Vivienne Finch (1946-2000): Recollections and reminiscences.

Vivienne's departure is a great loss to the world; her gentleness and enviable ability to pour softness and compassion on even the most starkly ugly and poisonous is a memory that will forever guide me.

For her to write at all was a wonder. For her to write so beautifully, an achievement of heroic proportions. For her to write so meaningfully, a miracle. For her to write to me, my greatest honour.

I have lost a cornerstone to that small structure — my temple to the finest qualities of life — which comprises those friends who are close and personal, loved and respected, envied and admired, confided and trusted. My world will never be the same, and all of ours is the poorer.

It was my great privilege to have been counted among Vivienne's correspondents, visitors, confidents and friends for almost thirty years. Extinguishing her pain of living also extinguished the vast searchlight of illumination she shed on us all. We have our memories to share and guide us.

Be at peace now.

Your chum, Paul Lamprill.

I first met Vivienne in 1972, when as a young editor I visited her at her home in New Malden, Surrey. Although paralysed from the neck down by a diving accident, she was in charge of her life, organising the builders who were constructing a new house for her family next door. The remote control devices she used to operate the front door and open/close curtains were innovative in the 70s.

Having time on her hands, she had volunteered to type up the novel I was busy scribbling. We became good friends and the following year I asked her to become my business partner, running the publishing imprint Headland which I'd founded in 1969. As well as being very efficient, she helped to produce a British edition of the Dustbook's Directory of Little Magazines, for whom we were then the UK distributors.

In 1976 she decided to move on from being my business partner, and though I saw her work published in a number of place until the mid-80s, we lost touch with each other.

Although my novel was unfinished and abandoned, I never stopped thinking about her, and wondering how she was doing. She died in France, in a place, I'm told, she dearly loved. I miss her very much. I cherish my memory of her smiling face, and through her poetry she will always be alive.

Gerald England.