POLICE officers are talking to Tytherington youths and conducting house-to-house enquiries as they continue their search for the arsonist who started a house blaze that claimed the life of a talented author.

Macclesfield CID set up a major incident room last week after forensic tests confirmed the fire, that killed mother-of-one Miriam Polunin, 59, was started deliberately.

The health food book author was pulled to safety through an upstairs window of her elderly and sick mother's sprawling detached home on Oldham's Rise, Tytherington, at about 5am on Saturday, March 19.

She was resuscitated by firefighters but died from the effect of smoke inhalation the next day in the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Her mother Sara Doggart, 91, and her 62-year-old carer were also rescued by the fire brigade. The carer was discharged the next day but Mrs Doggart still remains in Macclesfield Hospital in a "stable" condition.

Detective Constable Phil Jones said: "House to house enquiries have been conducted in the area and we have spoken to a lot of the local youths over the weekend.

"We are appealing for anybody with any information that may be of use to get in touch with us."

Miriam Polunin, who wrote Healing Foods, lived in London and was in Macclesfield to visit her sick elderly mother.

Miriam was born in Buxton of a Northern Irish father and a Russian Jewish mother whose family had fled first from Russia, and then, in the 1930s, from Hitler's Germany.

She went to school first in Macclesfield and then at Howells, a Victorian girls' boarding school in North Wales, and later for nine months at the Sorbonne in Paris. She went on to study Economics and Philosophy at London School of Economics, then English at University College London.

After university she shared a flat in London and took the unusual step of being apprenticed as an engineering manager at Rolls Royce Aeronautics. However, her interest in aeronautics was short-lived as in 1970 she met and married Ivan Polunin.

Together they set off for the Far East spending a year in Japan and then back-packing around Indonesia and Australia. It was her experience of the local, and very healthy, foods of the Far East, which sparked her lifelong interest in the food-health connection.

The couple returned to the UK where Miriam's ever growing interest in health took her into health journalism. She joined the editorial team of Here's Health, which at that time was a small format A5 magazine sold only in health shops.

Over the ten years that she worked for the magazine, most of them as editor, she took it from that lowly status to a mainstream 'full-sized' magazine available in all the main outlets including WH Smith.

In the 1970s she also started writing food and health-related books, the first being The Wholemeal Kitchen, which was published in 1977. In the early Eighties she went freelance and wrote more books.

She separated from Ivan who returned to the Far East.

During the 1980s her interests turned increasingly to the connection between food and health - a connection which, at that time, was scarcely recognised.

Miriam wrote several books on the subject starting with The Right Way to Eat: To Feel Good, or Even Better which came out in 1978 and was followed by Skin Troubles in 1984, The New Cookbook in 1985, the Natural Pharmacy in 1992, and, in 1997, Healing Foods, her most successful book still to be found on the shelves of every bookshop health section.

Meanwhile she had written a number of reports for the Department of Health, the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, on eating well and on the deficiencies of school food - a topic which, 20 years later, finally hit the headlines.

She also became an active member of the Guild of Food Writers, serving two stints on the committee, and an active campaigner for local foods and farmers' markets.

Miriam was a keen cook and gardener and had recently become an enthusiastic member of the Arnold Bennett Society. She had a wide circle of friends.

Det Cons Jones said last week: "Forensic examination of the scene would indicate that the fire was started maliciously and as a result Cheshire Police have set up a major incident room to investigate the cause of the fire and the tragic death of Miriam Polunin.

"At this stage we are unable to establish any reason why anyone would want to target this family or this house. It maybe that this was a prank that has gone tragically wrong or that it is something more sinister."

  • ANYONE with information can contact Macclesfield CID on 01625 610000 or information can be left anonymously on the Crimestoppers information line on 0800 555111.