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Thanks for posting this Lawrence.

I only met her son, Alaric, a couple of times, once in a book shop in Exeter where we both converged on Perec's A Void and had a little laugh and chat about it. I knew his stuff of course but nothing about his family and background.

Tim

On 13 Feb 2015, at 14:03, Lawrence Upton wrote:

> 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