She balanced teaching with raising a family - in one of the earliest interracial marriages in the UK - and wrote Nippers, a pioneering multicultural series for children in the 1970s, followed by adult fiction.

'What the doctor ordered . . . What he doesn't realise is that encountering an illness and understanding it are two quite different things . . . An uproarious and uplifting novel about sickness and health, and how perhaps we're never quite as cutting-edge as we might like to believe. 'What the doctor ordered .

This is more than a book - it's an incitement to change people's perceptions.