My mother, Suzanne Dore, who has died aged 90, shrugged off the drawbacks of an education disrupted by the second world war. Her older siblings, Judith and John Fay, both went on to higher things, while mum was left with a job in the kitchens after serving as a Wren during the war. She went on to become a qualified teacher, published author, restaurateur and championship-winning breeder and exporter of rare horses.
The daughter of Stanley, a journalist, and Muriel (nee Nicholson), Suzanne was born in Chelsea, south-west London. Muriel took her own life when Suzanne was four, and she was raised by her stepmother, Jo. She went to Brickwall school, a progressive private school in Northiam, East Sussex, which closed just before the war, then the Grove school, Hindhead, Surrey, as a weekly boarder. She met and married Vic Baker, a demobbed Royal Navy petty officer turned agricultural labourer, in 1947, and their son, Nicky, was born later that year. The marriage ended in the mid-50s and my mother, a single parent whose well-heeled family had disapproved strongly of the match, ended up on her uppers.
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