CARMEN WOULD HAVE been the first to acknowledge how fortunate she had been to have lived a sheltered life as a child, growing up free of the stresses and strains that afflicted so many of her generation. She was brought up in the seclusion of Shamley Green, in the heart of the Surrey countryside. Her childhood was marked by a love of Surrey's gentle hills and splendid woodlands and the byways that led a walker from village to village. A love of such surroundings formed a background to Carmen's life, though much of it was spent in cities such as Oxford or Kyoto, Cambridge England or Cambndge Massachusetts. Until her last years an urge to tread those fields and climb their slopes drew her to spend weekends at the family's home whenever academic engagements and officials duties allowed a day or two of refreshment, amid the trees of Hascombe or the hills of Holmbury St Mary.

FAMILY LIFE AND EARLY YEARS

The family was of no less importance than the countryside in shaping Carmen's sense of values. Solidly united as they were, parents and children were marked with very different characteristics. Her father, C.P., better known as ‘Pip’, Blacker (1895-1975) of Eton and Balliol was for ever searching for an overall truth which would explain the universe and its creatures; lapsed Catholic though he was, he deeply respected the devotion that some of his friends owed to their faith and shared this search with them with complete tolerance; and he taught his children to do so. From 1914 onwards he served in France as an officer in the Coldstream Guards; the memories of trench warfare, the loss of his brother, also in the Coldstream Guards, at the battle of Loos never left him. Returning to his regiment in 1939, he chose to serve as the medical officer of the second battalion. Marked bravery in recovering a brother officer who had been injured by a land mine brought him the award of the George Medal.

In the meantime, C.P. Blacker had been trained in medicine at Oxford, to serve as a registrar at Guy's Hospital and, more prominently, on the staff of the Maudsley Hospital as a highly distinguished psychiatrist. Observing as he had the distress and suffering brought about by the uncontrolled birth of large numbers of children, he became deeply concerned with the problems of population growth.