GENERATIONS of girls remember Miss Manktelow, the smiling, perky teacher at Parliament Hill school.
It wasn’t just her cheerful, bustling character that drew them to her.
But something else they couldn’t help identifying with the brunette Cecily Manktelow – her hair stylishly rolled up into a bun.
Extraordinarily enough, she never once changed her hair style.
Her pupils never knew that behind the ‘bun’ lay a tragic story.
It was a style her RAF pilot lover liked – and after he was killed in World War II, she vowed never to change it.
She taught at Parliament Hill for 43 years retiring nearly 20 years ago as deputy head.
She died six weeks ago at 82 – and what was so tragic about her death was that it was probably unnecessary.
She went into the Royal Free with an uncomplicated condition – a leg ulcer.
Last September she was on a bus in Archway when a teenager accidentally kicked her in her leg. That started the ulcer.
She was the kind of patient who should have been discharged after two or three weeks at the most, perfectly healed.
But then after a short period she was struck down by that dreaded MRSA super bug.
She was sent home in May, a shadow of the vibrant, lively woman who had entered the Free – not long after her 82d birthday in December.
But she continued to decline at her home in Hornsey Lane until she was re-admitted to the Whittington – and that was where she died on June 1.
Her close friend Sheilagh Edge, a fellow teacher at Parliament Hill school, told me that she was still horrified that Miss Manktelow could have died so needlessly. She was angry.
“Cecily and I completely believed in the NHS,” she said.
“We supported it from its inception. I could not believe that this great teaching hospital could have treated her so badly. The quality of nursing care was truly shocking. I know they are under pressure but there are basic things about nursing that seem to have gone.
“They would take notes, record blood pressure – but did they ever look at her face, Oh No! They would put food before her but no one fed her, and she wasn’t able to feed herself. She lost so much weight and was so weak by the time she came out she could not hold her head up – it was lolling from side to side.
“We have no complaints about the Whittington. But if she had not gone into the Free I believe she would be alive today.”
We put Miss Manktelow’s case to the Free who said: “Regarding issues surrounding MRSA we assure you that infection control is a very high priority for the Trust. Although we have not received a formal complaint we can say Ms Manktelow was cared for in line with Department of Health recognised infection control good practice.”
Regarding whether the happy, carefree Miss Manktelow was fed by nurses, the Royal Free told me: “An important part of rehabilitation is to encourage patients to feed themselves and Miss Manktelow was assessed as being able to do this.”

How the faithless paid homage to the fallen

MEN and women of religious faith will not feel uncomfortable when, eyes closed, they stand in silence in homage to those killed in a disaster.
But what about an atheist or a person without any faith? Are there any uncomfortable moments?
Along with several hundred people this agnostic stood in silence at noon on Thursday by a mass of flowers laid on a green in Russell Square, Bloomsbury, in memory of those senselessly slain in the London bomb blasts
For once, I thought this kind of spiritual sentinel made sense. Buried deep in the earth just a few hundred yards away at Russell Square Tube station lay a compartment of a Tube train in which dozens of commuters died.
Thoughts inevitably flowed to the moments when disaster had struck them, and the relatives and friends they left behind.
As I was leaving the park, I met the author Ian McEwan whose wife, Annaleena McAfee, a fellow journalist I once knew when she worked on a north London weekly.
I guessed that he probably shared my agnosticism and asked him how he coped with such moments of public homage.
McEwan, who has a London home near the square, told me: “It’s difficult, I know. What can you do? The Guardian asks you to turn in a 1,000 words and you join a public outpouring of grief like the one here.”
He looked slightly perplexed. He looked as if it had been difficult to give an answer. I knew how he felt.
I asked McEwan to stand next to the display of flowers for a photograph but he declined.
“Just take one of me here,” he said.