Hominid variety (2)

The greatest Telegraph obituary of this millennium:

Nerina returned to her mother, by now living in a house near Horsham with her sixth husband, Noel Sparrow. Just before her mother’s death in 1958, Nerina decided to take up ballroom dancing and joined a dance club. Before long she had met and fallen in love with Phyllis Haylor, a well-known figure in the ballroom dancing world. After selling the house at Horsham, Nerina and her stepfather moved to live nearer Phyllis in London, where Nerina found work as a secretary at a hostel for unmarried mothers and later as a voluntary social worker with the Samaritans.

It is the extraordinary life of Nerina Shute, a woman born into a rich and decadent family two generations on from real power. ” born on July 17 1908 in north Wales, where her parents had briefly repaired after her father lost all his money on the stock exchange; but she spent her early childhood in a house on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, her father having inherited money from a relative”

Her mother was to rack up six husbands of her own, and uncounted of other people’s:

in 1920 Renie Shute abandoned her husband and baby son and took Nerina to Hollywood, having received an offer for one of her novels.

There she bought a gold mine in which she and her husband were to lose what remained of their inheritance, created a scandal by embarking on an affair with a married man, then attempted suicide after her lover was killed in a motor accident.

Rapidly recovering from this tragedy, Renie then married a Hollywood actor, despite still being legally married (under English law) to Nerina’s father, thus becoming, consciously or unconsciously, a bigamist. It was at this point that the 18-year-old Nerina decided to return to London …”

The young Nerina made a career in journalism, but was, herself, only married three times. Her final husband, a distinguished BBC war correspondent, made off after she confessed an affair with the maid. Original to the last, she then took up with her ballroom dancer, which is where we started.

This sort of behaviour is why we need brain cases of 1000cc.

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