I had just moved to Camden Town, north London, in 1956 when Martina Thomson, who has died aged 88 of pneumonia after suffering from bone cancer, and her husband, David, came to live in the house just behind my family home. We were separated only by a patch of back garden that we quickly decided to share. The Thomsons gradually filled their own early Victorian house with unsteady-looking piles of books and the walls with pictures – drawings done by her children and her friends and an enormous lithographed poster by Steinlen.
She was born Martina Schulhof in Berlin. Martina went to the Rudolf Steiner school there but the family left Berlin just before the second world war and came to London, where her uncle, Georg Hoellering, ran and chose the films for the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street. During the war, Martina was evacuated to the Cotswolds and learned how to milk cows; after that she trained as an actor at Rada in London.
In 1952 she met David Thomson, then working in Paris for Unesco and later a sound features producer at the BBC, and they married in 1964 after Martina's short first marriage had been dissolved. They had three boys and a quietly adventurous life.
David's BBC job allowed the family two six-month-long working trips to Greece; they also rented an old and remote schoolhouse in Norfolk. David later left the BBC to write full-time: his best-known books are three memoirs, Woodbrook (1974), In Camden Town (1983) and Nairn in Darkness and Light (1987). After his death in 1988 Martina became a tenacious guardian of his papers and his works.
Martina had unusually wide-ranging interests and skills. After Rada she went on to act under the stage name of Martina Mayne in radio plays that David produced, often playing foreign parts on the BBC and English ones on German radio. She could put on a very sexy voice; when these roles dried up she went on dubbing voices for erotic films.
She liked Paris, Ireland, Italy, films, Ulysses, Beckett and Proust. In the late 70s, she qualified as an art therapist and wrote On Art and Therapy (1989), and later worked for a while in an HIV ward. She also became an experimental ceramicist, inventive about the glazes for her bowls and creating tiny but vivid animals and symbolic figures in boats. But latterly she became most interested in poetry; writing (and when required reading aloud with an actor's skill) her own poems. Her work was published in poetry magazines and collected in Ferryboats (2008). In 2012 she published Panther and Gazelle, translations of the expressionist poems of Paula Ludwig, whom her parents had known in Berlin.
Martina was acute, well-read, funny, sympathetic and shrewd. She liked the now vanished Camden Town of the 1950s and 60s, when the pubs she and David liked were quiet enough to talk in; enjoyed retsina and a little whisky; wrote terse postcards in an individual but legible hand. In the 50s she had been called a "cracker" and she remained beautiful, with wild grey hair and an indomitable spirit. She made several trips alone to Nepal.
Despite her cancer she continued to savour life, going shopping with or without her Zimmer frame, or to the National Film theatre. Recently she flew to Italy for a few days, and she travelled across London by bus to see an exhibition only weeks before she died.
She is survived by her sons Tim, Luke and Ben and by eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
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