Margaret Bonham

	Margaret Bonham and her daughter Cary in 1946

MARGARET BONHAM (1913-91) was born in London and went to Wimbledon High School for Girls. She married disastrously when very young, but re-married in 1940 and lived in Wales with her conscientious objector husband Deryck Bazalgette, who was working on the land. A daughter, Cary, was born in 1942, and a son in 1944. After the war she abandoned her family to marry Charles Kimber, the socialist inheritor of a baronetcy and affluence, with whom she shared a love of rally driving and good living; their home was a large C17th house in Oxfordshire, where two more children were born. Meanwhile she had published short stories in magazines: The Casino (1948) was her own selection; a novel came out in 1951. Her third and final marriage having collapsed, in 1960 she moved to a cottage in Devon, where she was devoted to her garden, friends and cats. After her younger son was killed in a car crash in 1972 she never wrote again.