Anne Gray was born Anne Connah in 1916 in Savièse, Switzerland, the only child of a Swiss Calvinist mother and a British Anglican father. Her Aunt Sal was an anthroposophist, a follower of Rudolf Steiner, whose philosophy Anne at first rejected. She came to England, first to work and then to study at the London School of Economics, where the materialism of both the course and the other students drove her to re-examine Steiner and his theories and become an anthroposophist. She married Peter Gray who, disabled at birth by cerebral palsy, was educated at a normal Steiner school. They had two children and together they taught and cared for multiply-disabled children in a Steiner school in Bristol. Anne is also a member of the Christian Community.
"The soul chooses its own parents." So, I ask, did Anne choose her own difficult mother? She laughs. "I certainly learnt to respect her for what she believed in, for realising that though she had brought me into this life, I had a different path from her. She got stuck in the past, but she'll have got unstuck by now."
"In a Steiner school, if you have a problem, say a child who has a particular difficulty, you discuss it all together, everyone who has anything to do with that child. By the end of the evening you've gained a different attitude towards that child, and you've come to a better understanding of how you can help them. Now I think that's community."