Prunella Scales, my neighbour in Barnes, south-west London, in the 1960s, was gifted as a superb reader of poetry. Together with Michael Hordern, Richard Pasco and Janet Suzman, she read the poems in John Betjeman’s 1977 BBC TV “aerial anthology” of film, poetry and music, The Queen’s Realm: A Prospect of England. Betjeman, himself an incomparable reader of poems, particularly admired her “unactorish” rendering of Philip Larkin.
When Betjeman was incapacitated by a stroke and beyond speech, Pru used to visit his bedside regularly to read aloud to him. It was a characteristic gesture from a warm-hearted and generous woman.
