Helen Mason
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Helen Mason Young (Born 1938 in Glasgow) was a journalist and children's author. She gave up a successful journalistic career with the Daily Express after she married the political journalist Hugo Young and decided to devote her life to her four children.
As they grew older, she grew back into work. She completed a number of successful children's books under her married name, Helen Young, including Wide Awake Jake, A Throne for Sesame and What Difference Does it Make, Danny? whose target age-groups grew along with her own children. Eventually she resumed her journalism as a freelance columnist on a number of newspapers, notably The Observer and The Sunday Times. As a journalist she was usually credited under her maiden name Helen Mason, and occasionally other pseudonyms to protect her children from the embarrassment of being identified by their friends with some of her more personal observations about them.
A lifelong believer in the power of positive thought, the possibility of her enthusiastic smoking habit harming her was never something she took seriously. She finally gave up after discovering she was suffering from lung cancer, which after much treatment and occasional optimism eventually killed her in October 1989.