Stoic Englishness, Celia’s trump card.

This Happy Breed (1944)

softened up. Celia’s trump card was ‘stoic Englishness’. Her voice had an effortless, youthful tone that could switch from sad to funny in the bat of an eyelid. There was something of a gurgle in it.

She had forays away from middleclass posh. Her cockney Ethel Gibbons in This Happy Breed (1944) and her fierce Edinburgh headmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) were both done with her trademark lightness. She read verse with simplicity and none of the awful pious tones we frequently get.

Often, when she was alone in the house, we would find her sitting on her heels on the floor, playing patience with her glasses on top of her head and her back to the television.

On one occasion, she offered me a lift to London, but after a couple of miles she pulled in and asked me to drive, saying, ‘I’m really not very good at it.’

Even in her seventies, she was physically supple and youthful, with the giggle of a schoolgirl. She was a much adored ‘Gamma’, every child’s dream grandparent. On the tennis court, she was the perfect mixed-doubles partner – gales of laughter and the odd flukey drop shot. She did everything quickly – always moving as if she’d forgotten something. She loved Rod Stewart – on her 70th birthday, we all danced to Sailing on auto-repeat.

She found fun in almost everything except cooking. Her domestic life was punctuated by the vagaries of one cook after another. She once said, ‘Changing things from raw to cooked is a problem I do not understand.’

She didn’t win an Oscar for Brief Encounter but, years later, by way of compensation, she bought herself a wayward brown Labrador and called it Oscar (so she had one after all). He probably gave her more pleasure than the statuette would have done. She was quietly thrilled to be ‘damed’ in 1981. Asked if she had any unfulfilled ambitions, she said, ‘I’d like to have leant against walls in thrillers.’

Self-mockery was her default position. When the question of an autobiography cropped up, she said she wouldn’t write one because ‘I never had an affair with Frank Sinatra and if I had had, I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

I’m sure she hadn’t and wouldn’t.