Honorary president: Judith Butcher Honorary vice-president: David Crystal OBE

Virginia Masardo y Gleadell
21 November 1938 to 3 February 2008

An edited version of the eulogy delivered by Virginia’s cousin Robert Crick at her funeral on 14 February 2008 at Sacred Hearts Roman Catholic Church, Cheltenham

I have been thinking about Gini a lot recently, invoking her aid to prepare words for this moment. Gini had a way with words. In different languages, registers and dialects, she knew how to fit the words to the context, and she knew when to be silent.

Cousin Dick Chataway in Canada, who can’t be with us today, recalls with gratitude a lifetime of Gini’s cards and letters and emails – as do her other correspondents around the world, some of whom, such as poet laureate Andrew Motion, she never met. Writing professionally, she began with The Universe – and then went on to expand her horizons. Publishers shower praise upon her from the United States, the OUP, the BBC, Hodder & Stoughton, Nelson Thorne and Sage Publications. Founder member and leading mentor of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, she was just a girl who could not say ‘no’ to any opportunity for work. So she worked. And honed her skills.

A very special and consistent personality is revealed throughout Gini’s life. The little girl cast adrift by that ‘naughty ship’ she vehemently slapped as it took her toy Scotty-dog to the ocean’s depth is the woman who was there for all of us who have, from time to time, been lost at sea, in need of non-judgemental empathy and practical help. Gini was always listening, ready to share a relevant moment from her own rich story, never, ever in self-pity, for the sake of her interlocutor. We miss her conversation, but we know we can still call on her spirit in times of need.

The first-class honours student at UCL, house mother to the younger students, paying her way with full-time editing, translating and proofreading, went to a school that did not expect girls to go to university. She got herself a place at drama school, but never went there, as history intervened and took her to Cyprus, where she learnt the Greek language, intensified her love of Greek culture and history and flirted with the EOKA boys, subtly subverting British imperialism.

The general’s daughter, who continued her father’s work caring for the troops – representing him at the D-Day 60th anniversary and other battlefields, adored, as he was, by the ‘swede-bashers’, each of whom she knew, as he did, by name – is the same courageous woman who outfaced the enemy victoriously when vexatious death came for her.

To English Cheltenham, she and her man Paco brought a breath of Mediterranean panache and a genuine experience of community life. The dark and beautiful young woman, riding her horse along the white sands of Cataluña over half a century ago, is also ‘Mama’ to a generation of local children and a stream of young women from around the world, who have found their best selves and a second home in this town, in her firm gentle hands, her warm penetrating gaze, her fascinated interest.

The schoolgirl who has maintained constant contact with devoted friends from Farnborough is still the naughtiest girl in the school, the most fun, the captain of games, listening, head-cocked, quiet and attentive, and laughing out loud at the head of the dinner table, still Nankipoo, the wandering minstrel, singing and dancing her way from Oxted to Portugal, from the glory days at the Royal Court to the Maid of Mildmay – and, of course, the Prince of Wales, who visited her in person this winter to seek her wisdom and to be entertained.

I remember that awesome big girl leading her siblings, Tinkie, Giles and ‘Teenywee’ (now in his 60s but still her baby brother) and us, the awestruck cousins, in wild adventures in the Surrey heathland. Her life has been one great adventure of the imagination, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s late romances. Far more than the conventional 16 years passed before she had the redemptive experience of finding her long-lost daughter – not that she was short of daughters!

Painters, musicians, writers, creative artists from Lawrence Durrell to the Squeeze and Wheeze ceilidh band have been inspired by that imagination, guided by Gini’s articulate analysis and supportive criticism, encouraged by the discriminating approval of this most eclectic of intellects, and they have enjoyed her creativity. Her home, like Prospero’s cave, is stuffed with regimental and family archives, artwork, pictures and a library that is testimony to her untiring spiritual activity, her sense of history, her thirst for awareness. And you know she read all those books, and accepted their challenge to her intelligence, her imagination and her feelings.

Deeper than mere intellectual melancholy, she experienced the mystic saints’ ‘dark night of the soul’. She has wrestled with God like the Jewish prophets from Jacob to Jesus. Enduring her pain, she was lucid when the priest came to absolve her. It was Sunday morning, a busy time for clergy, so he couldn’t stay to debate the doctrine of grace as she might have wished. Like it or not, he told her, and we know it is true: Gini is now among the saints for all eternity.

Her vitality and sensitivity were apparent to all who met her briefly. Those who know her intimately are astonished that she has stopped.

So here we all are to celebrate the completed life of our dear Virginia Masardo on, of all days, St Valentine’s in, of all places, the Sacred Hearts. It has been a life full of sweet love, with no sentimentality. We always feared it would be her great, vulnerable heart that would take her from us, but that is not what happened …

Her garden grew ever more Eden-like but, like all her work, it is not finished. Someone else must build that rockery. I remember her mortification when she found that her shrubs had been hacked back in the autumn of 2006 and her delight at their vigorous regrowth the following summer. The garden is real, but it is also, of course, a metaphor. Bold editing, drastic pruning, followed by guilty uncertainty, have all been gloriously vindicated in so many spheres of her life, not least the final flourishing of her 40-year marriage to Paco.

Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur.

[Lo! the book exactly worded,
Wherein all hath been recorded.
          From Verdi’s Requiem]

I know I have not done justice to this truly remarkable comrade, whose various facets are known only to God. Please share your insights into her history as this day unfolds and long into the future.