My wife, Joanna Barfield, who has died aged 63 of cancer, was a popular Suffolk teacher and active in local art and music circles.
Joanna was head of modern foreign languages at Stradbroke High school in the 1990s before working at Halesworth Middle and Worlingham Middle schools for many years as an English and food technology teacher. After the closure in 2012 of the middle schools in Suffolk, Joanna worked as a supply teacher and was well known in local primary schools.
Joanna was born at Nocton Hall, an RAF station in Lincolnshire, to Ida (nee Saunders), a nurse, and David Barfield, an RAF regiment policeman. She spent some of her childhood in Kenya, Singapore and Italy with her three older brothers before state boarding school at Wymondham college, Norfolk. Joanna studied French and German at King’s College London and trained as a teacher at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
She began her teaching career at Bancroft’s school in Woodford Green, east London, and then worked for two years in the classical music business in London before moving back in the early 1990s to East Anglia, where she and I met at an art gallery in Harleston, which was showing some of my woodcut prints.
Joanna sang with the Harleston choral society as well as singing solo and in duets with friends in recitals in churches and halls. A well-known face in the local art community – a stylish figure with her long red pre-Raphaelite hair – she stewarded in the Halesworth Gallery, where she was a serene presence at private views.
We collaborated on a series of large-scale art events and exhibitions in Suffolk, which took place in galleries, shop windows, fields and marshes. Joanna loved her garden and her many cats. She was a devoted reader of the Guardian newspaper who only recently converted to reading online.
After her diagnosis of womb cancer, Joanna bore her final illness bravely. Last year, she and I celebrated our 32-year long relationship with a wedding. She is survived by me, and by her father, her brothers, Richard, Steve and Nick, and her stepson, Ben.
