My mother, Connie Hayball, who has died aged 94, had two lifelong passions: literature and socialism. In her 90s she wrote two books, From Perry Gutter to Birmingham (2011) and Dad and Me (2013), which drew on the detailed memories of her childhood, including the streets with their back-to-back houses, daily domestic routines, and her father's work.
She was born in Birmingham, the second child of Harry Houghton and Hilda Presdee. Harry was a skilled metalworker making items such as corkscrews and tin-openers. Hilda had been in service and then worked on armaments, after a childhood in a Shropshire workhouse.
Her father was a strong influence on Connie – an atheist, socialist and republican, he loved reading, a complete Dickens set taking pride of place in the family home. Aged 11, Connie won one of the first fully-funded city scholarships to King Edward's high school. As a working-class girl with a thick Brummie accent, Connie was something of an outsider there, but she nevertheless loved it and made a lifelong friend, Stella, who was also from a working-class family. In 1936 they joined the Young Communist League and were active in raising food and money for the Spanish Republicans, also persuading the headteacher to let them collect at school.
In 1938 Connie won a scholarship to study English literature at Birmingham University, writing in praise of Dickens in her finals. She was subsequently informed that her unorthodox views – Dickens was then considered populist and lowbrow – meant she did not achieve a first. Remaining at Birmingham, she wrote her MA thesis on the playwright Sean O'Casey, with whom she corresponded.
She then became an English teacher, working in Bury, Manchester; High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire; Nuneaton, Warwickshire; and finally Hinckley, in Leicestershire, where she lived from 1964. She met and married another communist, Ted, also a teacher, but they both resigned from the party after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. She was active in CND and later a Labour party member for almost 30 years.
In retirement she became a school governor, a volunteer Citizens Advice adviser, a participant in the local Pensioners' Action Group, and a founding member of Hinckley University of the Third Age, running special study groups, including one on William Morris, another of her heroes. She also wrote a thesis on the Anglo-Indian novel for the PhD she received from Loughborough University.
Ted died in 2008. Connie is survived by me, my sister Jane, and three grandsons, Percy, Harry and Jack.
