Lorna’s new book, her memoir, entitled My Short Century, will be published this spring. Lorna has worked on and off on her memoirs for the past ten years, and Brian Cathcart described the laborious process in an article in the New Statesman in 2006:
Arnold works with pen and paper, even though she cannot read the words. “I just about know that I’m writing on the paper and not the table top, though I sometimes stray. If anything interrupts me it’s very hard to find the sequence again, so I never write in short spells, only when I can find a few hours when I won’t be disturbed.”
The scripts are typed by a friend in Hampshire and edited by another in Warwickshire before they return to Arnold in Oxford, where she has a scanner that converts them into speech. “The results are sometimes funny. It read one sentence as: ‘This is a revel a tory book.'”
Since then, her sight has further deteriorated, and she has completed the book by dictating material, and having the entire book read to her by dedicated friends and family members. Though 96 years old, she retains her sharp memory, and recounts stories from her rural childhood, her work in the War Office during World War II, as well has her many years as an official historian for the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Lorna’s last publication was the 2007 edition of her book on the Windscale nuclear accident Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident.
Lorna Arnold 