[1] Born to a Jewish family in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, she escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organised by Trevor Chadwick.
Her father, Arnold Stein, had a small shop in the town selling ladies' coats and dresses, and her mother Erna (née Eisenberger) owned a knitwear business there.
The city was already home to many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, and Mayer's parents spent the next six months chasing between official offices and consulates in a vain attempt to emigrate.
[4]: 16–18 As a last resort, in February 1939 her father made a direct approach to Trevor Chadwick,[5]: 102 an Englishman who was organising the Prague end of an operation to rescue children at risk from the Nazis.
[6][7]: 64–86 [page range too broad] This rescue operation was part of a wider project set up in October 1938 by Doreen Warriner, with later assistance from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), aimed initially at helping exiled anti-Nazi Sudeten leaders to escape the country.
[7]: 1–36 [page range too broad] As the scope of the project expanded to include these leaders' families, the responsibility for evacuating refugee children was taken on by Nicholas Winton who had come to Prague just before Christmas 1938 to help with the rescue.
[9]: 23 A semi-fictionalized account of Mayer's rescue is used for the character Hugo in the children's book War Games by Jenny Koralek, Chadwick's niece.
[16]: ack, 215 Although Mayer generally had a good relationship with her guarantor, Muriel Chadwick, they were not particularly close[17]: 236 and in 1940 she was enrolled at a boarding school in Swanage.
[3][18] This co-educational, non-denominational school had been founded in 1934 by German émigré Dr Hilde Lion and Quaker activist Bertha Bracey, to provide an education for mainly Jewish refugee children from Nazi Europe.
[12][18] In her thirties Mayer read for a degree at Bedford College, University of London, graduating in 1963 with a BA in English, German and History of Art.
In late 1963 she was employed by him as a part-time research assistant on the Bedfordshire volume but the work (gathering building references from the Victoria County History) was unfulfilling, and to Pevsner's great annoyance she left after a few months to resume her writing.
Changed to a flower he stood by the river a sad case of rooted vanity; he never forgave the reflecting water for rippling his face.
She continued to have poems published in magazines and anthologies and appeared regularly at poetry readings, on one occasion speaking at the Aldeburgh Festival.
On BBC radio she has featured in episodes of Poetry Now (1987) and Time For Verse (1990), when Carol Ann Duffy presented poems written and read by Mayer.
The poet Elaine Feinstein for example observed in a 1996 review that "most readers ... will have paused over that poignant poem, 'Make Believe'", in which Mayer imagines her father alive again.
[11]: 34 The majority of Mayer's poems however are sharp and entertaining observations of familiar human foibles, domestic life and growing old grudgingly.
The tradition she works best in is altogether English, that is to say, often whimsical or playing with fairytale metaphor, sometimes using nursery rhyme and rhythms, sometimes, as in "The Lumpy and Oafish Girl", declaring her debt to Stevie Smith, a poet with whom she has more than once been appropriately compared.