Her daughter, broadcaster and writer Emma Freud, announced the news on social media describing how her "beautiful" mother had "taken her final bow".

She said: “After a loving evening – where we knew she was on her way – surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza, she told us all to f*** off so she could go to sleep. And then she never woke up.

“Her final words were ‘I love you’.”

Jill Freud at home in Walberswick (Image: Newsquest)

Born June Flewett in London in 1927, she was evacuated to Oxford aged 16 to escape the Blitz during the Second World War. There she lived at the Kilns, the home of CS Lewis which he shared with his brother Warnie and adoptive mother - plus possible partner - Jane Moore.

Employed as a young housekeeper, she became deeply fond of Lewis, later confessing to the Daily Telegraph in 2005 she had something of a “schoolgirl crush”. She also often encountered his friend JRR Tolkien there.

In 1945, Lewis, taken by her kindness and character, wrote to her mother: “I have never really met anything like her unselfishness and patience and kindness and shall feel deeply in her debt as long as I live.”

It was only decades later, in 2004, that she learned........

© Eastern Daily Press