Alison Herford

A tribute, written by Alison’s friend and academic colleague, Jane Garnett

Alison Mary Gabrielle Taylor, née Herford (St Antony’s, 1977), died, tragically on 4 December 2000 in Montenegro. She was born on 6 August 1949, the third of four sisters and grew up in Buckinghamshire near Burnham Beeches, a landscape which she loved and which helped to shape her commitment to trees and to the environment. Her parents were doctors, both high-minded people who instilled in Alison a strong sense of principle and integrity. Her father, himself a pioneer of social medicine, was fiercely proud of his Victorian and Edwardian nonconformist forebears, who carried their principles into often unconventional action – at home and abroad. More than a hint of this ancestry left its mark on Alison. The decision to send Alison to Bedales School, with its mission to cultivate the whole person in a progressive and free-thinking context, would seem to have grown naturally out of this background. Alison was successful there, displaying an equal talent for the sciences and the arts, although she did not find the atmosphere congenial. She originally intended to read Medicine at university and was offered a place at Bristol but, ultimately, decided to go to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, where she was awarded a 1st in Russian Language and Literature in 1977.

At St Antony’s she began a D. Phil. on Tynyanov and Mandelstam, which she never finished, although she never stopped reflecting on literature and the issues which it raised. She lived for two years in Voronezh and Moscow, on British Council studentships. Julie Curtis (St Antony’s 197?), who was with Alison in Moscow, recalls her inventiveness of spirit and determination to contrive ways in which they could get round the system: whether by gaining access to an exclusive dissident literary seminar, or by organising an illegal expedition outside the city limits to visit the monastery at Zagorsk, disguised as Russians in big headscarves and spending the winter night freezing in an unheated dacha. Alison had a sense of the absurdity of bureaucratic regulation but, more importantly, a profound understanding of its implications for Soviet society and a horror of the repressive aspects of the regime. Her lightness of touch was always combined with a deep moral seriousness of purpose. She maintained her commitment to Russia through her accomplished translations – of Mandelstam’s poetry; of a novel by Kaverin, one of Tynyanov’s pupils; of an interview with an old Bolshevik. She had a real gift for translation and it is hoped that a collection of her work can be put together in her memory.

In the mid 1980s Alison changed direction, taking A-Levels in Zoology and Botany in order to equip herself to study Forestry. After a year spent attending seminars at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (where she had accompanied her first husband, Richard Blake, whom she had married in 1981), she returned to St Antony’s to take an MSc. in Forestry and its relation to Land Management. Her tutor, Philip Stewart (St Antony’s, 19??) regarded her as the most brilliant student he had ever had. He, like all her friends, was enlivened and enchanted by her quickness and originality of mind, whilst frustrated by her perennial lapses of self-confidence. On completion of her MSc. In 1986, Alison did VSO in Nepal, researching bamboos and their use in rural development. She soon acquired fluent Nepali and went on to teach English for the British Council there, as well as continuing to be involved in land management projects. It was in Nepal that she met Mike Taylor in 1987. As he was a civil engineer, they travelled widely, living in Bangladesh, Uganda, Moldova and Kirgyzia. They married in France in 1992 and bought a house in Brittany, Ty Nevez, where Alison created a beautiful garden. In all the places where they lived, Alison became engaged with local environmental issues. At the time of her death she had just completed an MSc. in Environmental Science at Southampton University. She had hoped to bring together her Russian and ecological concerns in confronting environmental challenges in Eastern Europe.

Alison was fascinated by the process of translation – notoriously difficult in the case of her beloved Russian poetry, which relies so much on the particular cadence – the music of the words. In a sense this challenge of capturing multiple levels of meaning in translation, which she felt so strongly , was a metaphor for her whole approach to life. She passionately sought to bring out the polyphony of whatever she was engaged in – and never compromised by settling for the obvious, or the routine, or the one-dimensional. She had real independence of mind – an ability to take new directions and to stand against mediocrity – admittedly in ways which were often uncomfortable and excessively demanding of herself. She was naturally a traveller and a searcher and, unlike most of us, had the courage to confront the complexity of being so often a foreigner in a strange land. She delighted in the forging of connections but was mindful of both the inevitability and also the interest of always standing somewhat at an angle to the other cultures in which she lived. Wherever she was, she always made space – for reading, for playing the violin, for serious thinking and writing, for writing letters and for serious talking – for sharing her explorations – trying to translate them – with her friends and family. She was devoted to her family – to her sisters and to their children, of whom she always thought and with whom she loved to spend time in their homes, or with her father Martin in Cornwall. She was the most remarkable of friends and it is impossible to believe that she is not going to ring up out of the blue, as she so often did, to continue a conversation whose threads she had never let drop. But she was someone of such richness and depth that her presence will always remain vivid – her beauty, her intensity of enthusiasm, her critical spirit, her laughter, her love.

Jane Garnett