‘Aunty Nell’ by Joyce Hayward

My mother and her family had always cared for ‘Aunty Nell’- a tiny, quiet spinster who had joined my grandmother to help her bring up a family of twelve on a farm worker’s wage in the early 1900’s.
By wartime,1939-45, the children had got older and the youngest one was serving in the armed forces. So my ‘aunt’ left my grandparents and went into service for a rich farming family.
However, she still kept in touch and visited, in turn, members of my family to stay with them for her holidays or through periods of illness. She was always ‘aunty’ to us all.
My mother was the last one of her generation to die – but Aunt Nell outlived them all.
I used to take her shopping, have her round for Christmas dinner and generally try to help her. She was always very active for her age and quite capable of doing her own housekeeping right up to the age of 97 years old. But after that I started to worry.
My biggest fear was linked to the way she lit her fire. She would light it and then ‘to help to get it to go’ she would put a piece of newspaper over the front to draw it. Often the paper would catch light in the process and she would frantically stamp it out in the hearth. It seemed only a matter of time before her clothes might catch fire.
In the end I was unable to relax at night for thinking about this. I reluctantly called Social Services who arranged for her to be placed in a care home. She lived there happily until she died at the age of 106 years old.
It upset me at the end that, as I was not a blood relative, I was unable to register the death or keep her card from the Queen as a memento.