The daughter of a French mother and an Anglo-Scottish father, Alison was bilingual in French and English. Born within the sound of Bow Bells, she was also a true Cockney.
In the early 1960s she was a regular contestant on Granada TV's Junior Criss Cross Quiz, eventually winning a state-of-the-art Philips radiogram just in time for the start of Beatlemania.
In the mid-1960s she was on TV again - this time in the audience of Ready Steady Go.
A couple of years later she appeared as a soloist in Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde, which was televised for BBC2.
An accomplished piano player and singer, she sang in Peter Hall's acclaimed 1968 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She was studying in Paris during the 1968 riots but did not take part in them.
While studying Modern Languages at Oxford she began to feel unwell and was later diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Coincidentally (or not?) a French cousin, just a couple of months younger, received the same diagnosis. While Madeleine sadly died aged 36, Alison went on to be one of the longest surviving Hodgkins Lymphoma patients ever, though the effects of the pioneering treatment that saved her life in the 1970s became increasingly debilitating in later years.
As an academic and medical librarian, Alison was among the very first people to use the Internet professionally for non-military purposes. She remained keenly interested in technology and was a serial 'early adopter' of new ideas, hardware, apps and online practices.
She met her husband Peter when they were both recent graduates singing in the Bach Choir, and continued singing in various choirs and groups until her health no longer allowed it.
Trying out a few different jobs as a young mother, she trained as a teacher and also became a freelance journalist for a spell before returning to working with information systems first for a private employment advice company and later in the central office of the Citizens' Advice Bureau, with which she had previously volunteered. After retiring she returned to the CAB as a volunteer.
She baked exceedingly good and exceptionally artistic cakes, was skilled at line drawing and wrote some rather good poetry. 
Never a dabbler, she became a Buddhist after developing an interest in meditation and mindfulness, while retaining close links with the Anglican/Episcopalian Church - two ways of life she found compatible, congenial and complementary. 
After retiring she began an Open University degree in English. Unfortunately ill health led to her deferring her studies two thirds of the way through and she was not able to complete the course.
This is only a tiny fraction of Alison's story - a little morsel of the bit that is just about her alone... ... because the epic part is about her unconditional love and generosity towards everyone else in her life: her strong sense of fairness, her quietly determined and practical defence of those who needed help, the joy and pride she derived from her marriage, her family and friends, her stoicism in the face of her increasing physical limitations and her unfailing ability to see worth and substance in everyone she met.