Welcome to Helen Pennell - Fine Art, a site dedicated to the art and creative mind of Helen Pennell. Here you can view the significant body of art work Helen built up in later life. The images have been archived into different categories depending on the media used and there is also a section displaying many of Helen's sketch books. In the About section you can read biographies and tributes from Helen's family and friends, including photographs spanning her whole life. There is also a Downloads section where you can obtain wallpapers and screensavers for your computer. Please browse the site and celebrate Helen's wonderful artistic talent and unique perspective on life. Helen’s life-long family nickname was ‘Squib’ (an old-fashioned term for a firework). The name stuck because Helen never lost that excitable, quicksilver quality that her elders rather hoped she’d grow out of. She was born into a clergy family in South Africa, the youngest of five children. A tribute to our mother, Helen, by Imogen Helen’s life-long family nickname was ‘Squib’ (an old-fashioned term for a firework). The name stuck becauseSquib Helen never lost that excitable, quicksilver quality that her elders rather hoped she’d grow out of. She was born into a clergy family in South Africa, the youngest of five children. They lived in a succession of rectories, vicarages and a deanery before leaving for England in 1927 and settling in Portsmouth, where her father was involved in the building of the new Cathedral. Helen recalled that they had a governess whose name was Lettice (they wondered about her name)….Lettice found keeping order a bit difficult… Portsmouth was of course a big naval base, the harbour full of ships. Helen recalled how, “The hammering of metal and the hooting, and sailors’ voices, made it an exciting place for us, when allowed to venture there. Otherwise the city life was a disappointment after the space and sun in South Africa; and no running about barefoot.” But later her father took over a rural parish… “We went to live in glorious Hampshire countryside and a garden that seemed to grow everything, as well as an immensely kind old gardener. There was a great wild place we called The Wilderness and it was bliss for all of us − so were the vast beech woods, and the freedom. None of us ever forgot it…” war timeThe family returned to South Africa in the mid-1930s, where her carefree childhood ended with her mother’s death when Helen was 14, and that of her father a few years later. Then came the war and, with it, the deaths of her brother and close friends who’d joined up. Helen rarely mentioned her wartime losses – but she developed a life-long abhorrence of war. Just last week I found some letters which she had kept from two soldiers, written in the early 1940s, only a short time before both were killed. She herself trained as a radar operator in Cape Town. It was there, in 1941, that she met our father, Monty, when he came ashore from his troop ship en route to North Africa. Helen described how she and some friends jumped into a car, drove down to the docks and….well, picked up some good-looking soldiers and… gave them a good time…a few drinks, some dancing, a game of tennis, that kind of thing. She assured me that the father of one of the girls, regarding entertaining the troops as a gal’s wartime duty, had driven them to the docks himself. Well, happily for us, Helen picked up Monty, and a few years later he came in handy when she was desperate to get to England, where the real war was being fought. She wrote to Monty and persuaded him to tell his commanding officer that she was his fiancée, so that he would authorise her passage. She sailed for England, arriving in Liverpool early in 1945, shocked by the ravages of war she had only read about, the hardships she’d been protected from. She was embarrassed by her well turned-out clothes in the era of ‘make-do and mend’ but soon learned to eke out her rations like everyone else. Needing work, she spotted a wonderful antiquarian bookshop in Marylebone High Street and talked herself into a job there. Later that year she and Monty married. Monty’s post-war work (in oil exploration) entailed a married life of travel and improvised living in far away places. Conditions in the Southern Iranian oilfields in the late 1940’s were inhospitable even for those Helen with Monty and Imogenaccustomed to austerity back home. We lived in an isolated old house perched on a rocky escarpment high above the town of Masjid-i-Sulaiman. Helen had only me (a very young child) and Mahmoud and his family for company much of the time. (Yes, these were colonial times and Mahmoud was our servant). But she could find interest in any surroundings. She set about learning Farsi, studying Persian history, archaeology, artistic and craft traditions. Fascinated by other cultures, she felt we had much to learn from them. And being a natural history buff, she collected specimens amongst the plants and wildlife of what appeared to be barren desert hills. In 1951, Mossadeq expelled the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - and Helen and I joined other wives and children being flown out at short notice. But ten years later we returned to Iran, a country Helen had grown to love. In between, she and Monty had taken us to strange new lives in Sicily, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and South Africa. Our nomadic life made ordinary schooling impossible, so Helen became my only teacher for several years – Maths, French, Latin, Science, mythology, ancient civilisations, and much more – an intimidating syllabus to a normal person….but to Helen it was just another adventure. She was a wonderful teacher, because she herself had an insatiable love of learning – and she communicated her enthusiasm.