Monica Dickens

Monica Enid Dickens, MBE, was an English writer born on 10 May 1915 who died on 25 December 1992. She was a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and grew up in an upper-middle-class London family. After being expelled from St Paul's Girls' School, she rejected the debutante life prepared for her and went into domestic service, and those years as a cook and general servant became the material for her first book, One Pair of Hands, published in 1939. Her later adult books drew on other jobs she held, including nursing, work in an aircraft factory and reporting for a Hertfordshire newspaper. After marrying a United States Navy officer she lived in the United States, on Cape Cod and near Washington, and in 1974 she helped found the first American branch of the Samaritans. From 1970 she also wrote children's books, notably the Follyfoot series about a farm for rescued horses, which became a television series between 1971 and 1973. She published an autobiography, An Open Book, in 1978 and returned to Britain in 1985.