5 March 2013
To the Union Club in Soho, where Phyllida Law launched her second book, How Many Camels Are There in Holland?, a history of how her mother’s dementia united her family.
Among those present were her actress daughters, Emma and Sophie Thompson. “For my 50th, my mother collated all the notes about my paternal grandmother,” Emma told me about Law’s first book, Notes to my Mother-in-Law. “This one she wrote for Sophie.”
A moving passage for Emma was about grandma going to Australia with her sisters before the First World War. “On their way back on the boat to Britain, my great-aunts were in mourning. All their fiancés had been killed.”
