The BIG interview :: Wessex Scene Online

The BIG interview

17th May 2006
Jack Arnott

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Ethel Goodridge, 68, celebrated her fiftieth year working at the University of Southampton last Tuesday. A familiar and friendly face around campus, many students know her for her winning smile and efficient sausage dispensing manner. Looking back on a long and illustrious career, Ethel granted the Wessex Scene an exclusive interview, in which she reflected on her life and her recent Cafeteria Worker Lifetime Achievement Award 2004.

Sitting in her small bungalow on Burgess Road, Ethel seems to be one of those few people in life remarkably content with their lot. Growing up an only child in rural Southwarkshire, Ethel remembers a "warm" childhood. "Of course I had dreams when I was younger, who doesn’t? I remember dreaming of being the first female King. But by the age of 12 I had polio in one of my legs, as well as my face; I knew I would be lucky to get any job."

At the age of seventeen, a chance encounter with "a strange bespectacled gentleman" on the bus changed the course of young Ethel’s life. Nine months later, she gave birth to her only son, Jimmy, who she fondly describes as "the light of my life," along with Jesus. Her strict Scientologist upbringing meant not only that the child birth was in silence, but that her child was to be offered to the alien overlord Xenu in a ritual sacrifice on its first birthday. "Something told me that I couldn’t do it, for some reason I thought killing my baby was wrong." Ethel sneaked out one night with only her baby and a peanut butter sandwich in her backpack. That evening’s game of Jenga was the last time she would see her parents. She was now homeless, hungry and lost.

Ethel decided upon a new life in the big city, somewhere where she and her child could live a simple life, covered in gold and jewels. She hitchhiked the four hundred mile trip. "My cousin Larry had told me Southampton, and specifically Portswood, was a paradise. He said the streets were literally paved with gold." Larry was right. However, the Great Haricot Bean Disaster in 1962, which destroyed all of downtown Portswood, came only months before Ethel’s arrival. She claims she was "disappointed" on arriving to find only charity shops and kebab establishments.

It was in Portswood, working part time as a kebab spinner, that Ethel met Gerald Goodridge, a "kindly man who ate three kebab meals a day, and always had a ha’penny and sixpence in his pocket to buy me a bushel of honeywhistles." This man would later become Ethel’s husband after a whirlwind seven month romance. "The polio in my face was cured by the huge amounts of lamb fat that covered me every day, young Jimmy was growing up fast and Gerald made me the happiest girl in the world. He loved the fact that I always smelled like meat. He made me feel special."

Gerald took Ethel and Jimmy into his small home and, for six or seven months, they lived "the good life, with all the kebabs we could want." However, the introduction of mechanised spinning kebabs meant that later that year Ethel found herself out of meat and out of a job. She started work with her husband at the local university canteen.

Tragically, Gerald died in a freak mushy pea accident in 1989. "I’ll never forget his screams after he fell into the vat." Jimmy, meanwhile, left home at the age of 14 to become a trapeze artist, and Ethel hasn’t heard from him since, something she "regrets".

Focusing all her efforts on her work, Ethel was rewarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award 2004, presented by Kate Thornton in a glitzy ceremony in the Swaythling Working Men’s Club. She describes receiving the award as the "proudest moment of my life."

As for the future, Ethel hopes to retire to St Tropez and break her way into the glamour modelling industry, but for now, if you get a wink from a jovial looking dinnerlady with gammy legs, remember Ethel’s courageous story.