The woman who chose her own mother

Elsie London, 91, reflects on her life as a child in Toco. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle

FIVE years ago, when we first visited the quiet village of Alensdale, Toco, we met Ms Elsie London—a woman whose name has become as familiar as the coconut drops, sweetbread, and bottled preserves she sells from a small café named after herself.

She is now 91 years old, still seated in her favourite chair at the front of the café, greeting passersby with a gentle nod or a mischievous laugh, depending on the conversation at hand.

The café remains unchanged—cozy, spotless, with bottles of preserved fruit glinting on a table near the entrance. Our visit this time was still casual but carried a quiet purpose. I wanted to check in on her, officially, and hear how she had been doing.

“I doh cook as much anymore,” she admitted, settling into her chair. “Ah getting wuk to cook, eh… but ah slowing down. People still coming to ask me to do lil dishes for them, but mostly weekend ah does cook. Ah doh beat up too much. Ah bake still… lil sweetbread, bread, drops, cake. This morning a lady come and take two cakes. Ah make kuchela mango too.”

“And the wine too?” I teased. She threw her head back and erupted into that scandalous laugh she’s famous for.

“Doh bother meh! Look, ah tell a fella bring some (sugar) cane for me to make a lil babash. He bawl out, ‘Ms. Elsie! I must bring cane for you to make that?’ He say dais jail!”

She laughed again, louder than before.

But just as quickly as the laughter came, it faded. Without warning, her voice shifted—softer, older. “Boy, if I tell you. Up to this morning, I went there (down memory lane),” she said, touching her chest. “But I don’t like to go there. I does cry, even though ah old.”

What followed was not one of her usual village tales. It was a deeper wound. A memory that has never stopped aching.

“My mother, Kathy, give me away when I was six years old,” Elsie said plainly, without drama, but the hurt was alive in every syllable.

“It wasn’t nice. Ah say, ‘Mama, something wrong with you! Somebody give you me and you fed up?’ She start to cry. And ah tell she that is fake cry, and ah walk away.”

At six years old, Elsie decided she could no longer stay in the home of the woman who brought her into the world. With no bag, no clothes, and no plan, she walked to the house of a neighbor—the woman who would become, in all the ways that matter, her true mother.

“I went by a lady (who we would call Ms Theresa) home when ah leave my mother house. When she hear me walking up, she shout, ‘Who is that? Elsie?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ She ask, ‘Where yuh going?’ I say, ‘Ah come home.’”

Theresa had four children of her own, but she didn’t hesitate. “She ask me, ‘Where your clothes?’ I say, ‘Well, I hardly have clothes.’” It was then Elsie told her why she came.

Theresa listened, sighed deeply, and replied, “Kathy mad. Well, yuh home.” And with that sentence, a six-year-old girl’s life began again.

“Did you eat?” Theresa asked. “No, ah eh eat.” “Did you bathe?” “Yes, ah bathe.”

Elsie paused, her voice trembling slightly as she reflected. “You hear what a mother does ask if she care? That is a mother. Yuh hear what she ask?”

From that day forward, Elsie lived with Theresa. “She go and look clothes for me to go Toco Anglican School. She talk to Ms. Moore, the headmistress. My daughter born in that lady hand. I get married in that lady hand. Ah would be glad if she was still here.”

As she continued, memories of her parents stirred inside her like old spirits refusing to rest. “How ah grow up, and the way I see my father treat my mother, hmm.”

She shook her head. “Yuh take my mother when she fourteen. My mother born in Tobago. He breed she, intrigue she, then treat she bad. I say, ‘No. No man eh having me so!’ I had a mind of meh own.”

Her life, for all its hardship, had given her a fierce independence.

When asked if she was ever married (which was already made public in the last article), she added proudly, “Yes, ah married twice.” We knew about her husband George Byron, who died at 89, but the marriage before was only just revealed.

At one point, the neighbourhood hustler strolled into the café to sell 50 half-ripe oranges and some rough-skinned lemons. As soon as he left, Elsie picked up her story exactly where she had stopped, as though the pause belonged to the rhythm of her past.

“The other day ah sit down here, and ah don’t know what come to me. If ah could only see meh mother and father coming round the corner, ah getting something and deal with them!” She laughed that sharp, high-pitched laugh that rises out of pain but refuses to stay there.

“My father used to tell me, ‘Better you was the boy and Esau was the girl.’ Esau was humble. Ah used to call him priest, and he really turned into a Baptist priest.”

Our talk stretched past an hour, rich with laughter, heaviness, and the stubborn resilience of a woman who learned early that motherhood isn’t always found in the person who gives birth to you but sometimes in the one who opens their door when you say, “Ah come home.”

Before I left, she asked suddenly, “The fishermen understand what going on in the sea?” She meant the growing tensions between the US and Venezuela.

After I explained what the fishermen told me, she shrugged and declared, “A fishing boat doh have three engines.”

Even at 91, Elsie reads politics the way she reads life—with clarity, humour, and the blunt wisdom of someone who survived it all.

But beneath every laugh, every story, every bottle of preserved mango on her table, one truth endures: Elsie never stopped being the child who had to choose her own mother—and she never forgot the woman who chose her back.