I treasure Olivia for two qualities in particular. The first is
historic: that she was the most outstanding example of somebody to link
in person the two great twentieth-century ages of Celtic spiritual
revival, that of W. B. Yeats and Robert Graves, and their generations,
and that from the 1960s in which Olivia herself played such a prominent
part.
The second is that, better than anybody whom I have ever met, she
could sail through any situation and society with
perfect composure. One morning in the East End, she and I went for
breakfast in a very rough transport cafe. Every table was crowded out by
hard-smoking, hard-swearing, beefy men. Within five minutes she had
persuaded the nearest six of them to make places for us (two vacating
chairs in the process), extinguish their cigarettes and clean up their
language; and all done with nothing other than smiles on her part. I
imagine that she had much the same effect on deities.
