Our mother, Pauline Phillips, was a health service administrator, translator and historian who went on to make her home in the Languedoc, France, and died there aged 86.
Born in Highbury, north London, to Caroline (nee Potter) and George Hammant, she was toughened by poverty, the blitz, and evacuation to Huntingdon with other pupils from Highbury Hill high school. She strove for an education and career when this was difficult for women of her class. She became fluent in French via friendship with a young French teaching assistant with whom she travelled to France straight after the war. She then taught herself Italian to earn money translating books.
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