Several years ago, I asked my mum what her earliest memory was.

She told me it was her parents rocking her lovingly to sleep and her sitting on the potty – or ‘the pot’ as she called it – with Listen with Mother on the radio in the background.

Footage of mum as a young girl, around the age of four or five, shows her to be playful, sensitive and a little shy.

Mum often told me her own mother, my grandma, thought she was ‘absolutely wonderful’ and that this had given her an inner confidence throughout her life. Mum wanted the same for us. To her, all geese were swans because she believed that giving confidence to others made all things possible.

As a teenager, she wrote a composition stating that she wanted to be a nanny, to which my grandma’s response was: “Not after the expensive education you’ve had.” Seeing mum’s dejected face, my grandma told mum that she could be a Norland Nanny. I can’t quite imagine mum – with her love of colour and fashion, her brooches from charity shops across London – in the sensible brown-lace ups and beige aprons of Norland nannies.

Instead, mum decided on teaching, and what a teacher she was – to us, her children, and to her grandchildren. She read stories at my children’s nursery and taught them to spell their names through song and theatrical hand gestures. It didn’t surprise any of us that ex-pupils and their parents kept in touch. Only recently, one emailed to say that she wondered if mum could give her a reference as she wanted to be a bus driver. Another came up to her to express thanks for the way mum had taught her son to read.

In characteristic fashion, mum greeted her with warmth and then confessed to us that she had no idea who this person, or her son, were.