Liv (pronounced “Leave”) was born in 1929 in Oslo in Norway. She was very ill as a young child, and wasn’t expected to live, but somehow she survived. She had a mostly happy childhood and she loved skiing and walking in the woods which started just over the garden fence. She won school slalom competitions.

However, during the five years of traumatic Nazi occupation, she witnessed fellow pupils being taken out of classrooms and shot in the grounds. Also Liv’s family only got enough to eat because of what they grew in the garden or her father hunted in the woods.

After the war Liv travelled, visiting London, cycling from Marseille to Copenhagen, and on another trip living in Tours for several months in order to learn French properly. Here she met and fell in love with John Richard Hawthorne, whom she eventually married.

After the wedding in Oslo, Liv moved as a new bride to England where her husband had just got a job as a French and Latin teacher at Bootham School in York.

For the first years she had quite a difficult time dealing with butchers or other shopkeepers who needed to tell off this foreign person because “we don’t do things like that here; we do them the proper, English way.” Her relationship wasn’t much better with her mother-in-law, Elsie.

She gave birth to two sons, Per-Eric and Richard Arne, and she loved them both very much. She loved her grandchildren Tom and Emily just as much.

Most weekends she and her family would spend driving out to ruined monasteries or stately homes in North Yorkshire, or going for long walks on the Moors or the Wolds, or in the Dales.

In her forties, Liv went back to college and trained for an Education Degree. She was the Reception class teacher at Park Grove School in York for many years.

All her life, Liv wrote to her best friend from school, Tove (pronounced “Tor-vuh”). They loved to walk together and ski together. And they did one memorable trip travelling up the Norwegian coast by post-boat, through the midnight sun, to Norway’s northernmost tip.

Liv’s husband, John, died in May 2000, and eleven years later she moved to sheltered accommodation in Hove as she was finding it difficult coping on her own.

Two years ago she moved to Autumn Lodge in Hove because of her increasing dementia, where the staff cared for her and loved her smile. She died at Autumn Lodge two weeks ago, on 30th September 2016.