In 1984 my mother, Muriel Dickinson, went to live at 74 Chilton Road, Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, and it was not long before she discovered that the poet Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) lived directly across the road at The Hawthorns, number 71. She was warned that Pitter might not be too friendly if she telephoned, but she nevertheless did, and they became firm friends until my mother had to move house in 1991. At the time I had done some BBC Radio 3 programmes with Drama as well as many for Music; when I told Piers Plowright that I had met Ruth Pitter he immediately asked me to interview her and make a programme. I went to her house on 15 May 1986 and recorded our talk. It was broadcast as a monologue under the title of Opening: Ruth Pitter at Ninety on BBC Radio 3 on 8 November 1987. The next landmark was a launch party at Pitter's house on 12 August 1990 to mark the publication of her Collected Poems, with a foreword by Elizabeth Jennings. The original interview was repeated on BBC Radio 3, with an introduction from me, on 1 May 1992, after Pitter's death. The Collected Poems came out in paperback in 1996.

▪ Tribute

Ruth Pitter was so widely known in 1972 that her name was mentioned in connection with the vacancy for Poet Laureate created by the death of C. Day Lewis – in fact John Betjeman was appointed. The writer of Pitter's obituary in The Times claimed that she had enjoyed ‘perhaps the highest reputation of any living English woman poet of her century’. At her centenary in 1997 she was not as completely hidden from view as a decade earlier but we still owe her and her work some further investigation, as is amply demonstrated by the resourceful critical biography by the American scholar Don W. King. How can a poet who was a major figure for two or three generations become so forgotten?