I have tried and tried to find the stories that Nadine Gordimer and Elsie Cohen read out on the fledgeling SABC. I even imagine in my mind’s eye scenes of contented 1930s families listening to the stories, huddled around boxy radios housed in handsome wooden cabinets gleaming with polish. I can see the antimacassars and the aspidistras in brass pots, and the family sitting around listening to the wonders of the wireless, and the stories of two little Jewish girls, daughters of immigrants. This soft-focus image owes a lot to the beautifully staged Woody Allen film of 1987, Radio Days, which Elsie loved, telling us that it was just like that – people did sit around the radio as earlier, again within her memory, they had sat around the piano and sung songs. Ada was the musician in the family – Elsie did not have the chance to learn music. And the SABC stories, as far as I can tell, are gone, along with Elsie's own career as a journalist and writer.

Along with many other writers who have similar quotes attributed to them, the novelist PD James is credited with saying, ‘All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.’ This statement applies as much to this book you are reading now as to anything else, but I was reminded of it so much on reading Elsie's story in the Sunday Express. Her hero, Lee Alexander, is a young American man, possibly a teenager like herself, but look what Elsie Cohen of 59 Abel Road had to say about him: ‘Although he lived in “Devil's Kitchen,” the slums of New York, he should have really been born in a rich man’s mansion, for his favourite pastimes were writing poetry and reading the great classics. Even though he possessed these qualities, he had courage.’

I am so touched by this. Like Lee Alexander, Elsie loved writing and she loved the great classics. She had read most of Dickens by the age of 12, encouraged me to do the same, and was disappointed when I did not share this same passion.