My mother, Moyra Taylor, who has died aged 91, after contracting Covid-19, had a lively, sometimes audacious, appetite for life, whether hitchhiking through Europe with her two best friends in the early 1950s, or coaxing me, her more cautious daughter, to accept an invitation to get in the car of a man we had just met in Jaipur to attend his daughter’s wedding. Of course, it turned out to be a fabulous experience.
Moyra was born and grew up an only child in working-class South Shields. Her father, David Dingwall, was a merchant seaman who, during the second world war, would go to sea never knowing if he would return or his ship would be blown up at sea. Her mother, Agnes Fyfe, had worked in the family’s fishmonger’s business before she married.
Moyra excelled at school, and, had she been born in a different time and place, might have attended university or had a career. Instead, when she told a career adviser she was interested in becoming a journalist, she was told “not to be silly” and to consider secretarial school instead.
She met her first husband, Al Taylor, also of South Shields, at Spanish language evening classes. The pair shared a desire to explore the world, a similar open-minded outlook on life, an intellectual curiosity and an interest in good food and wine. They had two daughters, my sister, Catherine, and me, and in 1965 our family moved to Brussels.
There Moyra built a rich life for the family in the hub of a rapidly growing European common market. She nurtured a circle of international friends, did volunteer work, supported charities and raised her daughters in multilingual schools.
After Al died in 1981, Moyra rebuilt her life with the support of family and friends, including those she made at her job as a receptionist at the British School of Brussels. Her office there was known as the “salon” because so many staff and parents gathered there to socialise or to confide in Moyra.
One of those supportive friends was John Gordon who, with his late wife, Jennifer, had been close to Moyra and Al when both couples had young children in Cheshire. Their rekindled friendship turned into a courtship and then a partnership and they shared 35 joy-filled years together, living in Wilmslow, Cheshire.
Moyra, an avid reader and a fan of the Guardian crossword puzzle, was a devoted wife, mother, grandmother and friend and a role model for how to live a good life.
She is survived by John, Catherine and me, and her grandchildren, Ben, Sam, Isabelle and Louis.
