On a short visit back to England from France, my mother painted portraits of both Stella Fry and her son Michael Fry, simultaneously, see the diary entries for the overlapping dates, as a “Thank You”. The Fry’s were very helpful to our family and would do things like pick me up form boarding school and take me to the train station so I could travel to France and were genuinely good friends. They were a very interesting family, with Jeffery, the husband, suffering greatly from being given a prolonged course of LSD by the government to treat his severe PTSD after serving in the Navy during WWII. The treatment had, as he called it “fused the nerve endings in his brain” and caused him many problems, including only being able to sleep a couple hours a night. Despite this handicap he worked selling optical supplies including eyeglass frames but the family was not well off and lived in a small council row house not far from our bungalow in Bournemouth.

The painting is an interesting mixture of brush work on the portrait and palette knife for the background. I’m sure the inclusion of their cat did nothing to speed the process along. Although, this was a common position to find both Stella and the cat.

Stella also became friends with my grandmother and would run errands for her and help clean her flat. When my grandmother died in 1987, the family was shocked when Stella produced a hand written and witnessed will whereby my grandmother had left the entirety of her estate to Stella! It turned out that as my grandmother was getting a little senile in her later years, she would often ask for favours and promise to leave everything to whomever she was talking to at the time. Stella had taken her up on this and even brought into her flat the two old ladies from across my grandmother’s hallway to “witness” the signature, even though the document they were witnessing being signed was purposely covered by a sheet of paper at the time. Some seven years later and shortly after my mother had passed on, the estate was settled in the courts with the money being split between the family and Stella. After the lawyers got their share and the money was divided between my grandmother’s two daughters and then my brother and I, there wasn’t a lot left. I’m mentally using it now to fund this site.

Diary Entries