My mother, Heather Smith, who has died aged 90, was an aircraft mechanic, social worker and author, whose books Unhappy Children: Reasons and Remedies (1995, translated into German as Unglückliche Kinder) and Children, Feelings and Divorce (1999) helped readers to better understand the problems of the young.
The daughter of Charles Boese, a clerk of works, and May (nee Davies), Heather grew up in Birmingham. On leaving George Dixon high school for girls, she trained in secretarial work and was employed in various offices. At 18 she volunteered for the Wrens and, having described how to mend a bicycle puncture, was accepted for training as an air mechanic in the Royal Naval Air Service. She was stationed at RNAS Fearn (HMS Owl), at Tain, Ross-shire, and HMS Godwit, Shropshire, servicing Swordfish, Seafire and Avro aircraft.
After the end of the second world war, having gained a degree in social studies at Birmingham University, she became a teacher in West Bromwich and then a social worker. Her first marriage, to Bob Spooner, ended in divorce, and in 1955 she married John Smith, whom she had met at university, an investigator with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. They lived first in London and moved to Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, as their first child was about to be born
She worked first at home, while her children were young, teaching literacy skills to adults, became involved with the Society for Mentally Handicapped Children (now Mencap) and joined the Labour party. A long weekend at the Greenham Common peace camp in 1985 and participation in the march against the Iraq war in 2003 illustrate her feminist and political stances.
After returning to social work in 1965, she became a part-time associate at the Tavistock Institute; her time there had a huge effect on her practice as a clinical social worker in St Albans. Later, with the psychiatrist Elizabeth James, as senior social worker at Hemel Hempstead, she developed over many years a notably warm, welcoming and effective local authority clinic. A high point was Anna Freud’s discussion of one of her cases in a meeting at the Tavistock.
On retirement in 1987, she worked as a stand-in senior at several Hertfordshire child guidance clinics as well as running, with a colleague, therapy groups for children who told their stories and provided mutual support – an innovative approach at that time. She was delighted, while travelling, to find her first book on sale in Helsinki, Munich and Sydney. Always modest, Heather was nevertheless persuaded by a child psychologist friend to run a very well-received workshop at a conference in Barcelona in May 1999.
She also organised and assisted the 17th-century research group of St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society with the production of an urban history book, St Albans 1650-1700: A Thoroughfare Town and Its People (2003).
Latterly she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. She is survived by John, three sons, Dan, Tim and me, four grandsons and one great-grandson.
