The sad death of Jennifer Aldridge has been, for me, like losing an old and dear friend. I first got to know her back in the 1960s when, with my agricultural student mates, I started following life in Ambridge. The big story at the time was Jennifer and her baby; the single-mum with her short skirts and lipstick, determined to give Baby Adam the best possible start in life.

            We had a lot of arguments over who the father might be, though none of us got it right. What we did end up with was a lot of respect for this brave, free-spirited young woman who dared to live life her own way.

            Years later when I decided to try writing for The Archers, many of the sample scenes I sent to the BBC at Pebble Mill featured Jennifer and her philandering husband Brian. I based the characters – apart from the philandering - on a farming couple I knew in the small Wiltshire village where I lived for a time. They had a big farm and lived in an elegant Georgian farmhouse complete with swimming pool and tennis court.

            Having grown up on a Reading council estate, I’d never before seen a lifestyle that opulent. Even so, the couple seemed determined to share their good fortune with other villagers. There were any number of poolside parties in summer, along with winter gatherings at which the old house echoed to the sounds of laughter and cheery discourse.

            When I got to write The Archers for real, I recreated these happy scenes at Home Farm. At all of them, Jennifer was invariably at the heart of the action. An awesome cook, she was equally happy serving venison stew to the guns and beaters on shoot days as she was presenting a Sunday roast to the sometimes quarrelsome family members.

Family came front and centre in Jennifer’s order of how things should be. She was the true constant in all their lives, whether it was Kate discovering herself on the hippie trail, Adam weathering the squalls of working with his stepfather, or Alice battling with alcohol addiction. Perhaps the biggest challenge was in making herself a ‘real mum’ to Ruairi, offspring of Brian’s relationship with Siobhan Hathaway.

            While her devotion to home and family was uncompromising, Jennifer was far from parochial in her outlook. She achieved much success as a writer, first as the author of two novels, and later as co-author of a much-praised book on the history of Ambridge. Her regular feature articles for the Borchester Echo showed she could turn her hand to journalism, too. Through these features she showed herself to be a shrewd observer of contemporary life and attitudes.

            Sadly I have to admit that I played a part in her having to give up the farmhouse home she loved. In my storyline fish in the River Am suddenly start dying. Official investigations revealed the source of the pollution to be an illegal dump of toxic chemicals set up by Brian back in the 1970s. The aim of my story was to bring him down; a wrong-doing in early life was to return and haunt him, as in Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.

            When I dreamed up the story I never intended that Jennifer should lose her home. I imagined land would be sold to pay the massive clean-up costs. In the event the family partners decided the farmhouse should be sold too. With little complaint she was prepared to move with her husband – the cause of the catastrophe – into far more modest accommodation. It’s what you do for family, even when they’ve been selfish and stupid.

            And now she’s gone. A bright flame has vanished from the Ambridge scene, like the beacon that once burned at the top of Lakey Hill. Our lives are a little greyer and colder as a result. We’ll miss her.