This week, we said goodbye to my beloved Nanny Hazel—but not really. Glimmers of her remain everywhere. The only words I could write this week are about her. Because I believe we keep people alive by sharing their stories.
And what 93 years of life she lived. I picture her as a child darting barefoot through the dirt of her childhood smallholding in Cwmavon, chasing chickens, her blond curls bouncing in the sunlight. I imagine long walks across the Eastern South Wales valleys with her dad and a love for nature she later gifted us.
She grew up before the NHS and welfare safety nets, and her sparkling blue eyes concealed a resilience forged in childhood hardships. But she always dreamed big. I treasure a photograph of her from the mid-1940s, with a pale pink rose pinned in her cumulus curls and her coral lips parting in a blockbuster smile. Hazel was a pin-up to rival Hollywood’s finest.
She began working at Tirpentwys Canteen Colliery at 14, walking miles in all weathers to get there. There, she met dashing soldier Thomas George Jenkins, who she married in her late teens. She poured her resilience into raising eight children in thirteen years, mending countless socks, hearts, and everything in between. She was a whirlwind of grit, love, and determination, fuelled by a working-class ethic that never faltered.
She is the star of all my favourite childhood memories. She would take me to pick fragrant elderflowers for cordial and plump blackberries. Then, she’d work her magic and fill my belly with delicious cakes, pies, and crumbles. I became her shadow after I found a pot of “vanishing cream” in her pristine bathroom cabinet and worried she might disappear.
I can still picture long road trips to her caravan in Pendine Sands, the cassette deck playing “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “The Mighty Quinn” on an endless loop. That free cassette—a gift from a tea brand in exchange for tokens—became the soundtrack of her Sixties. Those road trips transported us to a world she created for us, full of warmth, laughter, and love.
Later, she provided a safe home for my teenage turmoil, with silky bedding and pillows fat with goose feathers. I still smell her roast lamb dinners and milky, sugary tea hand-delivered to my bedside table.
She had an endless capacity for love and giving and asked for nothing in return. She bore the tragic losses of her husband, a beloved grandson, and a cherished daughter with quiet grace, her dignity unbroken even in the face of such heartbreak. “Never explain, never complain” was a mantra she shared with her beloved Queen Elizabeth II.
So, when I received an invitation to a 2013 Buckingham Palace Garden Party, I knew instantly who my guest would be. A lifelong royalist (unlike me), my nan was giddy with anticipation as I drove us to London. It was a pilgrimage she never imagined she’d make.
At the Palace gates, she adjusted her fascinator with the precision she used to tie my childhood shoelaces, sparkling with pride. So far, so good—until a royal I won’t name appeared on the terrace. An ardent Princess Diana fan, she was vocally scathing about said royal – at the top of her voice – for all the wrongs they inflicted on the queen of her heart. I had to drag her away and distract her with crustless sandwiches. I joked she’d have us thrown in the Tower of London for treason, and her baby blues twinkled with mischief. Her sense of humour shone more brightly than any crown jewel.
As did her sense of adventure. In another treasured picture, she’s stepping off a 1970s aeroplane in immaculate flared trousers, a polo neck, and a bouncy perm. As a child, I would sit wide-eyed at her feet, lapping up her tales of exploring Israel, North Africa, and New York before Guiliani cleaned it up. Her wanderlust still binds us.
She was so excited when I spent a week in Hollywood this year. It was a dreamland she revered but never visited. With its shag-pile carpet and vintage atomisers, her bedroom was her slice of Tinseltown, a real starlet’s boudoir. She was in her final weeks when she asked to hear all about my trip. When I told her about cars driving themselves on the streets of Los Angeles, it was her turn for saucer eyes, full of the wonder that never left her. How crazy that must have seemed to a woman born when King George V was on the throne.
I will miss her wisdom the most. “They don’t give you a manual when your babies are born,” she told me from her hospital bed earlier this year. I held her frail, translucent hand dotted with bruises and smoothed her hair, like candy floss made of wire wool, from her clammy forehead.
“We’re all just doing our best, love.”
Defying the advice of her beloved Dylan Thomas, she didn’t rage at the dying of the light. She was ready. When she told me this, softly gripping my hand in her sunlit hospital bed, my cousin was two floors up, about to give birth.
“I have to make room for the new ones,” she said, her smile soft but resolute, her blue eyes bright with a lifetime of wisdom.
Perhaps she didn’t rage because she knew her light didn’t end with her. It lives in the memories she made with us, the lessons she taught us, and the love she poured into all of us.
She lives in so many parts of me: my inability to sit still, my independent spirit and our shared belief that all big occasions deserve a hairdresser.
She lingers in my son’s mischievous grin and every rose-scented breeze that catches me unaware.
My nanny Hazel understood me like no one else could. Everybody deserves that one person in their life. I am so lucky she was mine, and I had the chance to tell her so. Because no matter how long we are gifted with loved ones, it’s never long enough.
In loving memory of Hazel Jenkins, 28 August 1931 – 9 December 2024. Goodnight, and God bless, Nanny.
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