"ME!"

It's a tiny photo, two inches by an inch and a half, faded with age, which was stuck into a corner of my mother's album. While I suspected that it showed my mother, and was taken while she lived in Burma - those look like canna lilies behind her - it wasn't until the other day, when I was trying to scan the picture, that it fell out of the album and revealed a caption on the back.

"ME!" it says in beautifully neat writing executed with a nibbed pen and proper ink, "ME! Shorter than ever!"

What a cry from the heart, and what wrung it out of her?

Yes, she was short, but not unduly so. Perhaps it was that her older sister, Christian, was taller, or her friends were all taller, but why did she feel she was not just "short" but "shorter than ever"?

I never thought of my mother as small or short but perhaps that was because she made up for any lack of inches in strong personality. She was a woman of opinion and determination - how else could she have travelled alone down the Nile from Lake Victoria to Cairo in 1961, or flown to Australia in her seventies?

Perhaps it was a determination to prove herself, despite her lack on inches, that drove her to the adventure that was her life. Certainly, in what she achieved, she could walk very tall.