Early Years
Pat Smythe was the last of three children, the other two being Dicky and Ronald Smythe. Sadly, Dicky died from pneumonia at the age of 4. Her parents were Eric Hamilton Smythe and Frances Monica Curtoys, who were born in the early 1900s. She lived in London, on the outskirts of Richmond Park. Later she was a boarder at Talbot Heath School in Bournemouth.
Pat nearly died when she was nearly 5 from diphtheria. Although she recovered fully, it meant that she had to learn to walk again. Hardship and suffering were to feature predominantly throughout her professional and personal life. Her father died when she was in her late teens, and her mother when she was 23.
Read more about this topic: Pat Smythe
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)