My mother, Jean Kenward, who has died aged 102, was a poet whose work, for both children and adults, was published in many anthologies. She also wrote children’s stories; the Ragdolly Anna series (1979-87) was dramatised in a popular Yorkshire TV series featuring Pat Coombs in the 1980s.
Jean was born in Pangbourne, on the River Thames in Berkshire, one of three children of Ruth (nee Stone) and Harold Kenward. Her father worked for Dunlop – he later became sales director and president of the Motor Trade Association, and was knighted. As a child, Jean was left to run pretty free with her brother and sister: she always loved being outside. She began writing at the age of eight, while a pupil at the local school in Pangbourne, and studied in the late 1930s at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
