My mother passed away last week (cancer, not covid). Vera Lilian Atkins (nee Hough) was born in the village of St Helens near Widnes, outside Liverpool in 1937. She grew up during the war, and post-war austerity. She was honest, courageous and hard-working. She left school at 15
to go out to work. Later she studied nursing, and then worked at a school for the deaf, where she met my father. She was something of a rebel growing up, but resisted against petty authority and arbitrary rules, rather than common decency.
After a time living in Bulawayo, and then settling in Durban, with me as a baby, she worked as an office administrator at a property company, and later at the X-ray Dept of St Augustines during the 1970s. She was always very good at what she did. After we moved to Margate, she
took up pistol shooting as a sport, and ran an art gallery (for Errol Boyley, who was an avid shottist). She branched out by opening and running a boutique for the Boyleys. After my father retired, she became an estate agent here in Durban.
She was an avid reader, and was the best Scrabble player I know, as well as being a master at crosswords. She volunteered on the Red Cross ambulance in Margate (often encountering some very tricky situations), and taught first-aid courses at the local school.
She bore the cancer for the last year of her life with dignity and courage, as she had the debilitating rheumatoid arthritis for the last 15 years. Like many of her generation, she did not want to be a burden, or the centre of attention.
She taught me the value of honesty, and of helping others. I did not quite inherit her tidiness or meticulous organisation, though. Growing up, she taught me to view my eyesight problem not as a disability, but rather as something to overcome. She encouraged me to live a normal
life, even as she feared for my safety playing cricket and rugby, or riding a bicycle. I am so grateful for the privilege of the upbringing that I had, where values, and fun were much more important than the things we had.
This is what her support person from Hospice had to say after she passed away. 
A final memory: we lived adjacent to my father's school, and there was an unofficial arrangement where the poorer children could go to my mother at break and say that our dog ate their lunch, and she would make sandwiches for them.
