Obituary: Kathleen Tynan

I came to know Kathleen Tynan while we worked together on the Kenneth Tynan Letters, beginning in early 1993, writes Allegra Huston [further to the obituary by Joan Juliet Buck, 11 January]. I was always a little in awe of her. She was living in t he basement flat of the house she had shared with Ken, surrounded by the evidence of his life crammed into filing cabinets, binders, photograph albums and folios, and in piles on every surface. The archive was immense: she had kept every scrap of paper h e hadwritten on, every doodle, every theatre programme. Kathleen had a mania for order.

After we had worked together for about a year, and when the final selection of letters was complete, I learnt that Kathleen was ill. She swore me to secrecy. She had only agreed to tell me in order to explain why our work was behind schedule - she disliked unprofessionalism of any kind. Despite the pain, the frequent visits to hospital, she worked as if nothing were wrong, with an army of helpers to track down every mysterious reference. I don't know how many notes there are in the Kenneth Tynan Letters, but they must number in the thousands. Kathleen was determined that the book should be a model of its kind. Through a forest of Post-It notes we tracked down flagpole-sitters, "Walter Winchell, a nun", the early career of Tony Blair's father, the stripper Gypsy del Rio, and the great cricketers of the 1940s. Once, when we were defeated by a line which the 16-year-old Ken attributed to Marlowe - which was very definitely not to be found in the works of Christopher Marlowe - Kathleen smiled at me and sighed, "How I hate clever young men."

Kathleen Tynan had an extraordinary capacity to inspire devotion. She only needed to ask, and one would do anything for her. This she accepted like a queen. In return, she thought constantly of helping those she loved. When one friend was having trouble with the jacket copy for her first book, Kathleen offered to write it for her. That was one month before she died.