‘Mally’ Kennedy was a dedicated father of three girls working as a London bus driver. Would PPE and an earlier lockdown have saved him?
Ellen Kennedy had only been living with her dad for a few weeks, but already they had settled into an easy routine. Mervyn Kennedy, known to all as Mally, would wake up at about 9am and ask his youngest daughter to go for breakfast with him. Ellen, 31, would demur – the vegan options around their south London flat weren’t great – but Mally would insist, and so they would walk together to the Pond cafe in Thornton Heath.
Mally always ate breakfast at the Pond cafe before a shift, because it was opposite his bus depot. The 67-year-old bus driver had moved to the UK from Zimbabwe in 1999 in search of a better life for his wife, Patricia, and daughters, Melanie, Penny and Ellen. And it more or less was a better life, although Patricia died suddenly in 2004, a loss from which Mally never really recovered.
