Louisa Young is a renowned novelist and memoirist. But after her fiance, the composer and pianist Robert Lockhart, died at 52 in 2012, writing words left so much wanting. She turned to song, recorded an album and then, two years ago, at 60, gave her first live performance.
The gig was in a room beneath the clock tower at St Pancras station in London – “very high gothic and full of clock apparatus”. The guitarist Alex Mackenzie accompanied her; together (under the name Birds of Britain), they had put her words into an album, You Left Early – the same title as her memoir about life with Lockhart. The audience included a former boss, an ex-boyfriend and her singing teacher.
