A tribute to my mother: Fiercely independent and as well-read as any Edinburgh professor. I will miss her

Mary Jane McShane (nee O'Hare) was spared what she dreaded the most. Becoming a burden, or perhaps more accurately, losing control of her life. She died in the comfort of her own bed, where her youngest child and only son, my brother John, found her at 8.20 am on Saturday morning. She died a good death.

Despite the chaos of her childhood, where she and her three sisters moved from tied cottage to tied cottage with their farm labourer mother in search of work while her Irish labourer father travelled the country in the same relentless pursuit, she lived a good life. She met and married my father Jock when she was only sixteen and together they built a loving, stable life for each other and their four children – Mary, Wendy and John and me. Crucially, she got a library card which opened her up to a world previously unimaginable to a young woman who had grown up in poverty. Not the kind of hardship where you can’t afford to buy the latest trainers for your child or a new sofa, but grinding, relentless poverty that destroys body and soul.

Sitting with her recently, she remembered as a child harvesting kale with her aunt Maggie, also a farm worker. She and her sister had to walk behind her aunt gathering up the plants as Maggie tore them from the ground. Their job was to load them into a wooden cart pulled by an old horse. Kale was not the superfood beloved of Millennials. In the 1940s, it was fed to cattle or eaten by the rural poor to supplement their daily diet of potatoes, oats and the cheapest cuts of meat. “It was our life,” she said.

Early in her reading career – and books were my mother’s higher education – she discovered Catherine Cookson, whose novels about life in North East England sparked off my mother’s lifetime love affair with the written word. She quickly progressed to DH Lawrence, then on to the angry young men and women of the 1960s. Only a few months ago, she gave me a copy of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, the recent best-seller that documents the divide between those at the bottom of any society and the uncomfortable middle class who look down on them.

My mother could be a challenging woman. She had what Catherine Cookson would have described as a ‘sharp tongue’ which she was not afraid to use, sometimes inappropriately. She was a strict mother, likely as a compensation for the chaos that characterised her own childhood, and she could be unsentimental to the point of apparent coldness. But at her core, she was an exuberant, colourful personality, a clever, courageous woman, an instinctive feminist long before she read Germaine Greer. She gave me some of the greatest gifts any parent can give their child – a love of reading and a disdain for hypocrisy and injustice. And she taught me the power of resilience and hard work. Watching your mother on her hands and knees hoeing a field of turnips by hand to earn enough money to buy her children Clarks’ school shoes, as I did as a child, is a lesson you never forget.

Books were perhaps her greatest gift. I quickly learned to read, and from the age of five devoured every book I borrowed on our regular visits to the village library. I still remember the thrill of my first ‘real’ book – one without pictures – and my mother’s pride as I powered my way through Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five series. Some of our happiest moments together were in the mobile library that stopped at the end of our road once a fortnight. My mother filled her wicker basket with the latest novels, while the librarian turned a blind eye to the precocious nine-year-old scouring the ‘adult’ section for the latest Jean Plaidy. Prim and proper Miss Birchman, in charge of the village library, did not allow children near adult books until they were 12, so I relished the subversive freedom of the mobile library. My mother also encouraged my writing, buying me an ancient but serviceable Royal typewriter for my Christmas when I was 11. And she embraced new technology, delighted and relieved that, as she grew more frail in recent months, she could buy any book she wanted on the Kindle app on her iPad. Always careful with money, she was particularly thrilled by 99p book deals.

If my mother had any regrets, it would be that she had to leave school at 15 for a job as a housemaid in an Ayrshire farmhouse. Seventy years ago, secretarial college, let alone university, was simply not an option for a dirt-poor girl in rural Wigtownshire. She was supposed to know her place.

And she did, but my mother’s place was never to be a servant like the generations of women before her. She was fiercely independent, as well-read and as thoughtful as any Edinburgh university professor, a proud, singular woman. She defined my life and that of my siblings in ways that even she, insightful to the end, never fully appreciated. We will miss her.