Remembering Sheila Browne

I always feel awkward about my reactions when I find myself grieving for the death of someone I have never met (yes I cried at Di���s funeral, but why exactly is a complicated question) or even of someone I haven���t seen for decades and exchange at best a desultory Christmas card.

Yet I did feel sad today to learn the Sheila Browne, who was once Principal of my college had died at a ripe old age. I hadn���t seen her for many years although she did occasionally get in touch to tell me what she thought of what I had just written (often favourable, but always frank). But she was imprinted in my memory as the Principal of Newnham when I returned there as a fellow in 1984 and made one of those defining transitions into a new style of adulthood (and I don���t need any clever sod to tell me that my grieving is really for myself and my past..).

She also introduced me to some of the ambivalences of academic character from close up.

As I recall, Sheila had been at Oxford, then briefly an academic, before becoming in the days before Ofsted an HMI, and later Her Maj���s Chief Inspector of Schools. I discovered after my Mum died, as I went  through her papers, that Sheila had visited her school and had been gratifyingly complimentary about it. But for me in the early 80s her claim to fame was having stood up to Margaret Thatcher on some educational issue that I now dont fully remember but seemed hugely important at the time.

In public Sheila could be terrifying. She always complained that at meetings the younger fellows would never speak up. She didn���t seem to realise that if, when they did, her response was to say something along the lines of ���I���m sorry, you���re wrong���, it wasn���t a great "come-on" to open your mouth. But if you did persist, as I and some other trouble makers did, you got rewarded with dinner and generous quantities of the alcohol she didn���t touch.

Her dietary habits were in general austere. At big dinners the chef would present for pud some elaborate, over-the-top meringue creation, which came in the Principal���s job description, I then imagined, to consume; Sheila would push it away and demand a Coxs Orange Pippin. She was before her time, perhaps, as I now think,  in refusing to 'eat for the college'.

In private, she was quite different. She did have a tendency to see the blacker side of life (I longed for the day when Sheila would have watched a telly programme that she actually liked...). But anyone who needed help could -- clich�� as it must sound --  always count on her. She would beetle up to the hospital with almost anyone in college who needed a trip to A and E. And she gave me some of the best advice I ever had.

When I was pregnant with child number 1, I went to her to discuss the arrnagemets for my maternity leave. I was intending not to take all I was entitled to (with pay... never quite understood this concept of unpaid maternity leave), and to come back to coincide with a new term and so sacrificing a few weeks.

Sheila, childless and so far as we could tell (I get more anxious about saying that as I get older) unpartnered, simply said: "you take every week you can get... they give you four months , because that is what you need". And -- happily -- she gave me no choice.

Cheers to her.