Alison Selford was writer and TV critic for the Daily Worker for 12 years before being “cured” - as she puts it - of Communism. She’s written 6 historical novels, is now compiling her late-husband’s biography, and has just mastered a PC. Alison has lived at the Mary Feilding Guild for 2 years and “it’s been bliss all the way”.

Born in 1920 in Hendon, Middlesex, Alison was educated at Westcliff High School for Girls, Westcliff on Sea, before studying at the Central School of Art in London. As a teenager, she was a pacifist like many of her friends, but two trips to Germany at the age of 15 and 17 made her realise there was going to be a war.

It was during the war that she began her career in writing and journalism on the Daily Worker - she was taken on for one month’s trial to fill the space of a journalist who had been called up. Within the month, the Daily Worker gave her a permanent job and she quickly got a reputation for being fast, resourceful and first with a story.

Alison married twice and speaks fondly of her second husband, Jack, as “one of the good guys”. They married in 1950 and were together for more than 50 years. Jack was a shopkeeper who jumped at opportunity to train as a teacher at the end of the war, despite family plans that would have earned him much more money. Alison had two daughters, one with each husband, her first daughter making an international career as a belly dancer, her second moving from social work into film-making.

Alison wrote six historical novels but stopped after the sixth failed to find a publisher. She returned to journalism, initially with Times Business and then for several years with Euro-Money where her rising salary was matched by increasing boredom.

Alison and Jack were both members of the Communist Party until 1957 when they became increasingly disillusioned after the crushing of the Polish and Hungarian democratic reform movements. They left the Communist Party and became members of the Labour Party but they had lost trust in parties and politicians.  Alison still follows politics but from the perspective of the Daily Telegraph which “has a lot of things of interest to old left-wingers”. She is an unrepentant admirer of Margaret Thatcher.

Alison speaks several languages including Russian, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. She has travelled widely as a journalist and was in Iran just before and after the fall of the Shah, desperately calculating the distance from Tehran to the Turkish border in case of emergency.  In India in the early 80s she interviewed Manmohan Singh, now Prime Minister.

Alison has always been interested in writing and the arts. She remembers attending a talk by Virginia Woolf with Leonard Woolf sitting close by “so that she didn’t harm herself.”  Alison’s aunt was the writer Dame Rebecca West.

A wonderfully phlegmatic and direct personality, Alison is a self-confessed "show-off" with a natural wit and sense of comic timing. She started learning Latin 3 months ago – a ‘dead’ language because “there’s no point in learning another living one, I’m not going to be going anywhere where I can use it.”