On 2 September 1942, a plane on a search-and-rescue mission off the coast of Iceland crashed into the sea, killing its pilot and 39-year-old passenger. The passenger was Eric Ravilious, whose final letter to his wife, three days earlier, had extolled the deep shadows and leaflike cracks of the subarctic landscape. He was one of 300 artists hired by the War Artists Advisory Committee to cover the second world war, and the first to die on active service.
Back home in their dank Essex farmhouse where she was marooned with their three young children, his wife, Tirzah Garwood, was struggling: she had recently been operated on for the breast cancer that would kill her nine years later. The pressures of illness and domestic life had put paid to her own successful career as an artist. But each evening, after putting her children to bed, she would sit down to type out her autobiography.
