Rest in Peace, dear Glennie

Last night my dear pal 'little Glennie' passed away.

Well, she wasn't really 'little'. She was my age. But she was alway 'little' Glennie to me, I suppose because the first time we met, on the occasion of the Elmwood Players production of Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind, I was cast as Bertram Cates, the juvenile man in the piece, and Glennie played .. a child.

As teenagers with a common interest do, five of us became close friends ... Me, Mike, Helen, Shirley and Glennie ... and shared little adventures and theatrical times ...

In 1966, aged all of twenty, I (aware of my incapabilities as an actor) had virtually retired from performing, and instead took on the direction of a one-act play for the Players. Tired of reading through the banal stuff to be found on the library shelves, I sat down. one evening, at my dining-room table, with my portable typewriter, and quite simply wrote one myself. Elektra shared a bill with Wilde's Salomé and Shaw's Dark Lady of the Sonnets (directed by Helen), so only Shirley ended up in my play, as a very effective Chrysothemis

to the remarkable Elektra of a young lady who very definitely had the seeds of a professional in her, and who was then Mrs Judy Scollay

Suffice it to say that Elektra stood up splendidly alongside Wilde and Shaw, and that the following season I was asked to supply another 1-acter for the company. My experience of Real Life being, at that stage, somewhat limited, I again took refuge in Ancient Greece, and turned out a Women of Troy. Not quite the Euripides version (my two main characters were inventions) but including the traditional Cassandra and Polyxena. Once again, I had to 'share' the company's forces when casting came around, and the parts I had written 'for' the members of my Elektra cast -- especially my dazzling Klytemnaestra, Chris Joyce --

ended up being played by others. Last year's Salome played Cassandra, and -- best of all -- I got Glennie to play the other, younger princess of Troy ...

She was perfect as the teenager who rejected her kingly nurse's maxim 'better death than dishonour' and let a more malleable maiden become the victim in her place

I didn't direct Women of Troy. I had recognised that my limitations as a director were as great as those as an actor. I still don't think it was as good a piece as Elektra. But ... it took second prize in the British Drama League Playwriting competition and when, for some nefarious reason, the winner wasn't able to be published (part of the prize), I got my first published book!  And some people actually did the play. I heard of it being performed in a girls' school up north ...

By the time the next one-act play season came round, I was no longer in Christchurch ... I was in London, preparing to stun the opera world with my basso-too-profundo. Which, of course, I didn't. I had found my niche -- writing -- but it took me ten fun-filled years to find my way back to it. So, our little group was broken up ... Shirley was lost to a tragic end, Helen and Mike ended up in Australia ... and only Glennie, in latter years, remained in Christchurch. So, when I came to live nearby, we met up again ...

More than half a century on...

I was to see her only once more, when her son Richard and his wife Lori took me to see her last week. The cancer she had carried in the last years had done its devastating work. I held her hand for half an hour and chatted intermittently about old times. She did not have the strength to respond, but she heard and knew me ...

And now she is gone. But 'little Glennie' will always be an ineradicable memory of my teenage years.

Avonia Bunn in Trelawny of the Wells