Nicholas Tucker writes: There is reason to doubt Diana Wynne Jones's story of seeing her younger sister slapped by Beatrix Potter, repeated in the obituary by Christopher Priest (28 March).
My family shared Lake District accommodation with the Jones family at the time, and I can attest that there was no shortage of local old ladies resentful of noisy children up from the south. My brother was chastised in the same year for running a stick down a garden fence. Family lore also in time turned this avenging figure into Potter, but when I asked my mother about this years later, she said this was at best only wild surmise.
Priest suggests, too, that Potter hated children. Anyone reading Letters to Children from Beatrix Potter (1994), collected and edited by Judy Taylor, can witness the loving care she took when corresponding with more than 40 children, most of whom she had never met.