an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect. The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30years old. Plath's intentions have been debated. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, Trevor Thomas (1907–1993), what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr.Horder", including the doctor's phone number. It is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note (although the escaping gas had seeped downstairs and also rendered Thomas unconscious while he slept). However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's friend, Jillian Becker, wrote, "According to Mr.Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office, [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven and had really meant to die." Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart". In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, and spoke, in a BBC interview in March2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirtyyears old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do." By chance, the artist Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot had