1948, the year of the London Olympics. The scene: a classroom. A diminutive 10-year-old boy puts his hand up. ‘Yes, Hurst.’ ‘Please, sir, I’m an uncle.’ I didn’t quite know what an uncle was, but I knew I was one – and I was proud of it. Proud of it then and even prouder of it today. As I mentioned at Carol and Rick’s Silver Wedding celebrations, Ann and Carol occupy a very special place in my heart. The reason for this is that they lived the first few years of their lives in our house and Ann, like myself, was actually born there. I still remember that birth in the bedroom next to mine, as people scurried round with towels, rubber sheeting and hot water. Then came the cry of a new-born baby. Ann had arrived. 15 St Mary’s Road, Hayes was a typical council house. In 1948, seven of us – a year later eight – crammed downstairs into one small room, the parlour, front room or ‘best room’ being reserved for special occasions. There was no electricity until I was 16, so a candle lighted us to bed. There was still rationing. Ann’s mum, Dorothy, my sister, was quiet and reserved, dad Derek always on the go. For me as a child, Derek was a little strict, but love flowed in abundance from both parents and grandparents. Ann’s first school, Dr Triplett’s CofE in Church Walk, was the same school that my father and his siblings had attended when Queen Victoria was on the throne. The children would come home to us for lunch, even when the family had moved to Hayes End, a tradition continued in later years by other nieces and nephews. Ann was a worry from the word go. As a tiny baby, she could hold her breath for what seemed an eternity, and I can still see her mum or my mum, standing in front of the open fire, frantically trying to make her breathe normally. A splutter, and then she was howling again. Her uunsually small mouth caused problems throughout her life. On many occasions I jokingly said to Ann: ‘Can’t you have anything ordinary, like a cold or a cough? Why do you have to be different?’ A rare toe infection affecting one person in a million was, of course, later followed by cancer twice and then MND. For Ann, family was everything. This is not surprising when you realise that she was part of a large, closely-knit, incredibly protective wider family unit, one which several people have openly admitted they would give their eye-teeth to be part of. Ann was blessed with a loving and devoted husband, Roger, two adoring and adored sisters, and two daughters of whom she was immensely proud, not least for all that they had achieved. Carol once wrote to me: ‘Ann hasn’t a single bad bone in her body’, not surprising then that no one ever said an unkind word about her. I invited members of Ann’s family to share some memories and, unsurprisingly, the same themes kept recurring. There was Ann the organiser, the bossy-boots in the thick of the action, the family photographer, not asking you but commanding you to be photographed. Then there was Ann the sports fanatic, screaming at the tele as she waved her Union Flag. A trip to the Crucible with Sarah for the snooker and watching, with Victoria, the West Indies play cricket in the Oxford Parks were sporting highlights. At Victoria’s hen night last summer, she was, despite her physical handicap, still beating people at ten-pin bowling; she followed this on the 20th of August by dancing with Victoria at Victoria and Glen’s wedding. How ironic that the London Olympics framed the beginning and end of her life. For me – and others – the one ‘must-have’ Christmas present was a calendar from Ann showing birthdays (with ages), anniversaries (indicating which one it was) and births, marriages and deaths of those long-gone. As I type, I notice on the calendar in front of me that last weekend was the anniversary of her mum and dad’s wartime wedding in 1944. Ann could cram a huge amount onto a postcard, something inspired, so she once told me, by the postcards that Eileen and I used to send home from abroad. This developed, of course, into the incredibly detailed annual family letter, just a tad shorter than ‘War and Peace’. Ann was forever thinking of others. As soon as Christmas was over, she would begin shopping for next year, carefully selecting the present she thought would best please the recipient. This was mirrored by the way in which she would cut out articles that might be of interest to specific friends and relatives: for example, Jimmy Young’s column for her mum, articles on Jonny Depp and Lee Mead for Carol. Ann’s last gift to me, presented at Carol and Rick’s anniversary ‘spectacular’, exemplified her generosity: a ticket for the Olympics with the message ‘A special gift for a special person’; she forgot to add ‘From an even more special person’. Incidentally, I treasure the message more than the ticket! Her interest in gardening began in childhood, when tomboy Ann would assist her dad in all things horticultural. Carol suspects that Ann and her dad are already re-designing parts of Heaven’s landscape, and I for one wouldn’t bet against it! Ann’s remarkable memory was something I really envied; little wonder, then, that she won so many quizzes. In our very last conversation, less than 48 hours before she passed away, she was still imparting fresh facts about the family and earlier this year was able to solve a family mystery that had bugged me for decades. This final conversation with Ann, when she must surely have suspected that the end was nigh, was typical of many. No talk of ‘Why me?’ or ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ but instead a chat about the golf, the forthcoming Olympics and, as I’ve said, the family, the latest photo of Victoria and her ‘bump’ being the very first thing put in front of me when I arrived. Her last words to Nancy still ring in my ears: ‘ How’s your friend, the one who lost both her legs?’ What a girl! It came, therefore, as no great surprise when we learned that it was Ann who had been chosen to meet the Princess Royal on the first of November 2011 after the inaugural lecture by Professor Kevin Talbot, who occupies the Chair of Motor Neurone Biology at Oxford. God-fearing, fun-loving, caring, intelligent, memorable, universally popular, mind-bogglingly brave, inspirational, uncomplaining, living life to the full despite jaw-dropping obstacles; yes, she was all these things and so much more, but to us in the family she is, above all, simply ‘our Ann’, whom we loved, still love, and will for ever love.