Beloved enemies

12 April 1908 – 3 December 2013

Ida Crowe was born on 12 April 1908 in Lewisham, Kent, England, UK, the daughter of a single mother and a unknown father, who rumoured to be a Russian duke, who her mother met at a ball in Greenwich. Ida narrowly escaped being smothered with a pillow by the nurse who attended her birth. As a teenager, she travelled alone to Morocco, after suffering a mental breakdown. From the age of ten, she knew she wanted to write. She began to write while still at school encouraged by her mother, with whom she lived in Hastings. Writing fiction since her very early teens, setting her first publication, Palanquins and coloured lanterns, in 1920's Shanghai and she had several stories in major magazines …