When a child named Janet came to play with little Wendy Cope, she brought a cushion with her, from which she drew snippets of beautiful fabrics. “It was”, the older Wendy remembers, “wonderful.” Recently, her editor went to the British Library and rummaged around in boxes of Cope’s archive material, pulling out many scraps of prose from which, together, they created this book. It is, very often, wonderful.Janet’s visit comes from the first fragment of an unpublished memoir, written, filed away and virtually forgotten until now. An anxious girl emerges from these stories. The child of an elderly father and a dominant mother, she recalls little that was fun. Sent to a convent school, she asked if she could have a rosary – which so horrified her Evan