My mother, Vera Boote, who has died aged 94, was an accomplished nurse, teacher, volunteer and cook, and a beloved wife and mother.
She was born in Vienna, where her parents, Ethel and Sucher Badian, owned and ran a coffee house. As a girl, Vera was an avid skier, in the days before the luxury of ski lifts. Her childhood was disrupted by the Nazi annexation of Austria, and she arrived in England in September 1939, on one of the last ships from continental Europe.
Her mother was already in the UK and her father and sister fled to Holland. Despite not speaking a word of English, Vera had obtained her first nursing qualification within a year, training and working in various hospitals, starting in Hastings, later in Epsom and High Wycombe and finishing in Hammersmith, London. By 1947, she had risen to the post of assistant matron.
In August 1946, she had met Bob Boote, who later became director general of the Nature Conservancy, at the hotel in Hastings that had painstakingly been built up from scratch by her mother. Vera and Bob married in 1949 and, after the birth of my sister, Karin, and me, Vera became an educator, teaching nursing, German, human biology and industrial psychology. She began teaching at Stafford Technical College; and later at secondary schools in south London, particularly at Ensham school in Tooting, and in evening classes in Wimbledon.
After retiring, she was a volunteer and later chair for the local Citizens Advice in Wimbledon. Until she went into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, she was in regular contact with many of her former pupils around the world and with schoolfriends she had grown up with in Vienna.
On retiring, she and my father pursued their earlier interest and became accomplished dancers. They also enjoyed travel: I met them once (coming from different directions) in Bali and, for their 80th birthdays, sent them on a trip to India, where they posed for a photo in front of the Taj Mahal.
Vera is survived by Bob, by her two children, Karin and me, and by five grandchildren.
