(edited) ...Helen was my singing teacher. At the time I was a pupil at Watson's and hoping to get a choral scholarship to Cambridge. I had known Helen's singing for some years through her performances in Edinburgh - certainly Messiah and the Matthew Passion, and I seem to remember a Gerontius - but her teaching in the Strathern Road flat set me on a sound course and led, as hoped, to a choral scholarship to the St John's Cambridge Choir.

Because Helen had known my parents for many years (she and my father were at university together), we kept in touch from time to time. She came to a performance of the Mass in B minor that I conducted in Winchester Cathedral (must have been 2004), which she said she enjoyed; although she minded that "my arias had been given to a counter-tenor". 

I think I last called Helen in November 2019 to tell her that my mother had died. She told me then of her health troubles, but without a hint of being sorry for herself.

...I mentioned Helen and the excellence of her teaching in conversation only a few days ago, in the context of a young man in our church choir whose singing teacher has tried to develop far too much, far too soon. By contrast, I remember Helen telling me more than once that what she was trying to do with my teenage voice was to keep me out of trouble - technique could come later.