Helen Zenna Smith
Eva Grace Price was born on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia, of British descent. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was an Autralian miner. Fiction abounds in the autobiographical details supplied by own Evadne Price. She claimed that she lied about her age, when her father died, and she went on stage to support herself and to travel alone to England. She said that she was born on 1896 at sea, on an ocean liner during a travel to Australia, or later that she was born on 1901 in Sussex, England.
On 28 August 1909 in Sydney, she married Henry A. Dabelstein, a German-born actor. After moved to England to acting, she decided reinventing herself, changing her name to more evocative "Evadne". On 1920 in London, she married Charles A. Fletcher, and changed her acting career by journalism, writing a column for the Sunday Chronicle and other newspapers. Her husband was Captain in the 3rd Devonshire Regiment, and died on 1924 in Sudan.
On 1928, she started to writing books, children's stories and romance novels, under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith, she also wrote two novelized books, about ambulance drivers in World War I. On 1939 in Kent, she married Kenneth Andrew Attiwill, an Australian writer. During World War II, she was the war correspondent for The People from 1943, covering the Allied invasion and all of the major war stories through the Nuremberg Trials. Her husband was a POW in Japan, and was presumed dead for two years.
Her career as novelist took her into playwriting, radio scriptwriting and screenwriting. She also had a parallel career as a night astrologer during the early years of British television. When she and her husband retired to their native Australia in 1976, she wrote the monthly horoscope column for Australian Vogue. She also appeared weekly on the ITV Central evening news magazine show with a 5 minute astrological. Evadne Price died on 17 April 1985 in Sydney, Australia at 96. She had an unfinished autobiography that she named "Mother Painted Nude".
“Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.”
“See the man they are fitting into the bottom slot. He is coughing badly. No, not pneumonia. Not tuberculosis. Nothing so picturesque. Gently, gently, stretcher-bearers… he is about done. He is coughing up clots of pinky-green filth. Only his lungs, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawington. He is coughing well to-night. That is gas. You’ve heard of gas. Haven’t you? It burns and shrivels the lungs to… to the mess you see on the ambulance floor there. He’s about the age of Bertie, Mother. Not unlike Bertie, either, with his gentle brown eyes and fair curly hair. Bertie would look up pleading like that in between coughing up his lungs… The son you have so generously given to the War. Cough, cough, little fair-haired boy. Perhaps somewhere your mother is thinking of you… boasting of the life she has so nobly given… the life you thought was your own, but which is hers to squander as she thinks fit. ‘My boy is not a slacker, thank God.’ Cough away, little boy, cough away. What does it matter, providing your mother doesn’t have to face the shame of her son’s cowardice?”