Year of Birth
"I was born on 3 July 1923" - So Sue Ryder begins her autobiography Child of My Love. This was repeated by The Daily Telegraph in her obituary in November 2000, adding that "Lady Ryder of Warsaw, better known as Sue Ryder, has died aged 77", as well as by the BBC and many other news sources.
Her birth and death certificates both put the date at exactly one year later, on 3 July 1924, as does a plaque unveiled in honour of Sue Ryder and Leonard Cheshire in Cavendish Church in Suffolk. At the beginning of the war, Ryder volunteered to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, even though she was only 15. To get in, she lied about her age and seems to have kept the deception going for the rest of her life.
Read more about this topic: Sue Ryder
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or birth:
“The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)