She may not be able to hear as clearly as in former years, but this does not stop 102-year-old Ethel Williams from enjoying the satisfaction of laughter.

And as she sat on her verandah in her St John’s Road home in Spanish Town on Thursday, 18 days shy of her 103rd birthday, Williams would give a hearty laugh before responding to questions posed to her.

“I am Panamanian,” she said. “I was not born here. But I came here to live when I was three and half years old.”

Williams’s daughter, Carlene Brown, was willing to fill in the gaps.

She explained that her mother was born in Panama to a Jamaican father and a Panamanian mother after her father went there to work on the canal.

However, at age three and a half, Williams was sent to Jamaica to be raised by her father’s mother, who lived on St John’s Road.

“Up to now I don’t know my mother you know,” Williams told the Sunday Observer.

“Is only we as family she has,” Brown interjected. “Her father came back here and was living right here with her until he died. She had two sisters but she never met them. She don’t know anywhere else but right here — St John’s Road. Because from she leave Panama, is St John’s Road she live, right on this premises here.”

Williams attended Friendship Elementary school, on St John’s Road. After that, she contented herself in being a housewife, caring for her husband and four children – two boys and two girls.

The centenarian was so committed to her family that she never worked out, in fact, she never left her children even to go to the market.

“She cared us, so much so that she told us when we were small she never went to the market or to the shop because she did not want to leave us alone at anytime,” Brown said. “And so she would ask people to buy the things she needed and she stayed with us. She would always look after the domestic part of things. She was always home,” she said.

Williams’s husband, Cecil, was a rice farmer before moving on to sugar cane cultivation.

“After rice was no longer being farmed in Jamaica, he started planting cane,” Brown said. “During the sugar season, he would leave home for six months for St Thomas where he would work for that period. During those six months it’s my mother who managed everything. So for that six months, from January to July, he would pack his bag and go away to the sugar estate – Duckenfield – and then he would be here for the rest of the year.”

With her usual laugh before divulging information, Williams recalled meeting her husband only a stone’s throw away from her home.

“I met him right here you know,” she said. “We went to school together so I know him from school days. And he was just living next door so is somebody I know long time,” Williams said, pointing to a yard immediately in front of her home where she said her husband lived years ago.

She recalled how her young lover would put soup in paper bag and take it to her across the street after soaking the brown paper bag in oil to prevent the soup from leaking out.

In July 1943, at the age of 33, Williams married Cecil. The two produced four children – Delores who now resides in the United States, Carlene, Donald and David.

All three are still living on the compound with their mom.

On October 1, 1981 Williams’s husband passed away after suffering from lung cancer. He was a chain smoker.

The three children, who were present at the interview, recalled the morning their father died. He was in bed while their mother was making fried dumplings for the family. None of them was aware that while they were still going about their usual daily chores, he was inside dead. It wasn’t until Williams put the dumpling making aside to check up on her husband who was too quiet, that she realised that instead of sleeping peacefully as they had thought, he had in fact died sometime before, as his body was in a state of rigor mortis. That was the end of the dumpling making.

“He was a chain smoker. And I never knew that all this time he was sending me to buy cigarette that it would kill him,” Brown said.

But, she said, they were well cared for by their mother and discipline was at the top of her list.

“Thank God none of the four of us ever go police station yet for anything at all,” Brown said. “And nobody never had to make complaint on us. She was very disciplined and she brought us up with discipline.”

“She did strict man,” Williams’s 78-year-old son Donald recalled. “Anything she ketch she lick you with. And anything she tell you to do you had to do it. We had a big yard and in the mornings [boys] had to sweep up the yard while my sister who is away had to wash. My father had two goats and we had to tie them out and get ready for school. We didn’t have any pipe and so we had to go to Job’s Lane to catch drinking water before we go school. When we come back with the water we clean up the place and leave and go school. We went to Friendship Primary school. Then 12 o’clock we had to come home for lunch and mama would always have something for us. And when we came from school dinner was always ready,” he said.

For David, Williams’s 64-year-old son, she was a loving, caring mom.

“I lived all of my life with her and we were never in need of anything,” David said. “She always have something prepared for us.”

The children said that their mother was so generous that anyone who came calling and asking any favour of her would be sure to have it granted.

“Mama always say from her mother’s time she would see her wrapping up three fingers of banana, piece of yam and so on, giving people, and so she would do the same,” Brown said. “She kind.”

But there were two things that Williams never did. She never socialised with other children growing up and she never taught her daughter to comb hair.

“When she was going to school, it was only her and one other lady wear shoes and socks and so everybody looked at them as aristocrats because everybody else go school barefooted,” Brown said. “Mama said she and the children never got on because she never used to play with them. She said when everybody else outside the school playing she would be inside. And when the bell ring they would say it wasn’t time for bell to ring because it was the ‘gyal Ethel’ who was ringing it,” she said.

With a loud laugh, Brown admitted to not having a clue about how to plait her own hair.

“I am 69 now and you see my hair? Is mama comb it. Mi can’t comb my hair,” she laughed. “Mama never teach mi to comb hair. Everytime my hair want to comb mama would say go for the comb and come. Even now is she comb it. The only thing is that now I am the one who tell her when to comb it.”

Not only is Williams still very active in combing her daughter’s hair, but she still washes her own underwear, bathes herself and reads the newspapers and her bible regularly.

“She has no kind of illness,” he daughter said. “Mama is not taking any pills. I have diabetes and I have high blood pressure, and mama don’t have anything like that.”

Giving her usual laugh, Williams said that she does not know why she has lived for almost 103 years, but theorised that it could be the fact that fertilizer was not a part of her food when growing up.

“The doctor say is the food,” she said. “I never eat anything with fertiliser, ’cause you never had fertiliser back them.”

Her son David agreed with the theory, noting that even the chicken back then was different.

“Is pure common fowl they used to eat them time there,” he added.