Angela Joy Giffin

Angela Joy Giffin (née Lathey) grew up in the south east of England, and she grew up well.

Canal boat holidays and camping trips, horse riding with her dad Tony. The kind of childhood that leaves a watermark. She was a daddy’s girl from the start and never really stopped being one. At home there was her mother Rosemary, steady, self-sacrificing, the dinner always on the table, the kind of woman who holds everything together quietly and asks for very little back. From Rosemary, Angela learned to love openly, to give freely, to forgive readily, and she made all of it entirely her own.

The family called themselves the Four Ls — Tony, Rosemary, her sister Debbie, and Angela — a unit with its own gravity, the place she always returned to. And nearby, close enough to be practically the same household, were her cousins Jacqui and Ali. The four of them grew up together through all of it, bouncing on beds reciting poems from school, the summers that went on too long, a girl gang that knew each other’s everything. On one memorable canal boat holiday, a young Angela locked her own grandmother inside the boat and rocked it. She was that kind of child.

She was also a gymnast, not in any formal or finished sense, but in the way that some people just never stop being what they were at ten. The body moves before the mind can talk it out of it. Years later, in her normal clothes, she once vaulted a farm gate in pursuit of the dog without a moment’s hesitation. Everyone watching was astonished. She probably wasn’t.

She wanted to be a fashion designer, and her eye for it was real. She could draft a pattern from memory, cut it, sew it — a fairy dress, a pair of curtains, an apron — before you’d finished your tea, and the results were genuinely beautiful. She was never satisfied with them. Her first adult home she treated like a canvas: mosaic bathroom tiles she made by hand, a lime green fireplace, jigsaw murals on the walls, pink skirting boards. This was not decorating. This was Angela announcing herself.

She went on to be a retailer, an entrepreneur, a therapist — each one a reinvention, each one entirely her. She was moved by music in a way that went right through her, supported the musicians in her life with total, unasked generosity, and wrote her own songs too, from the comic and terrible Puppy Song to the Moon Song, a gentle lullaby she sang when she and her girls were apart from each other. As a mother she was the fun one, the one the teenage friends wanted to be around, always game, always ready to burst into song in the kitchen. She and her daughters Nicole and Spice had kitchen discos, the dog joining in, the three of them harmonising and doing a dance they called apricot jam. That was a regular Tuesday, if the mood struck.

She loved to travel, not for any particular destination but for the whole ritual of it: the packing, the airport, the feeling of something about to happen. She approached every holiday like it was an adventure waiting to be had, because as far as she was concerned, it was. On one trip with Marc she got caught in a coral reef current and came out the other side shaken but triumphant, with a story she loved to tell and told with great relish and ever-growing colour. That was very her.

She married three times. With Marc, her third husband, she found her pace. In their fifties they left the south east entirely for a corner cottage in Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire, and she took to it immediately — a dog she was completely blind to the faults of, a kettle on more often than not, her own space on her own terms. Her happiest chapter, and one she had earned.

She had five grandchildren — Rory, Percy, Nelly, Liesel and Elodie — and with them she found a gear that was softer and sillier than almost anything else. She baked. She got on the floor. She gave piggybacks she absolutely should not have given. She spent three months with Elodie from the very first weeks of her life. The playfulness that had always lived in her, given full permission at last.

She made art through her cancer treatment the way other people keep a diary — to process, to get through, to make something from the middle of it. Breast cancer she beat. The leukaemia that followed was rarer, crueller, the result of a genetic mutation triggered by the very treatment that had saved her. The kind of unfairness that has no satisfying explanation. Angela would have been the first to say so, and to shrug at it, and then to get on with things. She faced it openly, for over a year and a half, with the same refusal to be diminished that had defined her whole life.

To her daughters she was the blueprint: headstrong, industrious, imaginative, fiercely herself. She raised them to bend to no one. The warmth, the silliness, the creativity, the speed, the hunger for adventure — it came from her. She had a scrunchy-nosed smile and a mischievous glint and she was, almost always, up to something. She loved freely and forgave generously and saw something worth doing in nearly everything she looked at. She walked into rooms and something shifted slightly, without her even trying.

We will remember her for a million-dillion reasons.