There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You Read online

  Nik and I were probably the youngest couple there that night and everyone commented on my dress. Mind you I was a little like a Christmas tree! I should have had an inkling of trouble ahead after the third person had stood on my flicked out fishtail but I just made myself stand taller. This was not quite the thing to do as Kenneth More was making his way towards me and he was not what you might call tall.

  ‘How do you do? My name is Kenneth and I would like to ask for the next dance if I may,’ said Mr More. He was very charming and had a definite twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Thank you that would be lovely,’ I demurred in my most ladylike manner.

  He took my hand and sort of twirled me onto the dance floor to the opening bars of a waltz and another sound, a rather ragged note as if something was tearing . . . Oh my God, my dress! He was standing on my dress! It ripped from the rather flirty slit at the back straight up to my bra.

  ‘I am so sorry, my dear, here take my jacket and cover yourself.’ He handed me his dinner jacket.

  If he had offered it for any other reason than to cover a rip, it would have been such a romantic gesture, but instead I ran from the ballroom to the cloakroom. I was in floods of tears and the poor cloakroom attendant had a job to calm me down. She was so sweet and produced a needle and thread and literally sewed me back into my frock. Now that is what I call service. I spent the rest of the night seated at the table, pretending to all and sundry that it was no big deal. Only a little repair and after all it was only a dress. Ha, only! It was a rent to my heart, and what would Mr Wyatt make of my disaster?

  But would you believe it God took care of me, and the following week I was asked to do a voice-over for the TV for a carpet shop or something. My first ever voice-over and the fee would be £50! Cross my heart and hope to die. (Well, actually that is rather inappropriate now, isn’t it?) I was able to send My Wyatt the money and my silver dress went into the dressing-up box at college.

  Now though, standing there on Harley Street, suddenly I saw it all with new eyes. What is really important in life? Behind these beautiful facades, sickness lay. Every basement window with subtle blinds and opaque glass hid the real business of the day – people fighting for their lives. And although it is a cliché that money can’t buy everything, a silver dress is nothing compared to your health.

  Well, so be it. I made up my mind that if 95 Harley Street was to become my home for the next few months, it would be a place of pain and comfort, but most important of all . . . it would be a place of hope.

  1

  AND SO IT BEGAN

  July 2013

  I was admitted to the London Clinic LOC on 3 July for a colonoscopy. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. During a colonoscopy, they basically put a small camera up your bum. You are not under general anaesthetic for the procedure, but they give you Valium and you can watch the proceedings on the screen to the side if you so desire. Personally I would rather keep my eyes closed and thoughts elsewhere on much more pleasant things, but a friend of mine, who is a very cheeky chappie, told me it was the best sex he had ever had!

  I really don’t remember much about it to be honest but Richard Cohen was able to see the damage. There were three tumours apparently. When it was over, Michael came to take me home and we went to the cinema. The next day I was back at the clinic for a heart cardiogram and then admitted to await my operation to put in a port. Any port in a storm! A port is an amazing invention and I would recommend it to anyone who is going to have to have chemo. It is a small disc implanted in the chest through which all the intravenous injections can be given. It sounds a bit toe-curling but, believe me, when one is having literally hundreds of injections it makes life so much easier and there is no pain at all. I sat on my bed in the London Clinic all afternoon watching TV until Mr Imberts arrived to tell me all about the procedure. I was back in bed within the hour ordering my supper.

  Of course, I know, you may read this and think, ‘Jammy woman on the private healthcare, what does she know?’ Well, as a matter of fact, I do know both sides. When I was growing up I always spent my school holidays working at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. It was very new then and specialised, as it does still, in spinal cases. The nurses worked so hard and I loved the camaraderie of the nursing staff and their dedication to their jobs.

  When I left drama school and became a self-employed person I quickly realised that I could never afford to be ill, I couldn’t afford to take the time off work, and if I needed medical attention swiftly the poor old NHS was never going to deliver. Of course it does in real emergencies, one can have no better care, indeed it uses the same surgeons as one pays for in the private sector. But say I got a bug, or broke a bone while filming, then I needed to get it sorted quickly, and by having private healthcare I was able to deal with most eventualities. My friends thought I was mad paying out each month and, believe me, there were times when I had no money in the bank and I was living off boiled eggs and soldiers, but I never gave up the payments.

  Years later I had a huge overdraft but great medical cover, and it has been a godsend this last year. Everything that has happened to me has been made a little easier to bear because of the amazing care, the speed with which I’ve been tended to and the comfort in which I’ve received my treatment. When you are in hospital you realise just how important the whole set-up is, from the surgeons to the nurses, to the healthcare workers, to the cleaners. I have met some amazing people from all these groups in the last year, and believe me they all deserve such praise.

  So I was now sporting a small bump on my chest which would be accommodating an intravenous drip to carry the magic chemo up a tube under my skin. All you could see from the outside was what looked like a vein in the side of my neck and a small scar just above my right breast. I have never really been into plunging necklines so there was no danger of anyone noticing my impediment. I was prepped and ready for my first chemotherapy session the next day, on 5 July. As I am writing these words I glance at my watch and I realise it is exactly a year since I started this deadly affair with the disease that wants to destroy me. A year has gone already – how quickly time flies when you are having fun!

  The treatment room at the London Clinic is in the basement. I was shown into a room with a large seat like a dentist’s chair, the blinds were pulled right down and the air conditioning was arctic. I could see people’s feet marching past above me and was reminded again of how little the world out there knew about the world down here. I have to admit that the surroundings were not particularly welcoming, unlike the staff who were just brilliant. First in was the lady from the catering department to offer tea, coffee, smoothies and all sorts. Then came two beautiful nurses who would be looking after me, Clare Cobbett and Ani Ransley. They are truly angels, and I value their friendship so highly. Much as the oncologist is brilliant, God-like even, these nurses are on the front line. They fill in the gaps and deal with all one’s day-to-day fears and tears. Of which there would be many over the next few months.

  The clinic is always busy and the nurses were kept on their toes all day long, going from one patient to the next, checking IVs and talking people through different aspects of their treatment. Clare took over and got me seated, taking my blood pressure and temperature. Then I was weighed: I had lost a little weight but nothing drastic.

  ‘I am going to be the only cancer patient who puts on weight, you see!’ I joked, hoping that I could lose a few pounds for the summer. Look for the positive I say. I was then set up in the very comfortable chair while Clare found my newly installed port and inserted the intravenous drip. There was a small prick, but he was only passing by with a tray. Sorry, that was an awful joke but I could not resist. It is being brought up on Carry On films I guess. This was now Carry On Cancer, 2013 style.

  I was now effectively attached to the drip for six hours while various concoctions were fed into me. I felt very comfortable, and ordered a cappuccino and a Danish and read my book. To be honest it was all very pleasant and a wel
come respite from my usual chaotic life. I dozed off from time to time, only to be awoken by the strident bleep of my machine announcing my bag was empty and it was time for the next onslaught.

  The routine for my treatment is pretty much the same each fortnight. I arrive with my sample of wee and sit in this lovely chair which goes up and down and round and round and I am hooked up to my drip. This is where the wonderful port comes into its own, as they flush you out with something ready for the first cocktail. As far as I understand it, for my first twelve sessions I had three main drugs delivered through the drip from a bag. The one that has been consistent throughout this year is the unpronounceable fluorouracil, which comes in the form of a transparent rubber ball about the same size as a tennis ball. This sits very neatly into a blue purse on a belt which goes round the waist. The chemo is automatically fed from this ball into my system over the next forty-eight hours so I am free to go home. Come Sunday morning the ball had shrunk to nothing and a lovely BUPA nurse pays me a visit and takes out the needle and removes the remains of the ball, so that I am free once more. The extraordinary thing is that on chemo weekends I have so much energy because of the steroids, and I zip around like a mad thing. The downside is that it is difficult to sleep.

  That first weekend was fantastic. I got up as soon as it was daylight and started cooking. The boys all came round for Sunday lunch and we watched Andy Murray win Wimbledon. What a triumph! Rather different from the following year as I write this. Let us not go there.

  I was doing so well on this regime until about November. Then it stopped working, so Justin gave me a different set of goody bags which included Avastin which seemed to be the King or Queen of the IV-administered chemos. Another twelve sessions and things were still not improving. Then irinotecan was introduced and it seems to be quite harsh and I started to feel the side effects. I now feel very tired all the time and sick after meals. Meals? That is also a joke as my taste buds seem to have disappeared completely. Everything tastes like cardboard.

  I have explained to Justin that the irinotecan is having an adverse effect and asked if there is anything else that I could have. I feel bad asking because the irritation is nothing in the great scheme of things. But it is important on a daily basis because if you are constantly battling sickness and generally feeling under the weather all your energy gets sapped away and I need that energy to keep me going. At the beginning of July 2014, I finally feel as though the illness is getting to me. The nurses were always asking me about the level of pain and asking if I had ulcers, numbness and sickness, etc., but actually I was not really suffering at all. I had managed to stave off the bad stuff longer than most, but now it is getting to me. But we are getting ahead of ourselves and we must go back to the beginning.

  At that first session, I did feel tired as the day went on, but decided not to give in to a nap so I would sleep better that night. Afterwards I went for a walk round the block with my dear hubbie who was feeling a little melancholy. We talked a good deal about the future and what was going to happen.

  I am not good at keeping things to myself. I can keep other people’s secrets if need be, but my own emotions are a very different thing. I think of all those films where the star of the piece has an incurable disease and does not tell anyone and I’m not like that at all. When we arrived home from seeing Justin Stebbing that first time, my youngest son, Robert, and my stepson, Bradley, were home and I just blurted out, ‘I’ve got cancer but the doctor says I am not going to die!’

  Both boys burst into tears, as did Michael, and then me too. There was nothing one could say really. I pulled myself together and explained that I had these tumours in my colon and secondaries in my lungs and liver, but that hopefully with chemotherapy we could shrink the tumours and keep it all at bay. The boys wanted to know how long this would all take and of course we could not answer. Then my eldest son Michael came round and we had another heart to heart.

  In a strange way I felt totally removed from the whole issue. It was not that I was in denial but it was as though I was talking about someone else. I became very calm and talked easily about the chemo. We even made jokes about it. In fact over the whole year one of the great things we have learned as a family is to keep a sense of humour. Sometimes one of the boys will come in from work moaning about a trivial event, like missing a bus or someone giving them a hard time, and I just look up and remark, ‘Well that’s nothing. I’ve got cancer!’

  In fact, I was in Waitrose at the fish counter one day ordering some delights for the weekend, and there was a woman behind me who just kept tutting loudly every time I asked for something else. Then she demanded that they fetch another assistant as she couldn’t stand there all day. ‘I’ve got a bad back you know,’ she announced grandly.

  I turned to her and smiled, ‘Well I’ve got cancer. So there!’

  It’s how I’ve come to learn to deal with things. However, that first weekend was bizarre. The sun was shining and everything in my home looked so lovely. To have my family round me helped keep me sane, but did not help me feel better. I had bloody cancer – how was I going to deal with it? And not just with the cancer itself, but with my poor family having to watch me day in and day out and not be able to do anything for me. Well I made a promise to myself that I would find a way, but when I went to bed on Sunday night I knew I was going to have to face reality. There were decisions to be made about the play I was due to start, and what would I tell everyone? There is a way in which when the big things in life have to be addressed somehow we are able to embrace them, but all the little things, the minutiae of life, really get to you.

  As I lay there in the dark I listened to my heart beating and I promised myself I would fight to the end. There was so much I had left to do in this life, I could not afford to die. This new-found strength must be coming from the blast of FU2 I had coursing through my veins. What a great way to describe my feelings towards this bloody cancer!

  2

  PANTOLAND AND OTHER ADVENTURES

  December 2011 and December 2012

  I think it is time to press rewind for a while and fill you in on the rest of my life as it was unfolding and so, I am taking you back to when I entered the magical world of pantomime, I will wave my magic wand (pencil, mouse, call it what you will) and ‘Bingo’ we are now in Birmingham!

  I had such a good time doing it in 2011 that I reprised my role in 2012 and it was during that time that I began to feel unwell. Looking back it seems so obvious that how I felt then was a sign of what was to come, but at the time I just dismissed it – as we so often do.

  I don’t know why I had never been in a panto, ever, in all my forty odd years as an actress. I did do something approaching a panto at the Pindar of Wakefield, a pub in King’s Cross, hundreds of years ago. I was playing Robin Hood and dressed like Douglas Fairbanks Jr, complete with moustache. It was great fun and rather bawdy, as I recall, and I usually spent most of the performances warding off drunken advances from the audience. Well it was a pub after all, but it was also famous for its music hall performances and Christmas pantomime. I remember my opening song began, ‘Give me some men who are stout-hearted men!’ Need I say more?

  We finished the first half of the latest tour of Calendar Girls in the first week of December 2011, and unlike many of my fellow actresses, who were off to rest or holiday or spend wonderful moments with their family round the Christmas tree, I decided to attempt my first panto playing the Fairy Godmother. What else? I was persuaded by the actress Kathryn Rooney who was in Calendar Girls with me. She is a very talented young lady, and a vintage performer in pantoland, and also the partner of one of the great producers of pantomime, Michael Harrison. He would also be directing Cinderella, in which I was to appear with the wonderful Brian Conley.

  It was this cocktail of talent that persuaded me to dip my toe in the magic! I have always admired Brian Conley and remember meeting him years ago when he was first ‘discovered’. Like many performers he was a non-stop showman. Not
hing much had changed in the intervening years, and now, watching him rehearse as Buttons, I was so impressed by his professionalism and talent. Performing in a pantomime is probably the most exhausting job an actor can attempt, even more than a big musical, in a way, because at least in a musical there is a real story and each character can help move that story on. But in panto, the leading man or woman, that is the name in lights above the title, is never really allowed a break. It is relentless, and the audiences very much come to see their favourite stars, and demand 100 per cent. It is also an audience often made up of children, who do not sit quietly and attentively like they do at the Royal Shakespeare Company. They shout and scream and eat and drink and even run around. In some ways I was dreading it! However, it was a real challenge to me to make the little blighters sit up and pay attention, and my Fairy Godmother developed into a cross between nice grannie and grumpy headmistress!

  We rehearsed in a dance studio in Fulham and my first day was so scary. The last time I had done anything vaguely musical was West Side Story at Coventry repertory theatre in 1971! I find dancers very intimidating. They all have such amazing bodies and seem to live in a parallel universe. Even when I was young and not too shabby myself, I would feel unattractive and lumpy next to these gazelles leaping backwards and forwards. Nothing has changed since then, and when I walked into the rehearsal room I was overwhelmed by the smell of sweat and perfume, deodorant and cigarettes. They all smoke like chimneys and eat junk food and still they look gorgeous. So I skulked into the room and sat in the corner practising my lines. We only had two weeks and I was still in Calendar Girls mode, up on a hillside covered in sunflowers. At least I didn’t have to take my clothes off for this production. Mind you it might have been a show stopper, the Fairy Godmother naked on a swing!