A family has paid tribute to a 97-year-old retired nurse who died in a care home without saying goodbye to her loved ones.
Pauline Toppin became unwell quickly and and died on 17 March. Her care home near Old Kent Road in south London had gone into lockdown early and her daughter had not visited in two weeks as she was recovering from surgery.
Toppin came to the UK from Barbados in 1957 to work for the NHS as one of the Windrush generation, answering the call from the government to help with labour shortages following the second world war.
Toppin’s granddaughter Christina, 27, told My London that her grandmother was like “everyone’s mum”. “She had so many stepchildren, it wasn’t even funny. She took the mother role for a lot of people, even my step-aunts and uncles,” she said.
“She was very doting. She made sure we all did our best, especially in school. She wasn’t at all judgmental. We are all very different, with different subcultures and ways of living, and she never judged the way we dressed or the way we spoke or who we were friends with.”
She added: “Whether they were black, white, Asian, she didn’t care. All my friends loved her.”
A crowdfunder page has been set up to raise money for funeral expenses. It reads in part: “Pauline was our wonderful nanny, mother, auntie, cousin and friend who was taken from us in her care home on the 17th March 2020, and it has been determined that Covid-19 was the cause of death.
“Pauline was a strong, devoted and loving matriarch of our family. Pauline was loved by so many outside of our family. Anyone that knows her knows her to be one of the most caring, strong, vibrant, and beautiful souls this earth has ever seen.”
