Ben Goldsmith posts heartbreaking tribute to daughter three months after her tragic death

Iris Goldsmith, 15, a pupil at Wycombe Abbey, died suddenly on after reportedly becoming trapped when a vehicle she was riding, said to be similar to a quad bike, overturned.

Mr Goldsmith wrote on Instagram: “Summer’s now autumn and it’s three months and a lifetime that you’re gone, my little love.

“Still we’re incredulous. Painted in the colours of autumn itself, this was your season, ‘much better than summer’ you used to say.

“Not just pumpkins and dress-up and fat shiny conkers and skipping to school along paths strewn thick with leaves, your favourite things all, for you the autumn was the time of getting back to work; a time to get things done, of getting on with being amazing.

“You’re not here in the autumn, but the morning air this is tainted with your vividness. And still people write to us with little stories of things you said and did that make our heart ache with pride and longing.

“The mother of one young Wycombe girl, Emma, wrote to us about her daughter’s devotion to you. You were her ‘house mother’ and when you found out she was being picked on by a girl from another house you went there and frogmarched her back to Wendover to apologise in person.

“Another young girl will always remember when, newly arrived, you found her homesick and sat with her and made her laugh: “By being so happy herself Iris made all the other girls happy,” she wrote in a letter.

“You were there for the young ones and for the weaker ones, just as you were there for your own friends who came teary to he funeral in their drives, girls and boys who mill about the magic tree on Barnes Common shell-shocked still, wondering – like us – how such a thing can possibly have happened.

“Of course, there’s no answer, at least none that we mortals could ever fathom. You lit up so many lives. You lit up mine, and no words now can possibly describe how much I miss you, my special girl.”