Each person’s death diminishes us all, but the death last year of Olga Masters has removed from us, and our literature, a talent that had too little time to flourish.

To speak of too little time seems idiotic unless we understand that this mother of seven, who also had to work part-time as a journalist, was, like so many women of her era, simply not free to sit and write that most solitary of occupations until she was in her fifties. Not for me to judge what she would have considered her most important work, the rearing of a large family or the writing of fiction, though the dedication of this novel is simply: ‘for my children’. I am glad, however, that, in time, she managed both.