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  Would you use a company run by convicted property fraudster Michael Pattemore to sell your property?’

  It was absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with property. This important piece of truth, though, meant nothing to Mr Darren Richards when he posted his damning blogs.

  The other accusations levelled at us, and which really hurt me, was that I somehow would endorse something that was not straight. The actual words used were ‘Virtual Property World is “fronted” by Lynda Bellingham’. I have been in the public eye for forty-five years and worked for several high-profile charities during this time that would all vouch for my honesty and integrity, so much so, if I may blow my own trumpet briefly and say, I was awarded an OBE this year for my charitable works. But Mr Richards then went on to attack my son Michael too:

  ‘Lynda’s son, Michael, appears in their home-made adverts as the arrogant estate agent, and in another of the adverts as a happy home seller [I think this shows his versatility as an actor personally!]. He also claims to be an actual franchisee of Virtual Property World.’

  But that is the truth, what is wrong with that? If he had bothered to check his facts he would have seen that we made my son Michael do a National Association of Estate Agents course and signed him up to the team so he could learn a trade that he could do when he was out of work. Everyone knows how hard it is to earn a living from acting alone. The fact we did the adverts for the website together was an added bonus, we had the talent on the doorstep. But I ask again, how petty and mealy mouthed is all of this?

  When we were first alerted to the blog in the midst of my Calendar Girls tour, Michael had a pretty good idea where the blog had come from – we were aware of Mr Richards and his company Estates Direct which was a competitor to our own – but how to prove it, and what then do we do with the information, and more importantly stop them from ruining us!

  Michael sat up all night surfing the net looking for lawyers who dealt specifically with this kind of internet violation.

  Finally in the middle of the night he woke me with a start. ‘I think I found someone, Lynda. I am going to call him first thing’ and, boy, when Michael says first thing, he means first thing. I was awoken again from my much needed beauty sleep at 7.30 next morning to Michael dialling and pacing the floor.

  ‘No one will be in an office now, Michael, for goodness—’ But I was cut off and apparently mistaken, because Michael was now talking excitedly to a Mr John Spyrou of Pinder Reaux who was delighted to take his call.

  ‘This is our speciality, Michael, and we will use all our powers to help you. People have no idea, as yet, just how dangerous the internet is going to become. At the moment it is like the Wild West, manned unlawfully in pockets, with the odd law maker with a gun that happens to be pointing in the right direction, but that is not enough to save so many people from destruction, especially children.’

  How right he was, and as we well know it seems that every day now there is another suicide caused by hurtful words online, another bullying incident, an act of fraud, and so many general nasty people having a go. Need I say more?

  We now began our investigation in earnest. I could see Michael was not going to give up until we had nailed whoever had posted these blogs – at this point we were not sure if it was the boss man.

  The initial problem was to get Google to take down the blog in the meantime, because it was seriously affecting the business. Talk about stress and where I am today. Every day brought with it another heartbreak for Michael, and meanwhile I had to work every night and put on a bright smile for the public. Thank goodness for John and Rupinder, our lovely lawyers.

  Once the blog had been removed we then had the next battle, which was to convince Google and WordPress to give us the IP address of the blogger so we could move forward with our case against them. Months of waiting, and more money. How many families facing the same sort of problem as us, in terms of social media and blogging and bullying, have that kind of money? Does no one have a social conscience anymore?

  And then on 14 June 2012 we were granted a Norwich Pharmacal order by the high court. Sounds like a prescription for piles, doesn’t it?! It might just as well have been the way we were feeling. But it worked, and WordPress was the first to confirm the IP address, followed by Google. It was enough for us to serve Darren Richards and Estates Direct with a lawsuit in the last week of July 2012.

  We were now embroiled in the internet Wild West, and once Darren Richards had been served with his papers Michael got a message to say that Richards had called and would Michael call him back?

  I was very nervous about the whole idea and was worried that Richards would somehow try and wriggle out of his commitment. Michael spoke to the lawyer, John Spyrou, on the Saturday evening and John encouraged him to return the call. My canny husband did so but made sure he recorded the conversation. Thank God he did because this is where the mystery deepens.

  In the telephone conversation that Michael recorded, Mr Richards professed to be dumbstruck by the news and deeply upset, not to mention completely ignorant of who might have done such a thing. However, as head of the company, he accepted it was his responsibility to his team to get to the bottom of the matter. He assured us he was seeing his legal team in the morning, and once he had all the facts and figures he would get back to us. We never heard from Mr Richards again except through lawyers’ letters, which I suppose is understandable, but suddenly Mr Richards seemed to know everything about the blog and admitted it was his company that had posted it.

  Writing this now I try not to feel too upset, what is the point? It was all so fishy and by the time we arrived to knock on the door of the offices for mediation, on 10 April 2013, I think both Michael and I knew we were on a hiding to nothing. Unfortunately we are not permitted by law to tell you what happened in the mediation suite, but suffice it to say it was a very long and distressing day and we came out knowing that money will always win. We wanted to go to court, we had always wanted to take it further, but we were always advised it was too risky and there would be no money in it for us as our company was so new it had no records of profit; it was all up for estimate. So yes we did get a public apology from Mr Richards and he did have to pay costs, all of which went into the fees we had had to pay out. We lost our business and I lost faith in any kind of justice for the little man. It is a cruel and harsh and unfair world. Little did I realise just how cruel and harsh until June came ‘busting out all over’ and I was diagnosed with cancer.

  But we picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down and moved on. Michael and Bradley have just finished a fantastic conversion of two six-bedroom houses in Muswell Hill and they will make a handsome profit which will be well deserved. We have a beautiful family and many things to be grateful for, apart from the small matter of a terminal illness. But do you know, even that is bearable, because I will be able to come back and haunt Mr Richards in his darkest hours. Watch this space!

  16

  ADJUSTMENTS IN THE UNDERWEAR DEPARTMENT

  January 2014

  Here I was in 2014. That first week at home after my operation was very strange. Anybody who has spent any time in hospital and had a serious operation will remember those feelings of highs and lows. One minute I would feel exhilarated and shuffle out to the kitchen clutching my scar and make everyone laugh, and the next I would be hiding under the blanket wishing I was back in the safety of my hospital bed. It was most bizarre. With all due respect to my all-male household they made a very perfunctory attempt to watch over me, and it was clear, very quickly, that things would not progress far without a shove from me: the washing and ironing, for instance. Although I have a lovely cleaner called Julia who comes once a week with her mum Maureen, they are only there for four hours and there is not time to attend to the pressing needs of two twenty-something young men who like to look smart.

  ‘Do it yourself,’ orders hubbie Michael.

  ‘I will teach you,’ I offer.

  Neither suggestion seemed to hit th
e mark so I started doing a bit from time to time. For this I got told off, but the trouble is I can’t bear living in a mess, it made me feel worse. The cooking was not going very well either, so when they had all left in the morning I would potter around making a pie, or a soup or something, for supper. This was not just for their sakes, I may add, I would have starved if I had waited for them to come and ask me what I wanted. I resorted to keeping my bedroom door open at all times so I could hear the front door, and whoever arrived would be greeted with, ‘I am in here!’

  I felt like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations shut away in my room, though hopefully without the cobwebs!

  The black moments would often arrive in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep and everyone else was happily away in the land of nod. I could feel Furby moving about, and I was also aware of my whole stomach holding all this evil cancer inside it. It was as though a battle was being fought under my skin. I have never been able to lie on my back for long, but now it hurt to lie on either side, so I had no choice but to learn to sleep on my back. Months later and I am still not used to it, and it is so frustrating when you want to turn over and you can’t.

  But by the second week I was feeling so much better and, although I was still walking like an old lady, I was back at the kitchen island and feeling OK. Then I managed to pull a muscle and felt pain again, and I felt low and miserable. I had to lie down more, and as soon as I lay down my brain would take over, and I would start to think, which was not a good idea.

  The bizarre thing was that I would forget that I had cancer and address the whole deal as if, once I recovered from this operation, I would somehow be cured. It was only when Justin Stebbing’s secretary, Lesley, rang to make some appointments for my next lot of chemotherapy, that it hit me like a train. I still had to deal with all that.

  Justin wanted me to meet a lady to go through the pros and cons of clinical trials. ‘Well why not?’ was our response. I had nothing to lose and a great deal to gain.

  I lost two months’ chemo due to the operation and the recovery time, and in six months’ time I wanted to reverse the bag and go back to normal. I was back in the LOC by the second week of January and hooked up, yet again, for six hours every Friday morning from 8.30. The one setback was that I was on a new chemo which caused hair loss. So far I had been so lucky not to lose my hair, and it made such a difference to my state of mind that I was thrown completely by this news.

  ‘But you can wear a cold cap,’ advised Clare, my lovely nurse. ‘It freezes your hair follicles so the chemo can’t touch them. It is very uncomfortable for the first twenty minutes or so but then your head goes numb, and you can’t feel anything.’ Lovely!

  But I took her advice and persevered. The cold cap was very uncomfortable to start with and, if you look at a photo, the hat has the effect of pulling your face down to your chest. So I reckoned I resembled a very old hunt jockey in need of a face lift – it is not great for the morale let me tell you.

  I was by now getting much better at handling Furby, so my dear husband could leave that off his list of chores. I must say we did laugh at one point when he and I were assembled in the bathroom together for our bedtime ablutions. I have mentioned how unromantic it all was, and I remembered reading a book that advised young women never to reveal too much of themselves to their loved ones, that they should retain an air of mystery. Ha! Try that when you have a stoma bag. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with my lovely brown bag hanging off me, sporting my train tracks on my stomach from my operation scar, my various bruises from all the injections, and I was rinsing my mouth with salt water to help the sting of the mouth ulcers I now had, not to mention the invisible discomfort of thrush caused by the chemo. Romance?

  However, a little secret, dear readers, into our fascinating private life, for which Michael will probably kill me. He dared to start to have a pee and I jumped up and down like a wild dervish and screamed, ‘NO! Please I insist we retain some mystery. We are not allowed to pee in front of each other except under extreme conditions!’

  Michael just burst out laughing and replied, ‘Bloody hell, Lynda, it doesn’t get more extreme than cancer!’

  Enough said, I think.

  So life continued, and I did start to lose some hair, much to my dismay, but it was still there, enough to make a reasonable hairstyle work. Thank goodness for Carol Hemming, the lovely lady I keep on about who is the most incredible hairdresser. She advised me on wigs I could buy, and then when the time was drawing nigh for my visit to the Palace to collect my OBE, she showed me what she could do with a hairpiece and a blow dryer, and it was very impressive. In fact, in the end, she managed to do my own hair and make me look half decent which is no mean feat.

  I did go to a fabulous wig shop in Notting Hill Gate called Trendco. Just in case I needed back-up later on. I literally walked in, picked a wig very similar in colour to my own hair, popped it on and it fitted perfectly. I don’t wear it when I am doing personal appearances because I feel the press will just go on about my hairstyle again instead of focusing on whatever it is I am doing.

  I will never get used to the idea that I am of any interest to photographers or press. But can you believe this story? Michael and I had tipped up one Saturday morning to do some shopping at Waitrose in Finchley. We were outside the store at 8.30, nice and early, so we could whip round and get out quick. I never bother to wear make-up for these outings and I certainly would not bother to wear my wig unless it was doubling as a hat to keep my head warm. Anyway, I probably did look a frightful mess, but so what? Two weeks later I am on the front cover of one of those awful rags, Bella or Woman, looking terrible and the headline shouts:

  ‘LYNDA BATTLES HER CANCER’ or something equally lurid. Who has such a sad life that they loiter outside supermarkets to snap some ageing actress out with her shopping trolley?

  A similar occurrence happened this July when I went up to Worcester University to accept a Fellowship from Lord Faulkner. In 2013 I had attended a forum on domestic violence and met an inspirational woman called Ruth Jones. She had suffered domestic abuse and violence in her marriage and was a strong campaigner for raising the issues. She is a principal lecturer, researcher and consultant specialising in domestic and sexual violence. Ruth had also received an OBE over the same period as me, and she had asked me if I would open this new National Centre for the Study and Prevention of Violence and Abuse and receive my Fellowship from Worcester University at the same time. I was supposed to have gone to the ceremony in November 2013 but was, of course, unavailable due to illness.

  In July this year Michael and I travelled up to Worcester in the morning on the train, and spent a fantastic day with everyone. Before the ceremony there was a forum attended by all sorts of people from different groups and associations, and the NHS and the police, and I gave a short address about why I supported the centre. Now I have done various things for charity hostels and refuges over the years, but I never go into any details about my own situation, which was heavily covered in the press twenty years ago now. I wrote about my marriage in my autobiography Lost and Found, but enough is enough, and time passes. It is not pleasant for my sons to be constantly reminded of the issues we had and, to be fair, neither does my ex-husband need to be reminded all the time. Everyone deserves to be allowed to get on with their lives.

  Try telling that to these people hoping to fill the pages of their vacuous mags. I went to get my week’s shopping and there is my face staring back at me from the cover of Woman’s Own magazine, with the headline: ‘I AM TIRED OF BEING FRIGHTENED’.

  They all know I have cancer so I presumed it was about that. Oh no, it was harping back to the break-up of my marriage in 1996. What upsets me is that someone at that conference in Worcester that day taped my speech and then sold it to the magazine. Or a journalist picked up somewhere I was doing something with the Domestic Violence Centre and just cobbled it all together. It made no mention of the positive side of the day, i.e. I had re
ceived a Fellowship and how wonderful it was that this centre had been able to exist, it just rehashed old stuff.

  I was so upset I actually went on Twitter and explained it was nothing to do with me, and of course lots of my followers understood that and the way these people work, but several people replied they had only bought the magazine because I was on the front and were disappointed. So there you go, the perils of a bit of fame that one never wanted in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand it is also important for my work to get the message out there, and for that I need the media. But why can’t it be kept to the subject in hand? If I have a story to tell, or a TV show to advertise, that is fine, it is just all the rubbish they then pad it out with, and if they cannot speak to you personally, they just edit things you have said in the past and call it an exclusive interview.

  My next job, after restarting my chemo and sorting out my hair, was to find a suitable outfit in which to accept my OBE. It wasn’t as easy as you might think, as I now had Furby to consider, and dressing has all become about disguising him. The Investiture was on 14 March, the day before my mum’s birthday. How proud she would have been, they both would, my mum and dad. It is at times like this when you realise how much you still miss the people you love when they are gone, but that wasn’t a thought I wanted to share with my family that day for obvious reasons. To spoil the occasion by bringing in my mortality would be insensitive. Can you imagine trotting up the red carpet to HRH Prince Charles and blurting out that it was such an honour to receive an OBE, especially as I would be dead by next Christmas so it would make a memento for the family I’d leave behind! I wanted the family to be ‘up’ and out and proud. A mixed bunch we were, but we had worked hard and kept it all together.