Extraordinary lives
SUSAN was born with bad eyesight so throughout her childhood she had to wear strong glasses. When she grew into a beautiful young woman, contact lenses were a godsend. In the 1950s, our parents had a pub/hotel in Hampshire and one of my abiding memories was Susan, aided and abetted by me, crawling under the counter to swipe a packet of crisps while avoiding the legs of the bar staff. One of her first jobs was managing a trendy boutique in Brighton, but her thirst for adventure and travel saw her working as a dancer in a club on the Costa Brava. She met a French medical student and went to Paris with him. She worked as an au pair, learnt to speak fluent French and spent the winter skiing and the summer in St Tropez. When the relationship ended, she came back to London and worked as a store detective in the famous Biba fashion store in Kensington High Street. Susan’s next
adventure was travelling to Athens to teach English. While there she met her first husband, a young Greek businessman, and spent several enjoyable years there. Most weekends they went to their country cottage where they went horse riding on the former king’s estate. After her marriage ended, she found herself one New Year in Cyprus where she met a handsome young Dane who was on leave from his job in North Africa. Susan and Poul shared a love of travel and visited Nigeria and Venezuela. I have fond memories of visiting the rainforests with her, sailing around the Greek Islands and exploring the Peloponnese on bicycles. Susan married and settled happily in Denmark, where she raised her two sons, Henrik, who is a musician and teacher, and Christian, a landscape gardener. As she got older, her eyesight began to fail, but nothing stopped my sister. She embraced new technology, was knowledgeable about world politics, read extensively and loved riding her Icelandic horse. She probably knew she was very ill with cancer, but was still full of plans for the future. Susan never moaned or complained about anything — her life shows she grabbed any opportunity that came her way with both hands.
SUSAN CHRISTIANSEN, born June 10, 1949; died February 4, 2021, aged 71.