Diary

Alison Light

It’s four years since my husband, the historian and socialist Raphael Samuel, died of cancer at the age of 61. In the weeks after his death, I wrote about him every day. I filled a boxfile and an A3 ringbinder with anecdotes and observations, physical descriptions and characteristic phrases; I made notes on what he had told me of his childhood, on our marriage, on his work, on what we called his ‘Communist unconscious’; I even listed his shirts. I couldn’t stop writing; I was restless and, at times, euphoric. I accumulated thousands of words. I thought about writing an article. I knew how I wanted it to begin, with a quotation from one of Raphael’s love letters, written when I was coming up to London to visit him, a fortnight after we’d met: