Hannah Hawkins: 'It's a literal ache, a physical ache. I think about her every day' | OneFootball

"I'll always remember my first arrest," says PC Reid - then of Durham Constabulary, badge number 9139 - as she reflects on a past calling. "I was in a shop getting CCTV about a previous shoplifter, and I watched someone shoplifting again on the CCTV as I was there.

"The store assistant was like, 'he's shoplifting!'. I'm just there thinking, 'oh, no. What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?' I said, 'I should probably go and get him'. I ran outside and got a grip of his arm.

"'Excuse me!'

"'Alright flower'.

"'Have you just put something down your jacket?'

"'Aye, I have, aye'.

"'Did you pay for it?'

"'Nah, nah - I just need to sell it to get my bus fares'.

"At first I thought, 'what a shame'. But then it's, hang on… you've stolen that! That's theft! I could hear my tutor's voice in my head - 'you've got to arrest him'.

"So I'm thinking, right, I've got to put the handcuffs on. I'm shaking like a ******* dog, trying to put them on, and doing it wrong. I'm going through the caution, probably messing that up as well, and putting him in the back of the van, booking him in. The (custody sergeant) asked what he'd done. I went, 'stealing!' 'No, that's theft'.

"It's funny when I look back at it now. He'd probably have been better off putting the handcuffs on himself and getting himself into the van."

PC Reid is better known to Newcastle United Women supporters as goalkeeper Hannah Hawkins, now playing under her married name. She is an incisive observer of life and has many tales to tell from her time in the force. But we are here, in a box overlooking the St. James' Park pitch, to talk about her twin sister, Ellen.

"We were sidekicks. Inseparable. Two little tomboys growing up. We went to a primary school that only had 90 kids, so our year group had nine children in. We were born in 1994, before iPads and all that, so it was all climbing trees, in the woods, on our BMXs, playing football, and when the streetlights came on you had to go home. It was one of those childhoods," says Hannah. "And she was my best friend."

***

The Reid twins and their older brother, Connor, grew up in South Queensferry, west of Edinburgh. Their mother, Lynn, was a hairdresser, and father David - who was a triplet - worked in business. The siblings played football and joined Hibernian, the family's club, before their teens and before the club even had girls' teams. "I think the first game we lost about 18-0," Hannah smiles. She wasn't a goalkeeper then. "Ellen and I went. I got put on the pitch for like ten minutes. I always remember being put on the goalline for corners and I headed about four into my own net. I was so small and I didn't really know what to do."

They became quite an outfit. Her teammates included Caroline Weir - now of Real Madrid, a Ballon d’Or nominee - Claire Emslie, Kirsty Smith, Siobhan Hunter. And Ellen. "Ellen was always a bit more outgoing and popular than me. I was probably a bit more quiet at the time," Hannah says. "Growing up, if I'd ever done something naughty, Ellen was there." She giggles at the memory of stealing cigarettes from their mum and trying to smoke them round the side of the house. "We had a bay window in the living room and mum and dad had big curtains put in. I always remember Ellen - she was always the instigator - going, 'shall we play Tarzan? You go on one side, I'll go on the other, and we'll swing off the chaise longue!' One, two, three… the whole thing came off with all the plaster board, out of the wall. 'But if we just run upstairs and hide under the bed, we'll be fine…'"

Hannah's football career continued south of the border in her later teens. A Scottish youth international, she joined Bristol Academy - later to become Bristol City - in 2015 as backup to Mary Earps. She later returned to Hibs to play in the Champions League before joining Durham after they approached her through a direct message on Twitter. She combined her day job working at kids' clubs with caring for her cousin Jessica, who has cerebral palsy, with long, late drives down the A1 for training. She moved into a house in Sherburn Hill and completed the sports development degree she had started in Edinburgh, graduating with first class honours.

But she had other goals too. "I always knew as a little girl I wanted to be a police officer," she explains. "I remember people saying, 'you can't do full time police and football'. Me being me, I was like, 'I can - I don't need sleep!' It's a crazy mentality I've got. If you say I can't do it, I will. That's how stubborn I am." Encouraged by her partner, Katy, she completed an 18-week training course at Meadowfield and was assigned to the east area of Durham. "I think I thought policing was what you see on the telly - the fast, exciting stuff, Line of Duty, the sexy stuff," she adds. "It's not all quite like that."

After a week, lockdown began. But her soft Edinburgh accent and natural empathy endeared her to the community she served. More than once, she saved people. She recalls encountering one man in the woods in the depths of crisis. She spoke with him, arranged for a psychiatric assessment and bought him a McDonald's on the way home. A week later, his voice boomed through Peterlee nick. "'I want PC Reid! I want Hannah! She's the only one who understands me!'" she laughs. "That's why you don't get close to people. But I was just trying to help."

Balancing two careers brought fulfilment but it also separated Hannah from what was happening back home in Scotland. "I think if mum had told me everything that was happening, I would have just moved back."

She begins to explain. "Ellen had mental health problems for years and years. It began when she was about 14, 15, and started with eating disorders. Growing up, if anyone had pointed at a line of girls and asked would Ellen Reid - a tomboy, plays football, doesn't care about anything, boisterous, riddled with ADHD, an absolute clown, but amazing - ever get an eating disorder, or care about her appearance? No. But then just all of a sudden, at 15 - as happens to a lot of young people - it just creeps into her life.

"It started off with anorexia. She was admitted to the young person's unit at the Royal Edinburgh, which is a mental health hospital. She had that on and off for many years - eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia. As she started getting older, she started getting really depressed, which kind of goes hand-in-hand with the eating disorders and being in and out of young people's units. I think addiction goes hand-in-hand. You'd be obsessed with not eating, or excessive exercise." At around 16, Ellen started drinking. In her later teens, she experienced a hugely traumatic life event. "Then Ellen's thing was, she didn't want to be here any more."

The level of support she received changed when she turned 18. She would try to harm herself and attempt suicide. Hannah and her mum would go into "autopilot". "It was just something we physically had to do. We had to hold her on the floor and restrain her until she burned herself out, crying. She'd be nipping you, biting you, but you knew she'd eventually tire. It was just something you did.

"I remember one time holding her by her feet from the attic window and getting her back in. Eventually she'd start crying and want to talk. It would be that impulse, that, 'I need to do this now', the panic, I think it is. You hold her. If you had to phone an ambulance you did. A couple of times we'd have to phone the police, just because we physically couldn't cope."

Hannah was young too then. She would help to hide objects from Ellen, stashing them in the tumble dryer or the boot of Lynn's car. She never begrudged her sister. "There was no malice in her. It was just, 'I need help - please get me help. Can I try and get help?' But then, when you try and help, 'I'm not going to take the help, because it's too hard'. It's a really hard conflict."

In her early 20s, Ellen spent time working as a teaching assistant at a school for children with learning disabilities. It was a job she had an adeptness for. "The kids loved her. And the staff loved her. She was just so carefree, so fun. I think the kids felt safe with her, that she was just a big dafty - that's how you'd describe her.

"But I think they saw the light in Ellen as well. She was so talented with them. Even when she was going through her hardest time, she was trying to help others. And she was so proud of herself for that."

The family tried to get her help, from the NHS and mental health services. "They'd say, 'is she drinking?' We'd say, 'yeah, because she can't cope'. 'Well, we can't treat her if she drinks'. 'But she drinks because she can't cope'. It would be a constant cycle." By the time Ellen moved out of the family home, Hannah was at Durham and in the police. "In Peterlee, I would go to houses and just see my family. I used to get on well with them because I could really empathise. I'd say to them, 'look, I understand - your family member and my family member's an alcoholic. She's 25, 26, she's young. We can't get the help'."

Ellen engaged with Steps to Hope, an Edinburgh charity that works with homeless people and those suffering from addiction. She would go on retreats with them. But she was stuck in a cycle. Some of Hannah's recollections from that time are scarring. She remembers performing CPR on her twin sister after she had suffered a cardiac arrest one New Year's Eve. "She did really try," says Hannah. "But she just had constant ****."

***

On an early spring night at 1am, Hannah's phone rang and woke her up. "There would always be a 'what's happened now?' with Ellen," she says. Lynn was calling. "'Hi Hannah, it's mum. I'm at the hospital. It's quite a bad one this time. The police have brought me here. Can you come to Edinburgh?'"

The gravity of the situation was clear when Hannah got home at 5am as they sat anxiously in the living room with her brother Connor. Ellen had taken an overdose but had phoned an ambulance herself. She told the operator that she didn't want to die. They waited for news from the hospital, where Ellen had been sedated. She had been brought out of medically induced comas before; Hannah remembers her sister pulling the tubes out of her throat herself. "Ellen always pulls through - it's fine. She's superhuman," she thought. "You do think that - 'everything will be fine. She'll do something here, she'll pull it out the bag'."

At the hospital, they were led into a family room. Daffodils were painted on the wall and a box of tissues sat on the table in front of them. They were told, in unsparing detail, that Ellen had suffered a catastrophic brain injury after going into cardiac arrest and was unlikely to survive.

Some memories are too searing to relay in their entirety but they are burned onto Hannah. She watched her mother’s heart break. "My mum was like, 'I'm going to lose my baby'. I was like, 'she'll be fine, she'll be fine'. I remember looking at Connor and going, 'this is bad'." They were led into Ellen's room, where she lay on the bed with "tubes everywhere". "When you're that poorly, you get two staff members in your room. I was speaking to one of them and I said, 'is she really bad?' She said, 'she's really unwell. But we'll treat her until we can't do any more'."

Family members arrived to say goodbye. Hannah remembers staring at the monitors by her sister's bedside. Lynn and Connor took turns to rest before a nurse told them it was time to return to Ellen's side. "I thought, 'right, be strong, you can do this. You've got to be brave for mum'. That was my one rule. I gently shook her shoulder to wake her up and whispered to her, 'mum, it's time'," Hannah says before pausing. Her voice quietens. "I remember mum looking at me and just saying, 'my baby'."

At one minute to seven in the morning, on 14th March 2021, Ellen died. Her death was recorded as suicide. She was 26. A nurse took an imprint of her hand, a lock of her hair and hung a thistle on the door of her room.

***

Normality hit almost immediately. "It was like a scene from a movie - my mum, Connor and I, walking down this hospital corridor at, like, nine in the morning. It was just people going to appointments, living their lives," says Hannah. "And we'd found out that ours had just crumbled."

Lynn's house "became a florist's". People were comforting and sensitive but Hannah struggled to tie their kindness to the guilt she felt. She compelled herself to be doubly nice in return. It was a "feeling that we'd failed her." Knowing that Ellen had phoned the ambulance gnawed at her. "We will always carry guilt. Grief's one thing, but when you mix it with guilt, it's a horrible, horrible feeling."

She took just six weeks off work. She would come in from a shift and run on the treadmill in her garage to fill time, "because if I stopped, I had to think and feel." She had panic attacks, where her knees would weaken and her breathing shortened. A year after Ellen's death, she tried counselling for the first time but stopped after a bad experience with a therapist who repeatedly glanced at her timer.

It took almost two years for Hannah to return to football. In 2023, she joined Newcastle United and balanced playing with work in Durham Constabulary's Criminal Investigation Department, who created a shift pattern to accommodate her. She enjoyed the busyness and began to work towards her detective exams, but it took a toll. She remembers bursting into tears in front of her teammates as she tried to make a point in an analysis session. "It was probably clearly obvious I'd been up for 30-odd hours. The girls would be like, 'have you been to bed yet?' 'Nah, nah, not yet'. 'Are you going to go in after training and get a nap?' 'Nah, I'm going to work'. So unhealthy."

The Magpies went full time that summer and it came at an opportune moment for Hannah, who took a career break from the police. "I was constantly going and dealing with people like my sister, and not helping them. I thought, 'I couldn't even help my own sister - how can I come and help and give you advice when I couldn't even keep my family member alive?' It really crept into my policing career, the guilt. Once Ellen died, my spark in being a police officer changed."

Life clunked on, slowly, and Hannah and Katy married in Berwick in 2023. They left an empty chair at the top table. "There's a photo of my first dance. I did my first dance with my mum. And then my brother came in, and you see us three hugging, and we're all crying. And we were crying because of Ellen. I knew the whole time mum was doing the dance that she was crying because of Ellen. She wasn't crying because it was my wedding. I knew she was crying because of Ellen, because she was sad she was missing it.

"Then Connor came in. You can see the pain on both of their faces. It's quite powerful. It was just us hugging, showing that we're sticking together, the three of us. I'm really lucky."

She took Katy's surname, keen to separate her policing career from her football career, and spoke about starting a family. They began IVF treatment at the London Women's Clinic in Darlington and became pregnant at the first attempt, but suffered a chemical pregnancy - a miscarriage in the early stages. Joyously, though, Katy became pregnant again at the second attempt, and they were discharged to the care of the NHS when their seven-week scan showed one baby.

Five weeks later, they went for their third scan at Sunderland Royal Hospital and received life-changing news. "I thought she was joking at first. She went, 'ah… twins!'" beams Hannah. "I was like, 'good one'. She was a bubbly nurse, and she said, 'no, there are two babies in there'. Katy just turned around to me and said, 'what did she just say?' Oh my God. I thought Katy was going to kill me. She's now pregnant with two! But we were sitting in the waiting room, giggling like little schoolkids."

The thrill of being able to tell their parents bordered on euphoric but they were required to go back to hospital the next day. The babies were classed as high risk. It was a monochorionic pregnancy - they shared a placenta - and it was precarious, with a host of potential complications relating to blood and nutrient supply. "Because they had one placenta, if one baby dies, the other baby dies," explains Hannah. They would attend hospital every five days for growth scans due to the twins having twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). "Once we were put in a family room, with tissues on the table and flowers on the wall. Right away, that triggered me back to my sister. I said to Katy - 'we've been put in a room like this because they're going to tell us something quite harsh. But keep calm. We'll deal with it'."

There were agonising waits for answers and reassurance from consultants, and they were told that if it was still in the balance at 26 weeks they would look to deliver early. It was then that they found out then that they were having girls. Piper and Noa were born on 24th February 2025, at full term for twins, 5lb 7oz and 5lb 12oz respectively. "The love we have for them, and the healing they've given me as well…" begins Hannah. "My sister's never been replaced, but they've really given me purpose again. And I have to laugh - one of the girls, Noa, even though they're identical, she looks like Ellen. She's her double. I think that's nice for us as well. You see her side profile. Oh my God…"

Sometimes they get stopped as they walk with the girls in the pram. "People don't even realise, but they're always a bit negative. They'll always say, 'I bet your hands are full', or 'double trouble!' So Katy and I flip the narrative. We'll say, 'double the love!' or 'we're so lucky', because that's genuinely how we feel. It's so lovely because they're never going to have to go through anything on their own - first day of nursery, first day of school, birthday parties, they'll always have a wee friend.

"It's not until I lost my sister I realised how nice it was having someone. When I go through all my milestones in life I know my mum's going to be thinking, 'Ellen could have done that'. That's a bit of guilt I had with my wedding day, and in becoming a mum - Ellen's not going to be a mum. But now I've got the girls, I want to teach them. I'll tell them all about their Auntie Ellen. I want them to know all about her."

Earlier this year, on the fourth anniversary of Ellen's passing, Hannah wrote movingly and beautifully about her sister in an Instagram post. It paints a vivid picture of her "energy and sense of mischief", and her "way of making everyone feel special, of lifting others up without even trying". It also describes the "ache" of losing her. "It's a literal ache, a physical ache. I think about her every day. Every single day I'll think about Ellen, if it’s just looking in the mirror, if it's a song that comes on that I know she would have loved.

"Every time I get in my car, I'll phone my mum - it's just something I do. It's the same conversation - 'hi, how are you? Fine, how are you?' - but nine times out of ten, we'll speak about Ellen, even now. If something's happened, we'll say, 'she'd have loved that'. Or if it's something daft - 'bet you that was Ellen'.

"I'm very aware that as I go through life and as I age, my mum will look at me and think, 'is that how Ellen would have aged?' All my little milestones are things she's not achieving, which is sad, and I do feel guilt with them. But we always try and speak about Ellen."

It took time for Hannah to be able to remember Ellen in life, and not just in her final moments in the hospital bed. Fundraisers have been held in her memory to benefit the school she worked at and Steps to Hope. The family received messages on JustGiving pages about how Ellen would stand up to bullies, or would be the life and soul of any occasion, and Hannah found more comfort in those kind words than she had been able to previously. "It was really nice to remember her in that light. For years, if someone mentioned Ellen it would just be sadness. It still is, massive sadness. But I try to speak about her in a way that if she was sitting in this room, I wouldn't want her to feel like it's an invasion of her privacy."

She lifts up her right sleeve to reveal a tattoo. The Forth Rail Bridge is inked on her right tricep, above the silhouettes of two girls - the Reid twins - holding hands on the beach near where they grew up in South Queensferry. It was Ellen's favourite place. "And above that, it just says, 'until we meet again'," says Hannah. "I don't want it ever to be a secret. The girls will eventually find out how and why Ellen passed away. But all they have to know when they're little girls is that she's in heaven. When there are stars at night, it'll be nice to say, 'that's your Auntie Ellen'.

"It sounds really cheesy, but whenever there's a nice sunset or a nice sunrise, we always send photos to each other in the family group chat and just say, 'Ellen says hi'. If it's a nice sunny night, I'll look up, and I'll think of her right away."

If you, or a friend or family member, has been affected by issues raised in this story, help and support is available from the Samaritans. You can contact them on a free helpline - 116 123 - and visit their website here.

Hannah is a supporter of If U Care Share Foundation, a North East-based charity which focuses on prevention, intervention and support of those bereaved by suicide. You can read more about their work here.

Steps to Hope, the charity who worked with Ellen, are based in Edinburgh and West Lothian and work to tackle homelessness and addiction through charity, support groups and awareness programmes. You can read more about their work here.