My mother, Kathleen Johnston, who has died aged 95, was a greatly loved English teacher at Bolton School, Lancashire, for more than 20 years. She was inspired by her time as an undergraduate at Oxford University at the end of the second world war and her passion for her subject vividly brought to life the words of Shakespeare, Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Born at home in Bolton, she was the daughter of Samson Marsden, the manager of a cotton mill, and his wife, Marion (nee Fawell); her parents were keen that she and her younger sister, Nancy, should receive a good education. The girls attended Bolton school, one of the oldest in the county, to which Kathleen returned to teach when she was an adult.
She won a scholarship to study English at Oxford University in 1942 but had to defer her place until after the war. She spent the intervening years in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) taking apart, cleaning and reassembling guns – not a job she relished.
In 1945 she went to Oxford , not long after having met Tommy Johnston, a pilot in the RAF who was about to resume his training as a doctor in Belfast. The separation was not easy but it did not prevent Kathleen from also falling in love with Oxford and its golden spires. Her tutor, Hugo Dyson, was one of the Inklings, a literary discussion group which included JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, whose lectures Kathleen attended.
After Kathleen and Tommy married in 1949 they moved to Farnworth, where Tommy joined his father’s general practice. Kathleen spent the 1950s bringing up five children and filled the home and her children’s lives with books, instilling in all of them a lifelong love of reading.
In 1962 Kathleen was invited by the headteacher at Bolton school to teach English to the sixth form. Without any teaching qualification and with some trepidation she took up the challenge and went on to earn the respect and affection of her pupils and colleagues.
She and Tommy retired in 1984 to spend more time walking and travelling, pursuits they both enjoyed. Kathleen continued to provide one-to-one tuition for children at home and volunteered for the charity Talking Books until 1990.
After Kathleen developed Alzheimer’s disease Tommy looked after her until she moved to a care home in 2013. She continued her subscription to the Guardian and would sit with the paper on her lap long after she was able to read it.
Tommy died in 2015. Kathleen is survived by her children, Tim, Gillian, Bridget, Karen and me, three grandchildren, Patrick, Frances and Stuart, and two great-grandchildren, India and Mabel.
