Born in Durban, Natal where her Scottish father had moved to practice Architecture, she studied at Slade under Philip Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks from 1920. A brief marriage to a fellow student was followed by a second to Ian Parsons in 1934. He was an editor at Chatto & Windus and much of her work of the period was for book illustration. Her sister Alice Ritchie was an author of children’s books that Trekkie illustrated and she introduced Trekkie to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Virginia died in 1941 and shortly afterwards Alice was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Leonard visited her bedside at Trekkie’s house. He fell in love with Trekkie and they began an unconventional, probably chaste, relationship that lasted until his death in 1969. In an artistic menage a trois worthy of the golden day sof the Bloomsbury set she would often spend the week with Leonard and the weekend with her husband, holidaying with and acting as hostess for them both separately.