Ann 80

 

Tomorrow would have been my mum Ann's 80th birthday.

Ann arrived in 1946, into a Britain that was still busy putting itself back together with optimism, tea, and an alarming amount of concrete. She was raised in her grandfather's house on what was then the largest public housing estate in the country. To those who had come from London's poorest streets, it might as well have been a palace. Not because it had chandeliers - although a reliable indoor toilet can sometimes feel like one, but because it represented something almost magical: the belief that ordinary people deserved decent homes.

Three generations lived beneath that roof, together with enough relatives to ensure that nobody's business remained exclusively their own.

Her grandfather had served in the First World War. Her father's own father never came home and still lies in Gaza over a century later.

Her father lived separately with his mother until Ann was fourteen, when the family were reunited in new social housing near the car factory that provided work for so many local families. It wasn't luxury. It was stability. Sometimes that's the greater gift.

She was brought up in the Salvation Army by her mother and grandfather, where faith came with music, purpose and sleeves rolled up ready for work. Later she found her spiritual home among the Quakers, where silence was not the absence of conversation but another way of listening. She remained a Quaker until her death in 2010.

Ann lived with bipolar disorder. It was her travelling companion that sometimes filled the world with extraordinary colour and possibility, and at other times quietly removed every shade except grey. Yet it never quite managed to extinguish the determined spark that seemed permanently installed somewhere behind her eyes.

A lifelong socialist Ann believed, with remarkable stubbornness, that the world could be improved. Not perfected (that would have been suspicious)  - but improved. She met my father through the Young Liberals, proving that politics is occasionally a less reliable guide to romance than shared conversation.

Education mattered to her. She worked full time, encouraged her daughters to study, and then, refusing to accept that education had an expiry date, earned her own university degree in her forties. She campaigned for the things communities quietly depend upon, especially the local library, because she understood that books are not simply shelves of paper but ladders that allow people to climb beyond the circumstances they were born into.

When words alone were insufficient, she turned to tapestry, painting and creative writing. She had the rare gift of seeing possibility where other people saw blank walls. And that is why they did not remain blank: Ann sporadically set about transforming the bricks and garden around her home into something that reflected the imagination inside it.

History has an inconvenient habit of lingering around the dinner table and quietly introducing itself to the grandchildren and Ann planted ideas that continue to bloom long after she's gone.

Tomorrow Ann would have been eighty.

I suspect she'd be rather amused that we're still talking about her. Then she'd remind us that there was tea to be made, someone who needed help, and a library worth saving.

Happy birthday, Mum.