Eleanor Vance

Eleanor "Nell" Vance was born in Whitby in the spring of 1938, the youngest of five and, by her sister Joan's account, the loudest of them by a considerable margin. The composure everyone would later describe as her defining quality was not something she was born with. She built it, on purpose, and those who knew her early remember the girl who came before the decision.

She taught for thirty-one years. Her pupils remember the marking that happened at her kitchen table each evening, and the habit she had of reading a good sentence aloud to an empty room — not to praise the child who wrote it, exactly, but because a sentence that worked deserved to be said out loud at least once. Danny Okafor was nine, could not read, and had become expert at concealing it. She never mentioned it in front of the class. She simply began keeping him back on Thursdays to help tidy the book corner, and somewhere in the tidying, the reading arrived.

She met Arthur at a dance in Leeds that neither of them had wanted to attend. She informed him within ten minutes that he was standing on her coat, and within the hour that he would be walking her home. Both proved accurate.

Her house was a place people arrived at. The winter the pipes froze, she boiled every pan she owned and ran baths for the neighbours in turn, standing in her coat in the kitchen the whole evening, humming the same four notes she always hummed, insisting it was no trouble. It was enormous trouble. She never once said so. Priya Kaur, who moved in during a wet August knowing nobody, met her over a tray of runner beans from the allotment on Beckett Lane and stayed a neighbour for twenty-two years.

She returned to the coast when she retired, which surprised nobody. She is survived by Arthur, by her children Margaret and Tom, and by a great many people who learned from her that noticing something well is a kind of love.