I have come across some of my mother's poems scattered through her extensive papers. Only two of these have been published, one in an Indian newspaper in 1943, the other as a song by the folk-singer Vashti Bunyan in the 1970's. Although she did not rate her poetry as her primary literary activity, my mother's voice can be heard clearly in these and other poems. She read poetry avidly and had been writing poems from her early teens. Here I have made a preliminary selection of about half of the adult poems that have been recovered so far. Iris was born in Quetta, India (now Pakistan) in 1922, the daughter of Violet and William Rhodes James. She was sent home to England when she was young and went to six different schools. She was intelligent but also suffered acutely from having a polio-damaged leg. Rather than being allowed to go to Oxford or Cambridge, as she had hoped, she was taken out to India at the age of sixteen in 1939. Two years later she met Donald Macfarlane and they were married in early 1940. Her first child, Alan, was born in December 1941 and her daughters Fiona in 1944 and Anne in 1946. The family returned to England in April 1947, where Alan and Fiona were left with Iris's parents. For the next twenty years, my mother's life was split between England, where her children were being educated, and Assam, where her husband was the manager of a tea estate. She learnt Assamese and translated Assamese folk-tales which were published as Tales and Legends from India (1965). She also wrote a children's novel about Fiona and Anne as The Children of Bird God Hill (1967). She studied Assamese and Indian history, which led to a number of articles in History Today, and the book The Black Hole; The Makings of a Legend (1975). When Iris and Donald retired from India in 1965, they lived for a short while in the Lake District and then moved to a croft on the Hebridean island of North Uist. There she learnt Gaelic and published a book of translations of folk stories, The Mouth of the Night (1973). She also wrote another children's story, The Summer of the Lame Seagull ((1970). She contributed over thirty articles of a 'Hebridean Journal' to the Scotsman recounting life on the croft. She wrote a number of short stories which were broadcast on the B.B.C. At the age of 54 she went to University at Glasgow to study Scottish literature, but when her husband suddenly died she had to give up her studies. She also completed two thirds of an Open University degree in Philosophy. When she was 73 she decided to return to India. She made five trips in all, twice to Kalimpong, once to south India and once to Assam, latterly using a Zimmer frame. She published an autobiographical history of four generations of her family as Daughters of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj (2006; republished 2011). Iris died in Wolverhampton in February 2007.