My godmother

Daphne Helen Randolph was born in 1926, some six or seven months after her best friend from school, my mother, Monica. Mon would tell us how she and Daph first met, when starting at the Perse School Cambridge to which they had both won scholarships. Daph was so petite and slim that she thought Mon looked a lot older than her… they became best friends and shared laughter and fun for the rest of their lives, until Mon died in 1984. In both lives there was sadness and struggle, and no doubt their love and friendship sustained them through those difficult times… We moved from Cambridge to Weston-super-Mare, Daph and her husband John and their children travelled widely, up to Yorkshire, to Australia, to Surrey, Wiltshire… and always Daph created a beautiful and comfortable home for the family.

It was natural that when Mon got married Daph was her bridesmaid….

and when I was born, Daph became my godmother.

Daphne was a wonderful person and some of my earliest memories are of her; when I was less than two, I remember staying with her and her husband Uncle John in their caravan, and then later at their home in Coldham’s Lane, Cambridge. They moved to a beautiful house in Swaffham Prior and we often visited, and sometimes stayed. There was a wardrobe in one of the bedrooms and I was convinced it was the one which would take me to Narnia. Like Daph and my mum, I had a great love of reading from a very early age.

Daph and Mon worked together at the Low Temperature Research station In Cambridge, which is where Mon met Donald, my Dad… but that’s another story!

In their lunch hour they would wander into the town and Daph, the addicted reader would go to Boots’ reading library… and she would stand there and read. She would return to the same book the next day to continue reading, just hoping no-one had taken it out. Why didn’t she borrow the book herself? It was something to do at lunch-time and also it would have cost to borrow the book and in the late 1940’s I don’t suppose pay for secretarial staff was over-generous. I just love that picture of my darling Aunty Daph, standing in Boots, immersed in a book!