THE WHITBREAD WALK

 TREK THE CANYONS MAY 12th-19th MAY – 2018 IN AID OF  ST. ELIZABETH HOSPICE, IPSWICH

Here you can see the Whitbread family enjoying Christmas in 1979. The father is Ernie Whitbread and he is holding the family dog Sally, a lurcher with some border collie in the mix, which meant she was always trying to pick up sticks that were bigger than her. Who can remember the board game Mousetrap? I know I do.

Ernie spent his time during WW2 in Italy with the Royal Army Service Corp; I think that’s the furthest he ever travelled.

He had always wanted to go to Scotland but never got the chance. He stayed in the Army until at least the early 50s, and then worked as a storekeeper in South West London. He met and married Olive whom you can see here in the top left photo. She had two jobs: a cleaner and a school dinner lady. She was a great cook; the family always enjoyed what she made for them.

Their eldest, Trevor, was born in 1958. He was a loyal supporter of Chelsea and he loved going out for a curry with his mates. Trevor was so good with figures he could add up sums in his head whereas we’d have to reach for the calculator (handy when you are having a curry with your mates!)

Their youngest Linda, was born 1962 at their home in Colliers Wood. From the age of four she enrolled at the local library as her Mum could not keep up with the speed at which her daughter could read. Linda liked doing the crossword with her Dad. Her favourite photograph is the one she took that Christmas of her Dad doing his Winston Churchill impression.  

So why am I doing this walk? Two reasons really.  The first one is for my own personal connection to the Whitbread family.  I married their daughter Linda in 2002. Sadly all four of the Whitbread family in these photographs are no longer with us. Linda was the last to go in July 2017, aged 55, through secondary breast cancer. Ernie died aged 56 from a heart attack, Trevor at 51 years of age due to heart failure following a reaction to penicillin. Olive lived longer but suffered a stroke in her last years.

Linda and I did not have children, and neither did Trevor, so before Linda left this world she said to me:

‘With me & Trevor gone, who is going to remember my family now?’ To be fair, Linda has extended family in Kent, London and Canada, and of course she will be remembered by her friends, but I knew she was referring to her immediate family (I had known Olive, and Trevor, but I regret not meeting Ernie, as he passed away in 1982 ten years before I met Linda).

So on a personal level, this walk is for me to remember these four, especially my Linda who was cared for in her last seven weeks at our home in Felixstowe, Suffolk by the St. Elizabeth Hospice team in Ipswich, which brings me to the second and main reason for this walk.

In May 2017 when Linda could no longer walk upstairs, St. Elizabeth Hospice stepped in.

They brought round a medical bed for use downstairs and did a marvellous job keeping our spirits up, especially as Linda, for her own reasons, did not want to see her own friends at the end due to the emotional trauma it would cause her.

Ten of their nurses would rotate with two in the morning and two in the evening during those last weeks. They arranged their work around our needs and not the other way around.

Without them, we would not have been able to share these special moments together.

We cannot control when we will die, but in cases like this where we know the end is not far away, it means a lot to the family involved to have some control at least over where and how the end should take place. I say ‘how’, because having the option to die at home relieved a lot of trauma of the event for us, and for that reason made things less stressful.

Of course for many, dying at home is not always possible and in these cases the Hospice have their own facilities to cater for this, but for us it was a gift. Linda managed a few more weeks than the doctors expected. Being at home, feeling more settled in familiar surroundings, with the full support and care of the Hospice team was the reason for this extra time, I believe.

So this walk is to raise money so that they can continue to do their good work for people in a similar position. We just never know when we might need it one day.

Thank you for reading this and thereby helping me achieve my first objective and for anything you can donate to The St. Elizabeth Hospice.

Alastair Young