Margaret Ellis

Margaret was born in Leeds in 1929, in a back-to-back off Cross Green Lane, the third of five. She left school at fourteen and went back at twenty-one, to train. She walked into her first classroom in 1953 and stayed in teaching until the day she retired, forty-one years later, all but six of them with seven-year-olds. She taught reading the slow way, one child at a time, in the twenty minutes after lunch nobody had asked her to give. She met Thomas in 1961, or 1962 — nobody in the family agrees which, and she would never settle it. They had two daughters and a garden that was mostly rhubarb. She kept every letter anyone ever sent her, in shoeboxes, one per year, going back to 1951. Her daughters found them the week after and could not throw a single one away. She retired in 1994 and did not slow down for a further thirty years.