Ethel
my wonderful grandmother and her creation of many
I had reached the age of ten when my grandmother died very suddenly. After a week of parental night visits to Croydon General Hospital, with adult-strained, hushed voices, telephone calls at odd hours, remonstrations to keep order, I came down in the morning, and my sister was crying.
“If you want to know why I’m crying,” she said, “it’s because Nana is dead!” she declared; and after a few seconds, I realised it must be very real.
I was two years older than my sister, and I didn’t like the crying, suspecting in the back of my mind that she was doing it to show off. This was, of course, just not so. Without internal questioning I went through to the kitchen, and there was Angela, my mother, silently leaking tears, a steady stream dripping down her tired face.
Mum looked up and was clearly exhausted, and even then, not wanting to be triggered, it took over a minute for me to feel the years to accept it. Of course, she was grieving like all of us, my emotions now becoming as real as hers; I was wounded, just the same.. and it hit me, this was the truth, and now I was stunned.
Nana was gone.
I went straight to the toilet, locked myself in, and I tried to feel something; but I couldn’t feel anything at all… it was just weird. Part of me had turned cold and was shut away, locked in a freezer; and meanwhile, I was quite confused, knowing only that it wasn’t standard me. This was the loss of the most unqualified and unconditional blessed love I had ever received, and it hurt.
Ethel was a lovely woman, Nana, as we children called her. She enjoyed us and loved us, played with us, cooked for us, looked after Mum, sewed, crocheted, looked after her husband, and made brand new things for us to play with. We all learned from her, and now we were stunned. She had left us ‘too early’ as the cliché went, and still remains.
Ethel had married Frederick Cook, the WW1 Navy hero of a man who became a Croydon Alderman. Fred was twelve years her senior. This created both a marriage of convenience, and profound love.
Fred married Ethel after it transpired that she was the second wife of a bigamist, this being no fault of her own. Round about that time, quite differently Fred’s first wife, Ethel’s sister had died, leaving him with the children; and thus Fred rescued Ethel from social opprobrium of the day, and the life of being an outcast.
It was a particularly good event for them both, as he found a mother for his two children, and Ethel hers; and on top of that, my mother Angela was born, the youngest and the only issue of them both. There began a deep love that would last until Ethel’s untimely passing.
That momentous event began to cut me adrift with a knife from the sweaty fuses of my seven family - five children and two adults. This was more framing the lives than anything else, more than Mum’s divorces and the new Dad, my being given barbiturates at the age four, yet having a reading age of sixteen at the age of seven, and reading everything in the adult library regardless of the nice librarians.
I watched it all happening, and didn’t speak up until I knew I had an adult quip available. This, I judged, might not get me cursed, nor beaten, nor sent up early to be thrashed in the bedroom by the the older kids. None of that mattered. This epic sadness I could not express; it was simply that the loss of everything known and loved was gone.
My mother, child of Ethel and Fred, was the youngest, and so she bore the brunt of tragedies, supported by her older sibling, Betty the oldest, Judy, the most naughty, and John, the quiet, tall, shy one. These all avoided the evils and lack of food, except David, who died in a bomber towards the end of WW2. David the oldest was our Mum’s biggest love.
Everyone grieved when Ethel died aged 65, suddenly, after a week of meningitis; and thereafter Fred, so strong, kind and passionate, started to fall to pieces. Without the centre of his world, Fred’s mind suffered within months; but his strong swimmer’s body lasted another 8 years.
I watched inside my brain as it continued to tick along, regardless. It was the end of the world, but somehow, I was still here. Nana had loved me and looked after me when my Mother’s love life was at its most tumultuous, and the event of her sudden death confirmed a pattern of expectation in me, that people who love me would always disappear, something I spent years discovering, undoing and remembering.
Over the following weeks I came to understand that I didn’t just lose a grandmother that day, I lost my mother as well, so great was her pain. At first she was overwhelmed by her mother’s death and the consequent strain of caring for Fred, but her family all stepped in to look after him, one after the next. Poor distraught, unconsolable Fred, our hero, now in pain, parcelled up and shunted around the family, until his midnight rambling and advancing senility caused the family to look for a place in a home for the elderly.
Mum struggled desperately with her own depression, locked into the battle of raising five children, of being in a relationship with the husband who loved her forever, along with a major increase in caring, holding the entire family to ransom, but somehow also with love. Sometimes.
My safety was reading, thinking about death every day. Like Yossarian, in all its glorious macabre detail. I developed morbid fixations - bone cancer, I was going to die of bone cancer, like the Kennedy boy I had seen on TV. Cerebral aneurysm. My brain was going to burst. Lung cancer, I would suffocate and drown in my own blood. Leukemia, a steady slipping away of life until a ghost replaced the real me. Accidents – a cut jugular, a severed arm.
And then, I did suffer an accident, the first of many. Returning a ball to the school playground as I returned to school at the end of food time, I climbed up on the street side wall, threw, slipped, and the iron railing spike stuck my through my left hand at the base of the middle fingers.
I hung for a moment on nothing, but the strength of my skin and sinew kept me there; I then pulled myself up with my other hand, pulling my left hand off the railing. I spread my fingers and looked at the hole. Wow. Before it filled with blood, I saw the other side of my skin. I was fascinated!
A dinner lady who had seen the accident, but totally underestimated the damage, came up:
“Come in love” she said sympathetically, “I’ll put a plaster on it.”
I didn’t reply, knowing this wound required a hospital, so I ignored her, lifted my left arm up high and slowly jogged back up the steep hill to home. I was greeted with sympathy and went to get stitches in the local, small hospital… now I was developing my adult self.
During the weeks that followed, I was distracted, depressed, tired, sad, lacked in concentration. My studies suffered. I had regular intense migraine. Mum took me to see Dr Casey, who told her I had a virus from the accident, and prescribed Valium.
We are talking adult strength pills for a ten year old, so for the second time in my life, my normal, understandable grief at life’s injustice was subsumed beneath chemical mind controls, strong enough to nuke a horse.
I didn’t like the flat zone of valium, because I couldn’t read well on it. Before long, I palmed the valium, lied about taking it, and started reading Edgar Allen Poe.
Well over a decade later, I finally felt recognised, and expressed the pain of loss.
In the arms of a lovely girl I had wronged, I shed the tears that I should have wept on the day Nana died. Great sobs just shuddered out of me as I was held by a kind and loving woman, both of us realising that this was something much more than love drama; it was something buried unexpectedly deep, now bubbling out like pond water, not so much like hot magma.
As I continued on, my face wet and dripping down my nose, my voice cracking and howling, until finally I relaxed and lay there, and then let go, and started to mourn.
Even allowing for the unavoidable mistakes, the prescription drugs, and the many, sometimes wonderful and various screw ups of my own, I think it would have done me a lot of good all those years ago if they had simply let me go to Ethel’s funeral in West Norwood Crematorium and Cemetery, allowing me to say goodbye and express my grief with everyone else.
Instead, I still have siblings, sharing memories of Mum, Dad, Ethel and Fred. As adults we have said goodbye to John, Betty and Judy. Our friends call us up as we share the ups and downs, with some of us functional, growing, still alive, some of us even happy.
That’s a good idea, right?
Dean F.R. Whitbread, this version July 2026
Touching and thoughtful