Helen Trinca

And maybe in some ways I often wonder whether she would have liked to have been Lisa.

You know, she would have liked that happy, relatively happy family.

The mother, you know, the secure mother who made the clothes and, you know, was sort of, you know, just totally unconditional love for the daughter.

You know, the sort of stuff that she didn't really experience herself.

So I think she had a bit of an idealised version of life, of other people's lives, you know, what other families could be.

What I find amazing about that, and I couldn't agree with you more, is her capacity to observe other people's lives, to sit outside and sort of look at other people's lives and really nail it.

is amazing, really, because as you say, she didn't do the Christmas rush.

She didn't really know anything about working lives, either as a young person or as an older person.

I think she's an incredibly good observer.

And the fact that she can understand relationships, for example, between women and relationship between men and women, that in some ways you wonder whether she'd actually had that experience is, I think, quite remarkable.

She was a great

I like to think of her on the bus in London, you know, in her impecunious days, and she would travel by bus.

And I think either a friend of hers told me, or that might be one of her letters, where she was a great listener to other people's conversations.

She had tremendous capacity for language.

And I think that she might also have been quite a good mimic.

Her sister, Colette,

Sinjin, who I interviewed for the book as well, was renowned as a great mimic, apparently.

So I think language, she had a great ear and she picked up on the very nuanced signals, you know, in the stuff she observed to sort of really build stories.

So, yeah, she was very, very clever, I think, about that.

And maybe it came partly from the fact that she did sit outside, you know, and looked at the world of work and