My mother, Joyce Hastings, who has died aged 98, lived in three different countries, each with its own culure, and thrived thanks to her Christian faith.
She was born in Norwich, Norfolk, one of eight children of Gilbert Holman, a clerk, and his wife Stella (nee Rous). She attended Blyth school (now Sewell Park academy) in the city before training to be a nurse at Ipswich hospital, Suffolk, serving there during the second world war.
She first met her husband-to-be, John Hastings, when she was 14 and he was 11, as he accompanied his father, the organist at Calvert St Methodist Church. where she was in the Sunday school. They were engaged for seven years, until John completed his training for the Methodist ministry and they were permitted to marry. Immediately after their wedding in 1951 they travelled by ship to West Bengal, India. They spent a year studying Hindi, Bengali and Santali at Darjeeling language school before serving with other missionaries in north India, and had three children, Christine, Ian and Karen.
The family moved frequently, living in rural conditions in the villages of West Bengal: snakes and jackals visited the garden, festive food was eaten off banana leaves, travel was by bullock cart, meat joints were sold at the door and the cow was brought round to be milked.
In 1966 the family moved to Calcutta (Kolkata), where Joyce ran a guest house for travelling colleagues, while John led social work programmes in the poorer areas.
In 1971 Joyce and her family moved back to the UK, living in Leicester, Newbury Park and Luton, then relocating to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1981.
Joyce used her nursing knowledge and skills wherever she settled – from a clinic on a veranda in Barrackpore and Tollygunge, in the slums of Calcutta, to the special care baby units in Leicester and Whipp’s Cross hospitals, and especially at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed in Dhaka, where she worked voluntarily between 1981 and 1995.
She cared for John until he died of cancer in 1998, then eventually was debilitated by macular disease and dementia herself, and was looked after in Ipswich by Christine and her husband, Bernard.
Ian died in 2023.Joyce is survived by Christine and me, and by her seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
