RIP Jenny Joseph.

Jenny Joseph is a name I’m familiar with. It’s on the spine of a book that’s always on my book shelf, and is now on my bedside table, to read for the first time as an adult.  When I was 15, Neil Astley of the newly formed Bloodaxe Books asked me whether I’d like to be on the cover and the back of Jenny’s new book ‘Persephone’.

The pouty photos were taken and tinted by Irene Reddish, and I got paid something like £60 (this was a lot to me, we’re talking about June 1986). Unusually, there’s also a photo story in the middle, with models – my friends – Diana and Judith Taylor, Farne Conway, Fay Gilder, Thomas Gilder and my first boyfriend’s dad, Roger Neville. My life mentor and friend Moira Conway took the pictures for the photo story in the coffee shop of my mother’s bookshop, The Bookhouse, in Newcastle Upon Tyne.