My mother, Eleanor Woolley, who has died aged 97 of pneumonia, was a wartime railway clerk, a 1940s single parent, a primary school teaching assistant and a devoted mother and grandmother.
She lived her whole life in rural Oxfordshire, born and raised in the small town of Charlbury. She was the second of four children of Albert Griffin and his wife, Tilly (nee Hawkins). Bert, who had been invalided out of the first world war, worked in the Cotswold wool trade; until her marriage, Tilly had been in service.
