Let me add my own thanks to you for coming here today, or for joining us on livestream, whether now or later. And let me thank the many people who have sent condolences, tributes, and donations to Moira’s favoured charities.
It was my great good fortune, my privilege, my daily delight, to be married to Moira—much loved wide, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother—for sixty-one years. She was a remarkable woman. She was in no way defined by or confined to her domestic roles, or fully taken up by them, but nevertheless the home sphere was one in which some of her many talents were best displayed.
          You have already heard about her innovative and imaginative, and indeed educational, holidays when the children were young. As James put it in an entry in one of his holiday diaries: ‘When we got out of the car and said, “Oh, what a wonderful view,” we were allowed to have lunch.’ That continued after they had all fledged, and I was led to places way beyond my comfort zone of France and Italy—to remoter areas of Europe, to the near and far East, to north Africa and central Asia—places which I enjoyed as much as she when we got there. And, she organised some thirty or more one-day Eurostar excursions for the two of us, and friends, to Brussels and Leuven, to Lille and Lens, and above all to Paris.  But there were at least two other ‘domestic’ talents. First, she had the ability to take on any new challenge. All our three marital homes were found, viewed, and offered-on before I even saw them: she simply applied the agreed criteria—price, size, garage or off-street parking space (to satisfy my solicitor father), south-facing garden (to facilitate her gardening), and within five minutes’ walk of an underground station (to keep me quiet)—and got on with it. Secondly, she readily acquired new skills from scratch. She had never cooked or gardened before marriage, but she quickly became a very good at both—whether cooking for five hungry children, or a dinner party, or for the group of friends who gathered every Saturday in the early 1960s to create the thematic index for the first edition of the Jerusalem Bible. In1970 she even entered and reached the final of the Oxo Cook-of-the-Year competition. And in those three marital homes she created three very attractive gardens of increasing complexity and subtlety, often incorporating ideas gleaned from her annual visits to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Before marriage Moira had taught English, Latin, and lacrosse at the Ursuline Convent in Greenwich. Apart from the time when the children were very young, she also managed to work outside the home. After teaching English as a Foreign Language at evening classes for several years, she did editorial work at Sheed & Ward. In 1990 she copy-edited and prepared for press, by typing into a special keyboard, the first book we published using wholly electronic means. But it was in the 1990s, when she was in her fifties, that she started the work she undoubtedly found most fulfilling—as an Occupational Therapy Assistant at our local Acton Cottage Hospital residential care home. One of her activities there was to work with residents on their ‘reminiscences’—several of them had started work in their early teens in the laundries which once peppered Acton’s ‘soap-sud island’. Another duty was to maintain and keep tabs on the hospital’s wheelchairs—more than a decade later, when she had a knee replacement carried out at the former Royal Masonic Hospital in Ravenscourt Park, she was met by a wheelchair clearly marked, in her unmistakable writing, ‘property of Acton Hospital’.
          Family and work responsibilities were not enough to fully occupy Moira’s time. As Sarah mentioned, she was active on many committees and with many good causes. Early on she worked with EAASE (the Ealing Association for the Advancement of State Education). With War on Want he did a weekly, communal sort of surplus medicines to be sent to poorer countries. She did a year or two on the parents’ committee of the children’s primary school (St Gregory’s, down the road from here); she served several years as a governor first at the Cardinal Wiseman School in Greenford and then, after they had our three daughters had left, at Sion Manning School. She took children to Greenham Common, and grandchildren on the anti-Iraq-War marches. She worked for several years in the 1980s for Emmaus House (Acton Homeless Concern), finishing up as chair. After that she was on the committee of Ealing Community Health Council; she volunteered with Ealing branch of AgeUK; and she did regular office work for Friends of City Churches, an organisation with whom we had both enjoyed many church visits and London walks.
          But Moira was not all housework, work, and good works. She knew how to enjoy life. She had a lifelong passion for art, which in its turn led to many cultural visits in the UK as well as abroad. In this pursuit I was a willing if much less educated companion. Later in life she came to share with me my love of chamber music and jazz—but less for the music, I suspect, than for the fact that ‘you meet such nice people there’. Our fully-shared joint passion was for the drama, and she arranged to go the theatre at least twice a month. And of course she was an avid reader: there were some 800 books on the Kindle she had with her in hospital and the Acton Care Centre, and many more than that on her bookshelves back at home.
There was one more passion-and-talent I must mention: Moira’s capacity for making and maintaining friendships. In addition to the friends we had in common, mainly from our student days, and many individual local friends, there were at least three groups of women friends she was kept in with touch with over many years: friends from her Leeds childhood, from her Holy Child Convent School in Harrogate, and from her years at Leeds University; her ‘badminton’ friends mentioned by Sarah, originally a group of young mums who met outside the gates of St Gregory’s, but which survived through later years as a regular once-a-week gathering to play badminton and have coffee afterwards, and finally as an afternoon-tea and annual Christmas-dinner-at-the-North-China group; and her Acton Hospital work friends, some of whom became very close friends indeed, who kept touch and also met regularly for meals.
          Over the last three or so years Moira suffered more-or-less constant pain and much-reduced mobility from her arthritic right knee, and from increasing short-term memory loss. Neither of these conditions was a life-threatening, but both were constricting: we spent much joint effort trying to find strategies to circumvent them and maintain as active a life as possible. In stark contrast, the wholly-unsuspected cancer which took her life did so a mere four weeks to the day from its diagnosis—but allowed her final weeks to be pain-free and her death peaceful. Ann Moira Redfern (née Reynolds), beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, friend, and colleague: rest in peace.