'Dearest Squirrel...'

A completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK's greatest playwrights, the letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actressPamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre, and life in post-war Britain.As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne's death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together. `You are for me what you always were,' Pamela told him, `I am in love with you still.' It is, he declared, `my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime.'Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, they reveal a unique relationship, troubled, tender and enduring.