The Time I Nearly Killed Someone

For six months in 1997 I lived in Haven House, Suffolk, as a safety-net for Lady Olive Simmonds: a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian suffering severely from alcoholism, leg ulcers and a lilac tinted backcombed afro. Suffering burnout, I had left full-time singing teaching. It was my dream to move to Deaven. Olive’s house in Lembton was only two miles along the coast. When I had met her socially in…