My mother, Pat Wallsgrove, who has died aged 89, was a free-thinker, a warm, flamboyant teacher, a partygoer and very much a child of the 20th century. She was an anti-fascist campaigner in the 1940s, busy with children in the 50s and liberal in the 60s. Pat made use of cheap air travel to go around the world (twice, literally, and to every continent but Antarctica) from the 1970s onwards, with friends and family. Taking up the computer in the 90s, she helped set up Leamington Elders Action Project to share her technical skills with others.
She was born Patricia Alice Scaddan to Eileen ("Sis" to all) and Arthur. Her father came from a family of sailors and was invalided out of the navy in the first world war. He became a chemical engineer and travelled for work, most significantly to Huelva, southern Spain, to work for Rio Tinto mines. They left Spain because of the civil war.
At St Hilda's College, Oxford, to study English, Pat became a Communist party member, mostly to oppose fascism, and was its successful candidate for junior common room president in 1943. My father, Dick Wallsgrove, was the Communist party's JCR president at Jesus College but Pat always swore she married him for his dance skills, rather than his politics.
Pat didn't stay in the party, but remained a radical humanist who supported the liberalisations of the 1960s. Despite working for many years at Leamington College for Girls while the town still had the 11-plus, she was passionately in favour of comprehensive schools. Some of my most vivid memories are of her arguing with anyone, even the TV, about the Vietnam war, and bringing back a huge George McGovern badge from her first trip to the US.
She encouraged creativity and we still bump into former pupils who talk about how much she changed their lives or simply made them laugh. She was famously easy-going, and the favourite chaperone ("Ma Wallsgrove") for joint school social events.
It is impossible to remember her without a mischievous smile on her face. She is survived by her four children, Chris, Roger, me and Bill; and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.