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Few will know of whom I speak.; but it is a moment I wis to mark.. Dr Rosemary Sumner has died. Rosemary was a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths until her retirement in 1989. I believe she first joined the staff of Goldsmiths in the late 50s. I met her first in the early 90s when he son's VOICES FOR 9 was presented at Royal Court in London She wrote on Hardy, Golding, Beckett, Lawrence and others; and was for many years, I believe, a stalwart of the Hardy Soc She wore her learning lightly; but she had been adept in many languages; and told that, on leaving school, she was recruited to Bletchley Park where they gave her three months intense tuition in Japanese before letting her loose on Japanese signals. I asked her how many she decoded or how may discoveries she made - it was never clear what she did and it may have been quite humdrum -- and she said none; but she would have said that whatever the truth. After the war, she married and emigrated to South Africa; but, after the birth of her only child, Stephen known to the world by his fifth name, Alaric, she separated from her husband - he left her when the baby arrived - and returned to UK. She taught for a while at Neill's Summerhill. She described teaching with the baby in a pram beside her. At some point she spent some months in Sweden on an educational project. She was mother, as I say, to Alaric Sumner, artist and writer (remembered now mainly for Waves on Porthmeor Beach with the late Sandra Blow R A) who died in March 2000 aged 52, a loss from which Rosemary never really recovered. Alaric bought a house with her in St Ives in Cornwall and she moved there in 1990. Then, within a few years, he spent a year away in Leeds studying at the university; and a few years later he had taken accommodation in Totnes, Devon while he taught at Dartington College, some years before its move to Falmouth; and he tended to spend much of his time in Devon returning for weekends and holidays. Throughout the 1990s, Rosemary punctuated her days and weeks by walks, especially along the cliffs to Zennor. Her last years were quite sad and probably lonely. She was increasingly unwell from the early years of this century; and her last professional work was a book review in 2004. I am not sure that she had adjusted to her move from London, seeming quite isolated; it had been Alaric's idea. She read much of the time until the concentration was beyond her; and then she relied upon Radio 3. Put in care by those to whom she entrusted her well-being, she was often left to Classics FM or silence. Few visited. She died in her sleep on Monday 9 February 2015. A date has yet to be fixed for her funeral. L