Nick Jeffrey 

Caroline West Duah obituary

Granddaughter of HG Wells who had a love of poetry
  
  

Caroline West Duah, pictured here in 1988, was the granddaughter of HG Wells.
Caroline West Duah, pictured here in 1988, was the granddaughter of HG Wells. Photograph: Steve Macare

My friend Caroline West Duah, who has died aged 78, was at heart a poet, although the course of her life meant she was unable to devote as much time to writing poetry as she would have liked.

She was born in Ecchinswell, Dorset, to the novelist and essayist Anthony West and the feminist painter Katharine Church. Her grandparents were the writers H G Wells and Rebecca West. Her parents divorced when she was young, and thereafter she lived in the Dorset village of Woodlands with her mother, whose home there, Sutton House, became a meeting place for many female British painters.

After attending Cranborne Chase boarding school in Dorset, in 1963 Caroline went to study English at Girton College, Cambridge, where she won the college’s poetry prize and was published in Granta and other journals.

In 1971 she married Osei Duah, a Ghanaian agronomist whom she had met when he was studying at the London School of Economics. The wedding was attended by her godfather, the poet John Betjeman (who doted on her from infancy), and by Kofi Annan, Osei’s best man, who went on to become secretary-general of the United Nations. The couple moved shortly afterwards to live in Ghana, where Caroline taught English in local schools.

After their son, Barnabus, died in infancy, Caroline had a breakdown and returned to Britain. Osei had to continue with his work in Ghana but their marriage survived, and he lived in both Ghana and Lewisham, south London, where they shared a house.

Thereafter Caroline worked for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, transcribing books into braille, although she continued to suffer from mental health problems and towards the end of her life was hospitalised for a time in the Maudsley unit at Lewisham Hospital, south London.

In 2016 seven of her poems from her Cambridge days were reproduced in a private publication by her friend from university days, Tom Lowenstein. Her poem In the Same Night, published in that volume, contains the lines: “Sleep fitful / Thirst perpetual / Deafness imminent – ‘Old thing’, ‘Poor thing’ – Have none of it. The fiery spirit is victorious.”

Osei died in 2013. She is survived by her brother, Edmund.

 

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