When my family arrived from Argentina in 1976, my mother, Rosalia Lelchuk Staricoff, shared a bench at the research laboratories of the Middlesex hospital with Janice Taverne. When our bank accounts were frozen for a while during the Falklands war of 1982, she and her husband, Dick Taverne, helped us. They continued to be supportive, and a couple of years later we became British citizens.
In 2007, Dick handed over his parliamentary science communicator award of £500 for the benefit of the children at St Bartholomew’s CE primary school in Brighton, where I was the deputy headteacher. We put it to good use.
