Teacher, gardener, and grandmother to eleven.
June taught at Nelson Park School for thirty-one years, mostly the new entrants — the five-year-olds who arrived in February not knowing how to hold a pencil and left in December reading. She said the trick was never to look surprised when they managed something. She was surprised every time.
She married Tom in 1961 and they had the house on Latham Street for sixty years. The garden was hers. Dahlias down the fence, a vegetable patch that fed half the street, and a lemon tree she talked to — not sentimentally, more like a colleague she was disappointed in. There were always lemons.
She was not soft. She had opinions about how to lay a table, how to write a thank-you note, and how long was too long to leave a message unanswered. She kept every letter anyone ever sent her, in shoeboxes, in order. She remembered every child's name.
The grandchildren came, eleven of them, and then the great-grandchildren, and she learned all of their names too and never once got them wrong — even at the end, when other things had started to go. She kept a tin of the good biscuits for when they visited, and pretended to be annoyed when they found it.
She died in November, at home, with the window open onto the garden she could no longer get down to but liked to know was there. The lemon tree is still going. Someone will have to learn to talk to it.