My mother, Gill Frayn, who has died aged 90, devoted her life to helping others, both professionally as an education welfare officer and social worker in London, and as a volunteer.
She grew up in Hove, East Sussex, the daughter of Winston Palmer, a GP, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Goodman), who worked as his receptionist, having had to give up teaching botany once she married. Gill won a state scholarship to Brighton and Hove high school. But after reading English literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she stepped into a world that offered few career paths for women. She dreamed of becoming a writer. Instead she married one. She met Michael Frayn – then a Guardian journalist, and soon a novelist and playwright – when queuing for a visa for her boss at the Russian embassy. They married in 1960 and went on to have three daughters.
But after 13 years of married life, compelled by a longing for more, Gill did a diploma in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1973. When she graduated she became a school care worker for the Inner London Education Authority.
As her marriage began to unravel – ending eventually in divorce – she finally embarked on a formal career in education welfare, where she worked in the vast new comprehensives of south-east London. George O’Dowd was one of the troubled children she tried – fruitlessly - to get back into school. Years later he was to rename himself Boy George.
She brought the outside world in all its complexity into our family home. My father wrote a film called Clockwise, starring John Cleese as an obsessively punctual headmaster. The opening scene was lifted directly from Gill’s account of the headmaster at Eltham Green comprehensive, who would stand every morning at his study window with a pair of binoculars, scanning for any signs of misbehaviour among his pupils as they arrived.
In 1983 she became a senior education welfare officer. And then, having taken a degree in social work at London School of Economics, a social worker. The work was demanding and could sometimes involve personal jeopardy. Once she was threatened with a knife. More than she would have liked, she had to go to court to remove a child from the turbulence of their home.
Even in retirement, when you might have thought she had had enough of people’s troubles, Gill volunteered to accompany witnesses who were giving evidence in court. Then, well into her 80s and her mobility declining, she went into a local primary school to read with children who were falling behind.
One day a man cleaning his cab stopped her as she passed him on the street in south-east London. He had only been a little boy when, as a social worker, she had helped make him a ward of court, he told her. And he wanted to thank her. It was the best thing that had happened in his troubled childhood and had saved him.
She is survived by her daughters, seven grandchildren and twin great-granddaughters, and her brother.
