HAIRDRESSER, Nurse, Sister, Friend, Artist, Gardener, Traveller, Writer, Poet, Illustrator, Craftswoman, Interior Designer.

Jacqueline Ray Edwards, who packed several lifetimes into her 75 years, passed away last month at Mountbatten Hampshire, just yards from where she was born.

Jackie came into the world at Chestnuts Nursing Home in West End in 1944 and returned to Hamble to a Folland owned house rented to her father Ronald, an aircraft fitter who had spent the war fitting wings to Spitfires.

After the war, her father, mother Ray, Jackie and her siblings Gill and Tony moved to various pubs and clubs in the Southampton area for work for her parents before settling in Hamble with Jackie's maternal grandmother. A young Jackie was one of the first pupils at the newly built Hamble Primary School.

Her artistic talents overtook all academia and she painted, sketched, drew and experimented with various paint techniques her entire life. She had a particular talent for watercolours.

She trained as a hairdresser in Woolston, but then decided to take up nursing and worked all over the country including at the General and Royal South Hants in Southampton and Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester.

Jackie moved to Canada in the late 60s, lived on a yacht in Greece, worked at a cancer retreat in Mexico, ran a pub in Scotland and visited China after retirement among many other adventures.