Margaret was born in 1936, the youngest  of 3 children , her older brother Alan was age 9 when she was born and her sister Joyce was age 12. Both her parents were  only children, unusual in those days, so she did not have any  first cousins, though she has a few second cousins, and her great aunts and uncles were an important part of her early life.
She was found to have  a sight problem  when very young and had to wear  glasses from the age of about 6 months , they were tied on with a ribbon .
She was a happy child and being so much younger was doted on and looked after to some extent  by her siblings . I have a letter from Joyce (to her fiancé,  my dad)  describing how she took Margaret shopping age 6 to look for an educational book about Egypt  and came home with  'When we were very young'  by AA Milne .
 In spite of this she always said she was a very independent little girl and her phrase was "I do it!" She would  not let anyone do anything ; she wanted to do it all herself . 
 From the age of 3 to 9 she lived through the 2nd world war.  During the war the family lived in Sidcup, her father worked for the Church of England Children's society as it was then ,and was an ARP warden
She vividly remembered as a little girl being in the bath when the air-raid sirens went off and being dragged out the bath soaking wet and dripping and having to run into the garden and go into a cold dark Anderson shelter and not even being able to dress, being wrapped in only a towel.
She also used to  tell how  her mum baked a fruit cake  having saved up for ages to get the ingredients   and put it on windowsill to cool and thewindow got blown in due to a bomb and the cake was ruined.   I have a letter from my mother to my father describing this - 27 Nov 1944 a V2 landed on the nearby golf course.
In her teens  Margaret had a little dog -a corgi called Rikki -who she absolutely doted  on and is the subject of a few pictures  here.
At some point after her father retired , in the early 1950s,when Margaret  was in her mid teens ,  her family moved from Sidcup to Dymchurch,  a lovely seaside village in Kent , where my family spent many lovely happy holidays  with them.   After  leaving school Margaret  worked at Hawksworth Wheeler, a large photographic shop in Folkestone where she learnt the trade. She became a very experienced and accomplished photographer and  has taken many beautiful photographs over the years.   She lived at home with her parents until her father died in 1960 and  after that she and her mother moved to Exeter to be near her older sisters family, and Margaret found a job in Navana photographic studios  there.  John was working there already and the rest is history....
 
  In 1963 she moved with her mother to Starcross , a village outside Exeter on the Exe Estuary in 1963 . Her sister's family had moved to  a house there  and there was a bungalow in the garden where Margaret lived with her mother for a while, until her marriage in 1964. 
After staying in Starcross for a short while John and Margaret moved to Plymouth to Johns parents house  where they lived for over 50 years. Margaret initially  worked in the photographic department in Dingles there and then became a buyer.
Although Janet's family were not nearby and so could not meet that often  we kept in touch by letter and phone, and  it was always a joy to meet up, usually either at Seaton Avenue or in Cornwall.
The last time I took Margaret out we had a great time meeting up with a second cousin of hers who was over from Canada. Although Margaret's memory was going by then she loved going over all the family photos
Margaret spent much of her life caring for others, -her mother, her in-laws , and many friends  -she had a raft of who she used to call her 'old ladies' who she used to visit regularly and do errands for .
Even when in hospital , one of the Drs called Janet to say Margaret had had a fall (fortunately no t hurt) but it had occurred because the lady in the opposite  bed  had fallen and Margaret had gone to help her .
Margaret was very fond of children in spite of (or because of?) not having any of her own and used to play pretend games  for ages with them . She  gave Janet  her precious toy monkey  when she was very small and always used to remind Janet how she had asked to have it.
She took a great interest in all her nieces and nephews and their families,  and also her next door  neighbours girls who she watched grow up,   and she  never forgot any birthdays .
She loved most animals  especially dogs -but not cats -    she loved the birds in her garden  but hated the neighbouring cats and she had a squirty bottle by the back door and she would squirt them if they came anywhere near her feathered friends
As most of us know her bears were also a large part of her life and used to have conversations with her.  We are glad that one of her bears was with her when she passed away.
She leaves a huge gap in  all our lives