My mother, Ann Thomas, who has died aged 88, began writing poetry when she was six, although she did not produce her first book of poetry, A Safe House, until 1996. Her second book, All Summer’s Ahead, a poetry almanac, which I illustrated, was published in 2013. Her poems were often autobiographical and humorous.
Ann was born in London, daughter of Arthur J Davis, an architect, and his wife, Rona (nee Lee); her mother, star-struck, left home for California, though she later returned to Britain, where she died soon after the beginning of the second world war. “Tired of being bored/ tired of being good/ tired of Cook and Nanny/ and nursery food/ my mother ran away /to Hollywood …”, Ann later wrote in her poem La Fanciulla del West.
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