Introduction

Jane loved an audience. The ability to reach out to a really extensive audience via the internet would have pleased her greatly. She loved drama and had achieved bronze, silver and gold medals in drama from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Writing was a passion throughout the eighteen years of her life (October 20, 1974- March 15, 1993). She made up her first story at the age of two, about animals at play. I recorded her making up the story as she went along, sitting on the red and gold patterned hall carpet one winter’s afternoon in 1976. When she had finished she paused, looked at me and said, in her deep dark voice, ‘Did you like that, Dad?’ I said Yes, I did. A lot.

She seemed to want to write at every opportunity. Poems, short stories, reflections, thoughts, early attempts at novels… She would read the latest chapter of her first ‘proper’ novel, The Dream of Lorn in the Forest Tegoth, to her friends as she rode to school across South London on the top of the 194 bus.

Her friends – all about the ages of fifteen or sixteen – would listen excitedly to the next installment as she wrote it. The first chapter of that novel is on this website.

When it came to the shock diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) on November 1st, 1992—we had just had a wonderful family celebration of her eighteenth birthday with friends and relatives coming from far and wide—it was natural for her to want to keep a diary. Extracts from that diary, a small red notebook measuring six by four inches, covering entries from November 1992 to March 1993, are presented here, along with her last entry scribbled on an A4 sheet in thick black felt-tip pen (she was too ill to grasp anything else) and fixed to the bedroom wall.

This is not the first time extracts from Jane’s diary – ‘a moving and honest piece of knowledge’ in the words of an NHS  chaplain – have been published. Within days of her funeral, on March 23, 1993, extracts from the diary, read out at her Requiem Mass, were photocopied and circulated in their hundreds, unbeknown to the family. We were advised so many were printed that the church photocopier broke down. Extracts found their way as far as Spanish radio, New Zealand, Ireland, local London radio, the offices of the Daily Mail, and reached the headquarters of ITN news. Later, these extracts were officially published in the Weekend Magazine of the Mail on Sunday, in the Daily Mail, the Catholic Herald, The Tablet and Spiritual Development in Schools. A film director approached the family about making a television film of Jane’s life for the BBC.

Jane was a natural writer. It is not difficult to spot the influences on her work throughout her eighteen years: C. S. Lewis, J. R. Tolkien, the Brontes, Homer (The Odyssey), Virgil (The Aeneid), Frances Hodgson Burnett, Eleanor Farjeon, family stories and legends… and, no doubt, the countless films she saw in local cinemas and on television. Nor should the influence of the wild Devon landscape of Dartmoor and the beautiful rugged terrain near Kilkee, County Clare, in the West of Ireland, be under-estimated, where Jane spent family holidays. Or, for that matter, Celtic mythology, poetry and Irish folklore.  She would almost certainly have agreed with Walter J. Ong:  ‘ There is no way to write unless you read, and read a lot.’

I think, at the age of fifteen,  Jane wrote the kind of novel she’d like to see in a bookshop or on a library shelf. Something she herself would like to pick up and read. What comes through is an original young voice with a distinct way of looking at the world. If she had lived she would have written much, much more.

This website – a work-in-progress – is a tribute to the person she was and what she did write, often in  challenging and distressing circumstances. Some biographical notes give context to the story. At the time of her death she had been offered places at Exeter, Reading and Royal Holloway Universities. Throughout the ordeal of the last months of her life—the lumbar punctures, the blood transfusions, the biopsies, the hospitalisations and invasive hospital check-ups, the relentless chemo and radiotherapy—her attitude and demeanour was cheerful, optimistic, ever-hopeful. When she had a moulded perspex mask made to protect her head during sessions of radiotherapy she joked that, when she had recovered, she’d wear it to the first party she went to.

Jane was greatly supported by family and friends. Her writing encapsulates her thoughtfulness and courage. As you read and, maybe, ponder the meaning of such a life – notwithstanding her last illness – picture Jane as the vibrant, fun-filled, thoughtful, passionate, brave, determined and affectionate person she was.

October 20, 2021