Joan Hunter Dunn

It's sad to hear of anyone "passing on", as they say, (unless it were, oh... Robert Mugabe) but what struck me most about the obituaries of Joan Hunter Dunn was that she existed at all. I had always supposed her to be an invention, as her name seemed perfectly designed to evoke exactly the kind of tweed-clad, horse-faced, treetrunk-thighed, braying public schoolgirl that one would imagine John Betjeman engaging in ineffectual pursuit - when he could drag himself away from his teddy bears and his doggerel.