My mother, Dee Humphries, who has died aged 88, was an inspirational science teacher whose love of travel brought her to the UK from her homeland in New Zealand, and who maintained her wanderlust well into old age.
She was born in Dunedin to Constance Bryant (nee Shannon), and then adopted at the age of two weeks by Cyril Sharp, who worked for the New Zealand General Post Office, and his wife, Rene (nee Butcher). Raised in Waimate, she attended Waimate high school before graduating with a science degree from Otago University in 1955, followed by teacher training. Her first teaching job came in 1957 at Christchurch Technical College. She combined this with working part-time as a costume maker for the theatre director and crime writer Ngaio Marsh, a job that inspired her passion for theatre.
