Her novels were daring and convincing in their emotional spectrum
PATRICIA CRAIG Sunday 10 August 2014
Naomi May, who has died at her home in Richmond, Surrey, was an accomplished novelist and short-story writer, a subtle watercolourist, and an indefatigable member of the PEN “Writers in Prison” Committee.
She was born Naomi Keanie in Glasgow in 1934, and grew up in nearby Johnstone, an industrial town on the southern edge of the Clyde Valley. Her father, Norman Keanie, had inherited a construction company, and Naomi and her younger brother, Geoffrey, in many ways enjoyed an idyllic childhood in a handsome detached house called Miramar.
Then the war came, and as soon as they were old enough, the Keanie children were sent to a small boarding school in the Trossachs. Later, for Naomi, there were schools in England, one of which she “hated with a passion both enduring and defiant”. On the way home to Scotland after her last term there, in a gesture reminiscent of Becky Sharp at the start of Vanity Fair, she opened a carriage window as the train crossed a bridge over a river, flung out her abhorred school hat and gleefully watched it being carried out to sea. (She recalls the incident in her fascinating memoir of her early years, Everyone Wore Hats, 2013.)