Sue Brooks spent much of 2024 in search of Elizabeth Tuckniss — an unknown woman in a long line of unknown women to have shared their lives with extraordinary artists.

I’m turning the clock back to a moment on July 10th 2022. I’m outside Trefan Morys near Llanystumdwy in N.Wales. Jan Morris has been dead for two years and it is my first visit to her home. The heavy wooden gates into the garden are locked and there is no peephole. I stand on tiptoes to look through one of the three small windows facing the lane. The model ships are there on the windowsill, and a cockerel with a golden eye.  Inside seems to be a library and a living room, untouched since the last person lived there.

Where is Elizabeth?

I search in all the usual places online, but there is no mention of her name — the wife of 70 years and mother of their five children — and very little in the public life and writings of Jan herself. And in the obituaries, written about other people by Jan, and by copious people about her when she died aged 94. I check from time to time for an obituary of Elizabeth Tuckniss and find nothing. I should give up, I tell myself. There’s a touch of the voyeur about this — a slightly unhealthy obsession. Perhaps Elizabeth was perfectly content with the role she played. She was a mother and grandmother and that was more than enough.

And then — serendipitously — a book in the post from a friend, in August 2024. A Writer’s House in Wales, published in America by National Geographic in 2002. A small book, dedicated to the two everpresent guardians  of the house: Elizabeth who shares it with me, and Wales which is its patron and inspiration. At last. My hopes soared. 

I read avidly. The pleasure as a reader was more intense than usual because I had been invited INSIDE the house. Jan is giving me a conducted tour, pointing out the model ships, introducing me to the pictures on the walls, and the library. Ahhh, the library. Thousands of books, many written by herself, together with the translations into other languages, meticulously arranged. We walk through all the rooms, with no sign of Elizabeth’s presence, and finally into the garden. It is page 129 when she makes an appearance…eccentrically dressed in a kind of linen bonnet to keep off the flies. Jan tells me Elizabeth grows most of their green victuals in season. 

And that was it.

Except, of course, on the last page, a reference, well known from previous books and articles, to the gravestone in the cupboard under the stairs. It carries the inscription in Welsh and English Here are two friends. Jan and Elizabeth Morris. At the end of one life.

Disappointed and aggrieved, I start searching again. There they are — on June 28th 2024 in The Telegraph and July 3rd in The Times. Obituaries of Elizabeth Tuckniss who died on June 17th aged 99. Miserable, textbook chronologies which filled me with sadness. Small footnotes in the Hall of Fame, to a woman — another unknown woman — who shared her life with an extraordinary artist.

I made a vow that day to make a little tribute to her. Perhaps the ashes have already been interred on the island in the River Dwyfor, just below the house, as they had planned. But in my mind it will always be Jan Morris and Elizabeth Tuckniss who lie there.