I never knew

I’d worked with her for over 20 years and yet I never knew. When she announced her retirement it felt like the end of an era. During one of our last dinners as working colleagues she told me she had recently been to Stockholm during Nobel Prize presentation week. As a child she remembered going to the Nobel Prize dinner and sitting on a table with other small children, one of whom was now the King of Sweden. To relive memories of attending the awards ceremony all those years before she had gone to the Nobel Museum, which displays the details of all the Nobel Prize winners since 1901. ‘That’s my father,’ she said, showing me a photograph of a display in the museum ‘and that’s my grandfather,’ showing me another. I had to ask her to repeat this a few times. She had never mentioned this in all the years I had known her. ‘I wanted people to accept me for who I was rather than someone from a family with two Nobel Prize winners. The only time it became known was when my father died. I had been visiting him repeatedly in Cambridge and when his obituary was published someone put two and two together because of my surname. Fortunately I persuaded them to keep the information to themselves.’

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