The Bright White Tree

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I was overwhelmed by the positive responses I received from Joanna and her sisters and my confidence was buoyed to carry on the project. No matter that the man overseeing my spiritual conversion, and the person who would marry us, was none other than Rabbi Hugo Gryn, distinguished academic and broadcaster, and survivor of Auschwitz. It was as if she'd put it to the back of her mind, thinking there would be time later in her life to do it.

Joanna also led and celebrated the Jewish Assembly, adding to the richly diverse and tolerant nature of Wellington life that she did so much to promote.Her apprehension of the natural world and the nitty gritty business of human behaviour is vividly realised, memorable and always governed by the urge to say ‘yes’ to life.

In “Advice”, one of the last poems she wrote, she sought to pass on what she had learnt from her own long experience as a patient. Joanna truly lived the life of the school; she was admired and respected by fellow staff, pupils and parents alike. Sir Anthony Seldon on his late wife: 'She was spectacular, ferociously intelligent - I was in awe of her' ". Her novels include Still Crazy (2013), Squared (2014), Piper's Hole (2014) and Waterloo to Wellington: From Iron Duke to Enlightened College (2015).They went to Wellington in 2006 and made a home there, "bang in the middle of the school, where everyone could see into our house". When a policeman stopped her car and asked when she had last had a drink, she shot back defiantly: “Five years ago.

From the moment we met at Oxford in the 1970s – she acting, me directing – she weaved her strength into me. A parent at the school observed: "It was clear and evident to us all at Wellington that given Anthony's legendary work rate and manic enthusiasm for all aspects of college life, he could only have sustained his extraordinary efforts over ten years with the support and counsel of an extraordinary partner. I did it because I loved her, never remotely minding the squeeze it put on working and social life, dislocating my back carrying her up the stairs, nor being woken up throughout the night. He blamed the antipathy on his Jewishness, famously being told before the Second World War that he could never become a consultant because “no Jew could ever be a gentleman.No doctor, however great his capacity or original his ideas, has the right to choose martyrs for science or for the general good.