Elisa Segrave

Saturday. I’m in a ward in the Charing Cross Hospital with Bertha, another woman with breast cancer. All the lymph glands under my right arm have been removed. Bertha, who’s 60 and lives near Heathrow Airport, is talking to a woman with hennaed hair who was bitten by her own corgi, or her daughter’s corgi, I’m not sure which. The corgis are father and son. The son attacked the father and they fought viciously till the corgi’s father’s owner, the woman talking to Bertha, managed to force a hoover down one dog’s throat. She then shut one dog in the garage but the other one bit her in the wrist. Her wrist is poisoned and she has to stay in hospital Several extra days.

Janet Hobhouse, whom I first met in a street in Paris in 1974, was someone who inspired strong emotions. Being with her was like being on a roller-coaster, an exhilarating, intense, even frightening experience – a roller-coaster you often wanted to get off.