Cecily Joan Mackworth was born on 15 August 1911 in Llantilio Pertholey, Monmouthshire, to an illustrious and well-connected Welsh military family.
Her great-grandfather Sir Digby Mackworth, an officer in Wellington's army, married Julie de Richepense, the daughter of one of Napoleon's generals.
When her mother remarried to Charles Edward Gatehouse, Mackworth moved to Sidmouth and she subsequently studied at the London School of Economics, where her aunt Margaret was later a governor.
[1] Forced to flee Paris in 1940, she worked briefly for the Free Frenchin London during the war, in addition to giving lectures to the army and writing for Cyril Connolly's literary magazine Horizon.
She also published two novels, Spring's Green Shadow (1952) and Lucy's Nose (1992), as well as two volumes of autobiography, Ends of the World (1987)[2] and Out of the Black Mountains, the latter completed weeks before her death in 2006.