Ten years on, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s school bag still hangs where she left it – because her family can’t bear to pack it away.
And sometimes, when she catches sight of it in the sitting room, heartbroken mum Rosamund forgets for a moment that her nine-year-old daughter has gone.
The family has vowed not to leave their home on Lewisham’s busy South Circular road, despite the air pollution. For Ms Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who has campaigned tirelessly to cut air pollution since Ella died of an asthma attack in 2013 and was awarded a CBE last year for services to public health, to move would be to admit defeat.
The mum, who also has 16-year-old twins, says: “It doesn’t feel like 10 years until I see her friends and they’ve gone off to university. Ella would be almost 20 now. My biggest regret is we just didn’t get enough time.
“But she knew she was immensely loved. I was always battling for her and I’ll never stop.”
With the help of artist Amanda Ward, the family is arranging for a statue of Ella to be put up in their local green space, Mountsfield Park, in Lewisham.
Ms Adoo-Kissi-Debrah adds: “The significance is if you don’t want to walk on the South Circular – which is what killed her – you walk through Mountsfield Park.
“My thing to the politicians is, ‘Rather than us move, how about you clean up the air?’ The traffic on the South Circular doesn’t just affect my children. If we have to move, it means we’ve lost.”
