Arabella Spencer-Churchill died this morning. I realise many of you reading this will not have heard of her, but you may pause at her surname - her grandfather was Winston Churchill and love him or loathe him, Churchill is of the most famous names in English history. Arabella was Winston's beloved grand-daughter - and the driving force behind all the really authentic and interesting bits of Glastonbury Festival, the bohemian Grande Dame and pride of European rock music festivals.

Twenty-three years ago I was a raw, uncompromising, driven young woman trying to bring a different kind of ethic - passionate, emotive, dark and beautiful - to the limp, effete world of English poetry. I knew no fear and took no prisoners. Then I got booked to play at Glastonbury Festival.

Glastonbury, way back then, wasn't cool. It was so far from being media-hip it hurt. It was a Hippie Festival and hippie-world was the antithesis of Punk and Goth - or so we believed. It was all tie-dye, lentils and
headbands, maaan. My young male colleagues in the world of Punk spoken-word laughed long and loud when I said I was going to do it. Then when Arabella took a big chance and booked me into the massive Cabaret Marquee and I did
poetry every day to two thousand enthusiastic tuned-in and turned-on groovers, their laughter turned to jealous silence and they busied themselves getting booked for the coming year. The word was out; Glastonbury was on the up.

It was more than a mere music festival, you see. It wasn't just a hippie holiday camp either. It was a whole Other World, an Alternative Universe, a place to have your eyes wide open and your mind unchained for three days, to find solace in the knowledge you weren't alone in Straight world where drunken Townie boys spat at you in the street and beat you up regularly and depressingly, where being different was actually dangerous and Punks and Goths weren't the cute, cuddly Myspace kids they are now, but were viewed as cross between Space Aliens and social terrorists, trying to destroy civilisation as we know it, Biggles. Glastonbury, for many, was a spiritual gathering, a meeting-place of the alienated, the alternative, the seekers after knowledge, the esoteric evacuees of a country locked up tight by Thatcher's army of desperate faux-normality.

And it was Arabella who created the Glastonbury Cabaret and Theatre Marquees; Arabella who populated the festival with an exploding moveable feast of street theatre performers - stilt-walkers, scrap-sculpture mavens, fire-eaters, trapeze athletes, weirdoes and freaks of all stripes and colours who paraded daily in glittering disarray through the lanes, fields
and alleys of the Crazy City delighting and amazing the jostling throngs.

Arabella put on her famous - or infamous - pyromaniac Fire Shows, ran the wonderful Children's World play area and associated children's charity, re-united lost children with their families, lost performers with their
stage-managers and lost souls with their saviours.

'Bella' was a force to be reckoned with and a Valkyrie not to be crossed. Many - mostly male - muttered mutinously under their breath as she issued orders in that unmistakable throaty voice and brooked no opposition. But she got the job done - she always got the job, no matter how impossible it might seem - done.

But that so-called harridan image is not my final and abiding memory of Arabella. It's more simple, and more complex. It happened a few years into my twenty-three year stint at Glastonbury. It was one of the sunny festivals and the morning light was mellow, soft and clear promising a scorcher to come. I saw Arabella outside her caravan, relaxing for a brief moment. Now,
I didn't't really know her , to me she was the promoter who had taken a chance on me, who had re-booked me year after year and whom I was somewhat in awe of. She was the aristocratic descendant of a very famous man, after
all, and she resembled him mightily.

I don't know why, but I said - rather hesitantly - hello. She looked at me. Just looked. Before I'd gone to the festival that year someone had shown me a picture of Arabella when she was young, saying what a groovy chick she'd been. Knowing only the older, commanding Arabella, and being young and ignorant myself, I had been amazed at the almost unearthly, elfin beauty of the image; the mischievous smile, the mass of fair hair shining under a
wide-brimmed flowered hat, her vitality evident even in the old black and white newspaper picture, the huge pale eyes dancing with enthusiasm. Her tremendous spirit had been captured for all time by the chance photograph.

When I saw Arabella on that sunny day, I noticed for the first time, the sky-blue of her enormous eyes and her hair, threads of white in the corn-gold. It looked like beautiful silver-gilt. Impulsively, I told her.
There was a pause. I felt myself going red - had I overstepped the mark by being too personal? The pause lengthened. I was about to apologise and run
away when she smiled, the smile of that young girl in the picture.

'Thank you.' She said, in her husky voice.

I smiled back.

Arabella was not merely a strong woman in a world that only ever grudgingly acknowledges the strength of women, she was not just a good general in command of her forces, or a campaigner for charities and the illumination of the human spirit.

She was a woman with a great heart, who was able to be genuinely gracious to a silly, insecure, shy girl. But she saw, with those unclouded eyes, what the World did not; she saw that shyness is often covered by bluff, and that those who feel they have the most to lose, fight the hardest. She was a kind woman, and I think, she had been there herself.

Arabella Spencer-Churchill will be genuinely missed and not only by her beloved family and adored friends; it was a privilege for someone on the very outer fringes of her life such as myself, to have known and worked for
her. Glastonbury Festival will not be the same without her guiding influence and tremendous strength. A very bright light has gone out.