The gypsy of Chelsea

The former editor of Paris Vogue Joan Juliet Buck recalls her friend, Nona Summers, the flamboyant, often outrageous socialite of Seventies London, who died tragically last month

- Joan Juliet Buck

When Nona Summers stepped outside The Park Restaurant to light a cigarette after lunch on a windy August afternoon and set her dress on fire, no one who knew her wanted to believe the burns would kill her. Nona was too feisty to complain, too worldly to die. She did not accept tragedy or limitations. Her advice to her daughter, the writer and actor Tara Summers, was always, "If you're stuck behind a bus, you're in the wrong lane."

After the accident, Nona was taken to the Burns Intensive Care Unit of Broomfield Hospital in Essex and placed in an induced coma, as her daughter Tara and her son-in-law kept vigil by her bedside. After 11 days, with profound sadness and shock to all who knew her, it was announced that she had died on 28 August, at the age of 78.

Nona died in mid-movement, much as she had lived. At the time of her death, she was in transit, returning to London from Los Angeles, unsure exactly where she would live. She had never allowed the retinitis pigmentosa that had been narrowing her field of vision since 1989 to curtail her intercontinental adventures. Her eyesight was already fading in 1994 when she attended the first of the Vanity Fair Oscar parties that gave her reason to return to LA every winter. Brave and gallant, she deployed a pocket torch and a white cane- at first telescopic, only recently solid - and made her way through fashionable evenings in the bright beam of a small miner's headlamp strapped to her forehead.