and walking into the country with her. It may not have been a good experience meeting her, from the point of view of learning Italian, but I learned an enormous amount about modern English literature, poetry and prose from a highly sophisticated, intelligent girl.

I went up to Newnham in October 1932 and was in Clough Hall . . . .

I enjoyed the first two years of the Tripos very much. The syllabus, 'English Literature in Life and Thought from 1300 to the Present Day', was a tall order which had great possibilities. I suppose it was through its possibilities that I decided to write what was too-grandly called a thesis. Really it was a very long essay on 'English Mystics in the 14^th Century'. It could help me, if it was good enough, in the Tripos examination and, if it wasn't, it would conveniently be forgotten. The point was that once the subject had been approved by the Director of Studies, you were on your own. I had never enjoyed a piece of scholastic work so much and was completely engrossed by it. I read in various libraries, including the British Museum, and was thrilled by discoveries. I still have it, but sadly have lost the bibliography. I was given to understand that it was well thought of and I'm sure it gave me a Class 2:1 in Part One of the Tripos.

In Part Two I had a 2:2 and was glad I managed it because I was certainly very unhappy and, I think, disturbed. For a time I couldn't produce any written work and my tutors were kind and understanding. I guess nowadays I would be offered counselling: I needed it. Where would I be going after this? You could see I was very green! Nevertheless there were good friendships there and in those days there wasn't so much pressure for boyfriends and the sophistications of life. I had one good man friend, John Newton, at Corpus Christi College, who had been introduced to me by his History master at Manchester Grammar School. He was green too. We were very good friends for life. In fact, in due course his daughter became my godchild.

I came down from Cambridge in July 1935. What was I to do? My parents expected me to be a teacher and always had.

I think it was my father, who had always wanted one of us to learn German, who made the suggestion that I should occupy the gap by studying German. He could not bear the thought of my going to Nazi Germany to do so, but we had heard of a cultured lady in Vienna who took in English girls whom her daughter would teach. Thus it was that in January 1936 I set out for Vienna to live with the von Clayborns for six months.

There I met Hans, a friend of the daughter's. He was a professional musician, an organist, and something of a Bach scholar. We fell in love and into a strange, disturbed relationship. Hans had recently been divorced. Apparently, according to the current Catholic law predominating in Austria, he could not legally remarry. What I did not realise until later was that he was also an alcoholic. Towards July my parents came out to visit me and they met Hans and his friends and liked him. They didn't know enough about the situation, but they knew that he had been divorced. They invited him to stay in Guildford, where our home now was.

We intended marriage—at least I did—and talked of him possibly coming to England and getting a job as an organist here, as the question of employment in either country would have been very difficult. What was clear to me was that whether we married or not I would need to work. I decided to train as a teacher and was accepted for the Teacher's Diploma course at Manchester University. Hans came over to us for a month, which went reasonably well, although by that time I was aware of hidden dangers ahead of us. I think he loved being with us.

I went out to Vienna to see him the following Easter and we talked of his coming over to England permanently and looking for a job. Meanwhile, I had finished my training successfully and managed to get a temporary job in the English department of Parliament Hill School, and also to find a hostel in London where he might stay until he found work. It was only then that I realised the reality of our relationship, which was a kind of fantasy.

It was at this point that we happened to be invited to lunch with the Vaughan Williamses. I didn't know Ralph Vaughan Williams, but Mrs Vaughan Williams was a great friend of mine and she had heard that I was thinking about marriage to Hans and thought it might help him to get a job. But it was that lunch party which made me see I was completely in an unreal world. On the way home from it, walking through the woods to Newlands Corner in the Downs, I talked with Hans and saw that he was only concerned to have me there as a sort of salvation, I think, and that I was going to have to carry all the responsibility for practically everything. So I broke with him.

My parents were, I know, deeply shocked that I had done this. They could not understand me letting him come to England only to do this, but they were magnificent in standing by us and, once they knew the full story which I had to tell them then, they couldn't have been more loving, more sustaining. I can remember very well my mother sitting by me upstairs and saying that she had been engaged once, before she was engaged to my father, and she could understand. The situation taught me what real love means. I knew that, although they were shocked and critical, they weren't going to stop loving me and I thought how lucky one is to have unqualified love from one's parents.

went to stay with Godfrey and Erica in Lossiemouth

I came back from Godfrey's and Erica's just before I was going to start at Parliament Hill School. I was lucky to have the job because it was a very good school and there was a very nice staff. I met one of my greatest friends there, Mary Clark, who taught German. That was one of the closest relationships of both our lives. But I was extremely unhappy and found discipline problems very difficult, which I hadn't done when I was training.

At the same time, I started Jungian analysis. I had no idea what I was embarking on, but a doctor whom I consulted about my general distress and dismay said she could not help me herself, but recommended that I see this analyst. I do not know how good a therapist she was, but she certainly supported me through a very difficult time and, when it seemed almost impossible to solve my difficulties by staying on at Parliament Hill, she suggested that I find a job with small children, as I think she felt I was perceptive enough and sensitive enough to manage. I then decided to write to Manchester University to ask if I could take the course they offered in Nursery School work. I asked them if I would have to take the whole exam again. They replied that I could do it if I did all the practical work, essays and required reading, but I need not take the exam again. They rather reluctantly accepted me, because my tutor at Manchester felt sure I'd get another post in another secondary school if I was more settled.

Anyhow, I went back to Manchester and had a very good Nursery School training, first at a school called Lady Barn House, which was a kind of preparatory school, which both my sisters had attended when they lived in Manchester. It had a Nursery class and I learned a lot there. I learned still more during the second half of my course, when I worked in a school in a much slummier district of Manchester, where there was an exceptionally skilled head teacher, who was a quiet, gentle person who knew exactly what to do with children of that age. She became a very good friend of mine for many years afterwards. Meanwhile I was continuing with some sort of analysis, from time to time, with the great Dr Bains [sc. Helton Godwin Baynes], who was in London.

At the end of this course I applied for and got a job in Birmingham at the Edith Cadbury Nursery School, which George Cadbury had given to the town in memory of his wife. [ . . . ] I was in lodgings with a perfectly delightful woman called Mrs Petts. [ . . . ] I had a really fairly full social life as well, apart from my colleagues and the Nursery.

It was very much war time then, it was 1940, and Birmingham was heavily bombed several times, so one was involved in fire watch. Then happily for me, John Newton, with whom I had been corresponding from time to time ever since we'd been at Cambridge, wrote to tell me that he had married and that he was to be moved to Birmingham to work as Assistant to the Regional Commissioner for Defence. I was delighted and they came to look for houses and got one in the same road. Some other friends were also there, which was very congenial. It meant that we had quite a social life, because there were various other people about, whom I'd known at Cambridge.

But the bombing was heavy and sometimes more than alarming. For instance, we were heavily bombed the night before Coventry had it. I also felt I could not stay on at the Cadbury Nursery, because I really wanted to expand in some way, and I put in for a job at Didcot in Berkshire, where they were about to open a wartime Nursery and, instead of appointing nurses to be in charge, they were going to appoint Nursery School teachers. This is because the wartime Nurseries had to take children under three and teachers were supposed to be more capable of dealing with that than nurses.

This was a very big experience for me and also involved meeting someone who became a close friend, Jean Hayes, whose family lived next door. I eventually got lodgings with an elderly woman called Mrs Daft, who was the headmistress of a country village school. We settled down together very well and she always cooked my Sunday dinner and so on, but she was very wise too. She knew the difficulties of working in a small community and serving a rather benighted community of mothers. It was very much a learning experience.

I also had to learn about coping with staff and I think I was very innocent and green. One of my staff turned out to be a kleptomaniac and the people who appointed her knew this, but did not tell me because they thought I would be able to manage her.

I went on working there for about five years. It was a County appointment and some of the time I visited other wartime Nurseries on their behalf.

Towards the end of 1945 I began to think I ought to do something more testing. I'd not really suffered anything very serious during the war and felt I would like to be able to do something to help with relief work afterwards. So I persuaded the County to release me because my job was a wartime reserve job. I applied to the Friends' Relief Service and was accepted for training, beginning in January 1946. It was a very interesting group to be with. People who had been teaching and doing other responsible jobs during the war were suddenly able to be very much themselves and enjoy the training. I think it was one of the very strong points of the Quaker Relief that we were given some sort of training before we went abroad. Also, it gave us the chance to learn German, which we did with a German Quaker. [ . . . ] I have given an account of my work with the Friends Relief Service separately.

I went out to Braunschweig in March 1946 and stayed with the team until July or August 1947. Originally, as I stated, I was working mostly in nursery schools with children and mothers. From Christmas till the time I left I became Team Leader, to my great surprise.

I had decided before I came home to apply to the Mental Health Board, with a view to becoming a psychiatric social worker. I had thought of taking up something like this for many years, even when I was at Cambridge, and was in fact interviewed by one of the senior tutors from the course at Newnham, who was looking for people who might be interested. She was sympathetic, but politely made it clear to me that I'd better grow up and come back later.

I was accepted and started the training in September or October 1947. One of my problems was that I had no home at that point, as my parents had sold their house in Guildford and gone to share a house with my sister Elsa in Sydenham. At this juncture, my friends John Newton and his wife offered me a room in their house and that is where I lived during the course. I had a little furniture which I was able to bring with me, as the room was not used for anything at that time. I had very little anyway and certainly had no wardrobe. We managed to put the Morrison air raid shelter on end and hang curtains round it!

During the course I had two placements, one in the child Guidance Training Centre, which had temporary accommodation in North London, and the other at St Bernard's Hospital in Hanwell, where the teaching was exceptionally good and which was very easy to reach from Chiswick, where I was living. I realise now how absolutely essential it is for psychiatric social workers to have experience of mental hospital work.

In those days the Mental Health Course always sent students to new placements outside London for a short time at the end of the course. I was sent to the Cambridge Child Guidance Clinic. They had been wanting to appoint another psychiatric social worker (PSW) and I put in for that job and was accepted.

After nearly two years, in about 1950, I had the chance to go back to the Child Guidance Training Centre, now established in London, in what had been a hotel in Osnaburgh Street. It was one of the first child guidance centres in the country and quite separate from the Tavistock then. I had liked all the staff that I had met from there, especially Elizabeth Horder, the chief psychiatric social worker, and the director, Dr Moody. I knew, too, that it would involve some teaching of students in training and I liked the idea of that.

Elsa asked me if I would move in with her in her Sydenham flat, as my parents were moving out into a residential hotel. Elsa was on her own with the children, she was divorced. I decided to do this and it worked out very well for ten years, then she retired and I went back to live in North London. It meant that I got to know Elizabeth and Jancis very well.

I remained at the Child Guidance Centre until it moved into the Tavistock building and left shortly before they actually merged. I worked for all those 23 years in the unit which was in the charge of Dr Margaret Collins, a Jungian child psychiatrist. She really was her own self, whatever else she was, and we got on very well.

I chaired the Psychiatric Social Work Executive for the last two years of its existence. When it was dissolved—and I was going to chair that meeting—I remember thinking, well, I can't imagine how I have got myself into this situation.

I stayed on in Hampstead for a while after I retired at sixty and then decided to buy somewhere to live. I went south of the river, so that I could find something near Elsa, and finally found my very nice maisonette in Lee Green.

It was from there that I had so many wonderful holidays. A number of them were with Elsa in the Lake District at Glenthorne, where we tried to go every year, either in September or in early spring. I also had holidays with her with Interchurch Travel.

The first of these was to Taize, a quite wonderful holiday [ . . . ] We loved it and Elsa and I decided we would go the following year, if we could, and stay in a convent—also Benedictine—which had a guest house, which we did. All of that was a great experience.

Also with Interchurch Travel, we went to Santiago da Compostela and the kingdom of Fife, both very good holidays. Apart from that, we visited Rome together. I had already been once to stay with Jan in Rome and went on to Assisi and Florence on my own.

One of the holidays I had, which was for a whole month, was not with Elsa, but with my friends Mary Clark and Margaret Eden. A colleague from the Tavistock, Joan Hutton, let us rent the flat she had in a place called Santa Fiore for a month. That was real bliss. We went to a local restaurant for most evening meals, but otherwise catered for ourselves and lived in this little town, which had no other English people in it. Our Italian had to come to the fore!

One way and another, I feel I have had a lot of good holidays with good friends since I retired. Other holidays were with Mary Woods in Northumberland, around Alnmouth. Mary was at the first training in Manchester.

I have a digestive condition from which many elderly people suffer a "hiatus hernia". It has been quiescent for years but blew up after Christmas & made me feel very tired. It is much better now & manageable again.

I keep busy enough in my way. As one of my elderly neighbours says the business of managing one's even-somewhat-more-restricted life keeps one busy. Certainly I am much slower than this time last year.

I have also been doing quite a lot for the Meeting which has been going through a rather troubled though interesting patch. I have been asked to be an Elder—suitable on the face of it, or should be, considering my years, & have doubtfully agreed. The other Elders are of course years younger. It is supposedly a three year stint but I may not be able to manage that.

I intend to stay on here as long as I can cope but I have put my name down for two 'sheltered' places in or near York. One is for "Lamel Beeches" though I think it may be a long time (indeed, I hope it may be) before I can be described as frail! The Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust has another project in the pipe line which might suit better.

. . . I have been in a somewhat preoccupied & fraught state. First I had a stupid accident, falling over my shopping trolley which tipped up on an awkward pavement & lacerated my legs quite badly. Then as soon as I got back into circulation Elsa (nearly 97 now) came to stay for a fortnight.

I have been having a rather nasty complaint—"polymyagia rheumatica," a muscular kind of rheumatism which seizes you up completely at first but can be cured with steroids & I am making quite good progress now.

... I AM writing to you as the last surviving niece of J B Morrell. I have been dismayed to learn of the possible plan to demolish Burton Croft to build supposedly luxury flats.

As the excellent article about my uncle, which you published (JB: A Croft Original, July 28), showed, he gave so much to York and in so many other ways. He was always a realist, accepting the need for change.

But he knew the best of the old might also be preserved.

I fervently hope that whatever happens, if Burton Croft itself cannot be converted for a suitable purpose such as he would have wished, that the site will be used for a project worthy of him and his beloved city.

Mabel I Weiss,

Heslington Road,

York.

"She had her 100th Birthday in January and that seemed to do her good for a week or so but she had got weaker after that."

Facing us all were 2 Friends from York Meeting, who also I think had responsibilities for the Home where Mabel lived near the Retreat. One of these women opened the Meeting by explaining that it would be like a Quaker Meeting and at the end we would sing the hymn (small organ and organist at the side) and it would start with Elizabeth saying a few words when she felt ready. The whole session lasted about 45 minutes I should think and many people spoke, but with spaces in between and all adding their own memories and perspectives of Mabel's life. It was very touching and people said such lovely things about her—no-one could ask for anything more than tributes like that. All very gentle and sensitive and genuine. Although the room was, of course, not set out like a Meeting House people turned and spoke to us all so it didn't feel uncomfortable. About 50 people there I should think.