My grandmother Mary West, who has died aged 103, was an independent spirit, a matriarch and an active community figure in Somerset.
Born two months after the end of the first world war at her maternal grandparents’ house on the Isle of Wight, Mary never knew her father, who was killed during the last weeks of the war. A few years later her mother, Alma (nee Haynes), a grocery shop worker, married Harold Singleton, with whom she had a son, John.
