Mona Janes

Mona died peacefully at the Triangle Nursing Home from heart failure on July 17, aged 92. She was born Mona Williams in Stiperstones in Shropshire and moved to Oxford during the war to work in domestic service at St Hugh’s College. Here she met her husband Donald, who was originally in the RAF and then worked at Pressed Steel. They married in 1950 and bought their house in Cranham Street with a £200 mortgage from the Co-op.

Mona was to live there for the rest of her life. Here they had two children, David and Denise, who went to St Barnabas School. Mona eventually had six grandchildren. She was divorced in the late 1970s. After that she worked as a cleaner and also at the UBM builders merchants in Aristotle Lane. Mona was a regular attender of the over-60s club and the Saturday morning cafe.

She always had something pretty for passers-by to look at, in her window: if flowers were not in season it would be a piece of china. As a bus user, she got irritated when they changed the timetable. Instead she would use her bike and was a keen cyclist until her late-eighties. Eventually, the family had to confiscate the bike for her own safety, and that of other road users! Mona was interred at Stiperstones Methodist chapel next to her brother.