Reflections on the life of my late mother and the impact she had on mine
My mother, Joanna Strangwayes-Booth, finally let go of life on 16 April, after a long struggle with a peculiarly nasty lung disease. In the last two weeks of her life a constant refrain from the wonderful district nurses who came to administer drugs was that she was real fighter. And indeed, from the time she was born prematurely in 1940, in the breech position and weighing 3.5lbs, she was a fighter. She worked with ANC activists in South Africa in the early 1960’s fighting against apartheid, eventually having to leave the country after some of her colleagues were arrested. She chose to marry out of her Jewish faith, meaning that she took on a fight with the Orthodox synagogue (who said she could not darken their doors again if she married my father), and with her new mother-in-law, who hated Jews. My parents would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary next year.
When I was growing up there were always arguments raging over meal tables, usually about current events. She fought development in our village in Berkshire – I once woke up to her voice on the Today programme on Radio 4, because she had persuaded everyone in the village to park their cars along one side of the road and had caused traffic jams for 5 miles in every direction – she wanted to show what effect the new houses would have on traffic. She campaigned endlessly for political parties, most recently for the Conservatives in Broadlands, although I recall handing out leaflets for the SDP at some time in the 1980s and further back hanging out in party offices while she campaigned for the Progressive Party in South Africa. Until the very end she was an active participant in the Campaign Against Antisemitism. She fought breast cancer twice and lived with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis for two years longer than is usual after diagnosis.
She also fought with me (or I with her) for almost all my adult life, mostly about politics, but occasionally about other things. She was originally not happy with my choice of husband (“why can’t you marry a nice Jewish boy?” which caused another argument about hypocrisy), and she would have loved me to be a high-flying, high-earning lawyer, which I tried but hated. But overall, although strongly opinionated, she was a loving and kind person and was generally supportive of the life choices I and my sisters made, particularly in recent years. She loved the shop and would happily have spent more time here, had her illness allowed, and at the age of 82 took up knitting. She and my father came to live in our house for the last 18 months of her life which worked surprisingly well and enabled her to die at home which is what she wanted. She adored all her grandchildren equally and was immensely proud of them. My son has rightly said of her that she was never less or more than herself, which is a rare thing.
It was not an easy decision to write about her here – I was not sure how appropriate it would be. But the fact is that ‘here’ would not exist were it not for her. She was a highly educated woman (she had a first in Politics) and believed profoundly in women’s education, encouraging me to go to Cambridge and read Classics even though it had no obvious use as a degree. She always said the degree subject didn’t matter, it was studying for a degree that was important. She was a working mother, a journalist, ending up as the deputy editor of Good Housekeeping magazine, and then she became an entrepreneur, so really she had no-one but herself to blame when I gave up being a lawyer and opened a coffee shop. She started up and ran a business at a time when there were not many female entrepreneurs around, and she pioneered audio tours, almost unheard of in the 1980’s, now a very common thing at museums and historical sites. She gave a lot of her time to charities, so again should not have been surprised that I spent 16 years working for the National Childbirth Trust. She introduced me to opera, horseracing, science fiction and the novels of Georgette Heyer (naming me for one of them) together with the idea that it was okay to read widely and eclectically. Above all, through her example, she gave me the courage to do what I believed in.
She drove me mad, but I was very proud of her and her achievements, I loved her dearly, and was glad to be able to help her have a more comfortable time at the end of her life. Almost every time we argued, she would say “You’ll miss me when I’m dead” and she was right. I do.
Her funeral is on Wednesday 1 May, and the shop will be closed that day.
I may have told you this on Facebook a while back. Joanna was a customer of mine in the late 8os when I was at Tandy and she was doing the audio tours. I remember going to her house in Windsor and she took me to the pub for lunch. She said quietly to me, don’t look now, but that’s my mother in law over there, she’s followed us down the pub. She’ll be telling my husband I’ve had a strange man in the house tonight… I got on with Joanna like a house on fire and was very sad to hear when she passed away. Keith
Thank you so much for the story, Keith! It’s so very Mum and in fact also sums up my paternal grandmother. I remember the days of you and Tandy very well! Hope all is well. Kind regards, Venetia.