Sophie Gee

She's actually born in London, but then the family move from Ealing, which is where she's born, to Leah Breton, which is southwest village of Colchester.

And it's on the edge of the Essex marshes.

So the reason I want to mention this is that the novel of today is not set in Essex on the marshes.

But it's very, very steeped, as it were, in her own sense of what it meant to grow up on that kind of, in that estuarial landscape, Jonty, on the edge of the sea and also on the edge of London.

I mean, we're in London.

We're in Dickens territory here, where it's like the opening of Great Expectations, of course.

We're in kind of Conrad territory, I think, Heart of Darkness.

So she's really, you know, in Tiger in the Smoke, but actually all of her writing before that, she's really using these landscapes in a really powerful way.

And in Essex, the family lived in an old wreck, Jonty.

They lived in a Georgian rectory.

And it became an open house to a circle of writers and journalists.

And Marjorie Allingham got writing out of the gate.

She actually was paid at the age of eight for a short story that was published in one of her aunt's journals.

So it was a big literary family.

She ends up going to school in Colchester, and then she goes to boarding school in Cambridge.

And

Jonty, did you pick up on this?

She had a stutter.

Oh, I'm surprised.

Normally that's absolute catnip for you and rightly so.