Nanny Pearce (Ethel)

She was christened Ethel, a name she never much cared for, and in her later years almost everyone who knew her simply called her Nanny. Ethel Bradbrook was born on 15 July 1909 in the market town of Bury St Edmunds, the youngest of four children born to Harry and Jane Bradbrook. She had two older brothers, Wilfred and Frederick, and an older sister, Gladys. Her father was a chemist, and when the country wages of Suffolk proved too thin to feed a growing family, the Bradbrooks moved to Southall in West London, where he took a position with Boots the Chemist. Nanny was only three when they made the journey, yet she carried a memory from around that time for the rest of her life: the people of the street gathered together, panic-stricken, at the news that the Titanic had gone down. Her memory was extraordinary, sharp to the very end, and she could summon the names of childhood neighbours, teachers and friends decades later, often complete with impersonations and the odd prop. Where Gladys was content to sit quietly for hours with her dolls, Nanny wanted none of it. She wanted to be running, exploring, finding out. When the other children whispered of a whirlpool at the centre of the pond on Norwood Green, fierce enough to pull a child under and never let go, they kept a wary distance. Nanny took off her shoes and stockings and jumped straight in, swam to the middle, and came back to announce it was perfectly safe after all. Her poor sister had already run home to fetch their mother. She was the mystery vegetable thief who dug up her father's prized allotment crops, lit a little fire and cooked herself a stew in a metal pot, leaving her dad to shake his head and blame "them boys" for years before she finally confessed. She jumped the milkman's cart for a free ride, missed her footing and was dragged down the dusty street with her brand new tights in ruins. Told by her mother to slow down, she would laugh and call back, "Mum, I'll never stop running!" The greatest adventure of her childhood, though, was one she never grew out of. At the Salvation Army Sunday School in Southall, on a hot afternoon she never forgot, she felt God speak to her heart and she answered. She ran all the way home to tell her mother she was saved. That running faith would carry her through everything still to come. Nanny loved school. She was clever and creative, excelled in her lessons. Her name stayed chalked in the corner of the blackboard for years afterward. She had lived through the outbreak of one world war as a schoolgirl, sometimes scooting off home when the air-raid drill sounded rather than heading for the cellar. At fourteen she left school for work. Her first job was as a maid in a family-run milk shop, sweeping grates, dusting, setting tables and minding the shop while the ladies of the house walked the dog. She worked hard for six shillings and fourpence a week, and remembered being happy there. Later she found work she loved at Shand Kydd's, painting the special wallpaper artwork ordered by hotels and restaurants, until the wages sent her looking elsewhere. Somewhere in these years she met a young man called Vic Sinton, though he was not to be the love of her life. Nanny married her Grandad, Len Pearce, and together they bought their first home, 106 Fern Lane in Heston, for just £645. It was the house she would still be living in, alone and fiercely independent, at the very end of her life. Their son Alan arrived in 1936. Then, in October 1940, with the war raging and whole nights spent in an underground shelter barely six feet by four, Nanny went into labour six weeks early and delivered twin boys. The first, David, was strong and healthy. The second would not feed, and the nurses feared he would not live; they gently suggested she have him christened and turn her attention to the healthy child. Nanny would not give up. She sat through the night nursing her tiny son and praying, and he lived. They named him Keith. He would grow up to serve God faithfully as a pastor in the UK and Australia. Six weeks later, the very maternity wing where she had lain with her babies was destroyed by bombing. She never doubted whose hand had spared them. Grief came too. After the twins, Nanny had a daughter, Jennifer Joan, a beautiful baby with dark hair. At just six weeks old, Jennifer contracted gastroenteritis on the ward and died, one of several babies lost to the same infection. In a later, kinder age there would have been outrage and accountability, but this was wartime, and grief sat in every household. When Nanny later crossed paths with the woman whose illness had unknowingly spread through the ward, pushing a pram with her own surviving child, she said she simply did not have the heart to tell her. She carried that loss quietly, speaking of it only when she felt it might comfort someone else in their own grief. She knew other sorrows. Her brother Fred, his heart weakened by the scarlet fever that had swept all four Bradbrook children into six weeks of isolation as infants, died at just twenty-five. Her brother Wilf died of cancer at thirty-nine. Both men met death with a faith as steady as their sister's, Fred telling his family that it was "as easy to die as it is to live," and Wilf, as they left him each night, saying, "If I'm not here tomorrow, you know where I'll be." Grandad, expected to be posted to Singapore with his crew, sent instead to Heston Airport at the very end of Fern Lane, home every night and earning a wage while she went into hospital. A crippling back, healed in an instant when she stood up in faith and carried the holiday luggage the next day as though nothing had ever been wrong. She saw God's blessings, she said, like stars made brighter by the dark. The joy of her For all she lived through, what people remember most is her joy. You could always tell when Nanny had been to visit, because the newspaper would have a blackened tooth or a drawn-on moustache added to whichever dignitary graced the front page. She coloured in black-and-white photographs with felt-tip, labelled them, and sometimes took the scissors to them entirely. In serious moments you might catch her with her scarf pulled up over her mouth and her shoulders shaking, not with tears but with laughter she was trying and failing to suppress. She was an original prankster. Poor Mrs Pile next door opened her door to find a "baby" in a box pleading to be looked after, and on another occasion to Nanny disguised as a Salvation Army carol singer rattling a collection tin. On a family holiday she left a note on her son's windscreen claiming the wheel nuts had been loosened for illegal parking, then dissolved into laughter as he stormed off to complain. In Spain she once impersonated the long-awaited cleaning maid so convincingly, complete with scarf and sun hat, that the family chased her runaway hat down the street before realising the master of disguise had struck again. Her garden, tended by the simple motto of "doing a little bit each day," was one anyone would be proud of, vibrant and bursting with produce. Her cupboards were always full, her stove always had something on it for a visitor, and her heart was always ready with a wise word, a little rhyme, or her gentle encouragement to "keep sweet." In her later years Nanny faced her darkest testing, not from bombs or bereavement but from within: a time of fear and anxiety that tormented her mind after a series of falls, worse, she said, than anything she had known in the air-raid shelters. She held on. Meditating on the suffering of Christ, she came to know she was not alone in hers, and a scripture rose in her spirit, "Take no anxious thought for the morrow." The fear lifted, and she said she felt like Lazarus raised from the dead. She was coming up to her ninety-ninth year, still living at home on her own, when her health finally began to fail. In the middle of one night, her daughter Ruth sleeping on the floor beside her, Nanny suddenly sat up and said, with real certainty, that God had told her she would go on the Wednesday. Within a day an ambulance was called, and even then she was testifying to the paramedic, asking him not whether he knew the way to the hospital but whether he knew where hewas going for eternity. She was taken to West Middlesex Hospital, the backdrop to so many of her life's stories, and two days later, on the Wednesday, exactly as she had said, she went to be with the God she had trusted since she was a running, fearless child. As she slipped away, her family spoke over her the words she had lived by: "Well done, good and faithful servant." At her funeral, her son Keith, the baby she had once prayed through the night to save, read from 2 Timothy: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." She had told her granddaughter, once, linking arms on a slow walk to the car, "Don't get old, Mandy, it's not much fun." But those who loved her picture her differently now: running once more as she had as a girl, across the finishing line of her life on earth and into the warmth she had never doubted was waiting, one adventure ending and a greater one just beginning. She added colour to everything she touched, the way she once coloured in those old photographs. To her four sons, she was Mum. To everyone else, she was Nanny Pearce. She was everybody's Nan.