My mother, Jennifer Anderson, who has died aged 86, worked for MI5 for 10 years and then as an English teacher.
After her retirement in 1997, she involved herself in myriad community activities. She acted as a volunteer driving people to hospital and pursued a wide variety of interests, including serving on the twinning committee in Wincanton, Somerset, which included frequent trips to Germany, and organising local Greek classes.
A keen gardener, she was on the allotment committee and active in theatre and film groups. Having taken up scuba diving in her younger days, she retrained in later life and dived throughout her 70s, most memorably with dolphins in the Bahamas and with barracuda and turtles in Sipadan, off the coast of Borneo.
Jennifer was born in Holborn, central London, to Edmund Barton, a barrister, and his South African wife, Marjorie, who had served in the first intake of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. As a child, Jennifer was evacuated to Canada during the second world war, and when she returned after hostilities she studied modern languages at Oxford, which included a year in Germany that gave her a lasting affinity with that country.
After university she was recruited by MI5. She did not talk much about her work, but she travelled the world and on a posting in Gibraltar, she met Mike Anderson, who was serving in the Royal Navy. They married in 1963 and both took postings in Singapore, where I was born. At the end of 1964 the family returned to the UK, to Arbroath for two years and then to Portsmouth, where Mike was posted until his retirement from the Navy in 1973. They moved to Wincanton, where Jennifer became director of a residential school in Yeovil, teaching English as a second language to students.
Diagnosed with myeloma in 2010, she behaved stoically, treating each medical appointment as an affront to her busy social calendar. Everywhere she went, Jennifer listened, befriended and contributed.
Mike died in 2003. She is survived by me and her brother, Toby.
