Her father, Major William Leo Hoban was a British featherweight boxer and former soldier of Irish roots, her mother, May Irene Free, was a small businesswoman of partly Jewish extraction.
Although selected for London University, she had to do her two-year National Service as a government inspector in the Bristol aircraft factory at Staines.
[2] She was a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union and came from a fairly radical background – the Merseyside branch of what would later become the Militant tendency used to meet in her aunt's house in Birkenhead.
There she met her future husband, Anil Moonesinghe, who converted her to Trotskyism, and also a young conscientious objector called Stan Newens, who would later become a Labour Party MP and MEP.
She married Anil Moonesinghe in 1948 and they moved into a houseboat called Red October, which they built together, on the Thames near Marlow.
In the mid-1950s, she joined Sri Lanka's first co-operative housing scheme, the Gothatuwa Building Society, founded by Herbert Keuneman, Seneka Bibile, Bonnie Fernando and other members of the radical intelligentsia.
She subsequently joined the Ghana High Commission (at the time Kwame Nkrumah was President and had been advised by George Padmore) as a press officer, but returned to teaching at the Castle Street School (later Devi Balika Vidyalaya) in Borella, St Michael's Polwatte and St Paul's Milagiriya.
In 1967, her she was one of those proposed to contest the Agalawatte constituency on the LSSP ticket, but Dr Colvin R de Silva was selected by the party's central committee in preference to her.
In 1972, as part of the ongoing educational reforms instituted by the United Front government, she was appointed to a committee to look into the teaching of English in Sri Lanka Schools.
She was associated with a group of educationists led by Douglas Walatara, who wanted to teach English through the medium of the students' mother tongue, the indirect method.
The new English textbook, which replaced the GCE (Advanced Level) English textbook, and which she was partly responsible for, was controversial, avoiding Chaucer and Shakespeare, but including Bob Dylan (Blowin' in the Wind), John Lennon (Imagine) and Isaac Asimov (Jokester) – her personal favourite, Arthur C. Clarke's ("The Star"), was left out for fear of offending Roman Catholics.