My mother-in-law, Pam Hatcher, who has died aged 89, worked as a reporter on a fashion industry magazine until she became a full-time mother and later a primary school teacher.
Pam was born in Catford in south-east London, the second daughter of Alice (nee Phillips) and her husband, Ronald MacDonald, a stockbroker. The family moved to Orpington in Kent when Pam was young, and lived there throughout the second world war, during which a bomb landed at the end of the street and all windows in the family home were knocked out.
She went to Sydenham High school and then read history (with Italian) at Royal Holloway, University of London, before taking up a job, in 1954, as a reporter on Drapers Record, where her remit included covering fashion shows.
In 1959 she met and married Stephen Hatcher, a fellow journalist. Marriage meant the end of her job at Drapers Record as she turned to domestic duties, although she continued to write, drafting numerous (unpublished) works of fiction while her three children were young. Some of her children’s nativity plays were performed on Radio Kent, which also regularly featured her poems.
Pam retrained as a primary school teacher in the late 60s and later worked as a supply teacher at Borough Green primary school in Sevenoaks, where she had moved after her marriage. In later life, once the children had grown up, she was always fully occupied: driving friends and family to where they needed to be, orchestrating family dinners and holidays, dog walking and playing golf and tennis, and fitting in an occasional bit of supply teaching despite having passed retirement age.
She was notoriously competitive, quick-witted and perceptive, and always had great stories to tell, including of hitchhiking around Europe in the 50s, and of her journalistic work.
Pam was always available to help out, both in the most mundane of circumstances and in a crisis. She was an exemplar of her generation’s ingenuity and stoicism, with a quick wit, tremendous stamina, good humour and a dislike of anything over-fussy.
Stephen died in 2012. She is survived by their children, Emma, Paul and Claire, and grandchildren, Abbey, Joe, Finn, Oliver and Atticus, and her sister, Joan.
