I recently found a letter from my mother to a friend

It describes a visit to the open air theatre in Regents Park

My father rather admired the actress Belinda Lee

And as a birthday treat my mother took him to see

As You Like it as this was the first time that the actress

Who had previously acted in films had attempted Shakespeare

My mother who had studied his work rather liked her performance

And kept a few newspaper cuttings of the time

She was described as a high speed Rosalind by the Telegraph

The Financial Times noted her to be brown as a nut

As well as being fresh as a daisy and as pretty as a buttercup

I also found a couple of cuttings reporting the death of the actress in a car accident in 1961

What a waste was written in my mothers hand using her lovely purple ink

I thought of Camus and the absurdity of his death in a car accident the year before

My mother was an elegant woman who was gradually worn down by life

Tomorrow would have been her ninety-ninth birthday which I will subtly celebrate

She rests in my home town with my father and both are much missed

But I still have hundreds of her letters and cuttings to remember her by

Which I keep in a velvet lined box along with many family photographs