My GP said, I’m not going to give you any medication because that’ll only delay what’s got to happen anyway, because, it’s a stage that will go on and you’ve got to live with it. But he said he could put me in touch with a bereavement counsellor and he recommended Cruse, which is a bereavement counselling organisation. And so I rang up Cruse, left a message, then they rang me back and they said they had a waiting list, but they would be able to see me within the month. I was really sort of horrified because I wanted to see somebody now. And they said they could put me in touch with SOBS, and that’s an acronym for something for people bereaved by suicide. You sit round in a group and talk. I was absolutely appalled by the idea of sitting around in a group with other people who had been bereaved by suicide. I just couldn’t imagine doing that, so I said no thank you, I don’t want to do that, that I would wait. But luckily I got called back, within ten days by somebody.

It turned out she [the counsellor] had been a dancer with the Ballet Rambert and I’m passionate about ballet, and so that gave us a lovely link and I remember for her 70th birthday I gave her the Fontaine biography. And when finally after a year we stopped I took her as a thank you to Convent Garden with my sister. The nice thing about a relationship with a bereavement counsellor is that you can ring them up again afterwards. She really became a friend. And she had a memory like an elephant; it was extraordinary, she would always remember. I don’t know whether she took notes after our meetings or not, but she would remember exactly what we’d talked about the week before. And if you think about how many people she was seeing, I thought she was magic, and I was really really lucky, to have her. I still call her occasionally.

Your friends are wonderful but you can’t go on and on to them, and in fact I used to find that if I was seeing my friends I wanted to be cheerful with them. Seeing my friends perked me up, I didn’t want to unload on them. And yet it was terribly important for me to unload.

So you’d recommend to anybody in your situation to contact Cruse?

Yes, or, or a bereavement counsellor. There are other organisations I’m sure, but she, she was really wonderful

Had she had any particular training do you think?

Oh yes, I know they do, they give you a training, Cruse. She had retired early and done this training, and said she found it the most satisfactory of all the work she’d done, because she really felt that she could help people. And she clearly had a great talent for it.

I’m always very angry with the psychiatrist she had. When she was at [the local town] she was going to see the psychiatrist once a month and she was on pills. The Lithium had never agreed with her, which is what they usually use for people who are bipolar. So she was on something called Sodium Valproate, and that seemed to work. But she was quite over weight, because that’s a sort of bi-product of it. She felt that she wasn’t her lively self. And so she said to the psychiatrist that she would like to go off it. I don’t know what happened in that conversation cos of course I wasn’t there, I wasn’t allowed to be there. But anyway she just came home and said he’s let me go off the pills and he’s discharged me. And I was so, so, so angry with him. Because even if he’d just put it down to a very low dose, or even if she’d insisted on going off it, if he’d not discharged her, she’d have had to see a psychiatrist on a regular basis. It would’ve been, how should I put it? She was allowed to think that she’d recovered for good. And of course with manic depression that very rarely happens, or doesn’t often happen. And so when she went to Glasgow, she didn’t register with the counselling people or with a doctor, and there was no way anybody would know, to look out for her.

I was thinking perhaps I’ll write a little piece for the local paper so her friends know. Alex was away at the time and I was feeling quite low, and I began to write, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop, and I thought this is my opportunity to write my tribute to her, and also to explain about manic depression. Because so few people know. What I didn’t mention was that at her funeral my sister, whos a doctor, my older sister had said before the funeral, she said, I would like to speak about Alice and manic depression, at the funeral, and about our mother And I said, I think that’s a wonderful idea and [my elder boy] said, I think that’s a fantastic idea because a lot of my friends they talk about people feeling manically depressed and they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, whereas if somebody explaine, and so my sister got up and she talked about our mother, and what form her manic depression took, and how she had several times tried to take her life. And then she said, tragically Alice had inherited this genetic illness. It had been very helpful to a lot of people in the congregation, to help them to understand what had been wrong with Alice. And I felt I wanted to put this on paper too, so I wrote this long piece for the Guardian magazine.

It came out at the time of the book, and so there was Alice on the front of the Guardian. And they did it beautifully. I was so grateful to them. It was very important to me. I felt now I would never have to explain again. If people ask me about Alice, I could refer them to the piece.

[holds up pictures]

This is a sweet picture of Alice with me when she was little.

Ah, that’s lovely.

They carried the one beautifully, the one of the leaf. And then there’s pictures of me with my mother, and that one of the leaf you see they used. And people, several people have said that they’ve got it on their wall. And I was showered with letters. It was very gratifying because a lot of them were from people who suffered from manic depression themselves, and what was interesting to me was what a secret illness it is. Because if you have got it and you are coping, you are in work, then you don’t tell people you’ve got it because you don’t want to lose your job. You don’t want to in any way risk things not going right for you. And I had a lot of letters from, and e-mail correspondence with quite a number of people. I got a letter from a professor of psychiatry who said it should be obliged reading to all students of psychiatry because it explained the effect of manic depression on a family. I also got a letter, which was the most important one of all, from a man called Alan Ogilvie whos a psychiatrist specialising in bipolar disorder. He said he felt that my article was the best thing he’d ever read about the effect of bipolar on a family, and he was just starting up this NGO charity to do research into bipolar disorder and to de-stigmatise it, and he wondered if I’d like to be involved. And so I’ve become very heavily involved with that and I’ve become a trustee and I have raised some money for them. He’s become a very good friend, and it’s been very important to me to feel that I can use my experience in this way, and I think he finds it a help.

We then went to the morgue and I remember waiting there, sitting in this waiting room, and suddenly our eldest boy said, out of the blue, I don’t want her cremated And I said Yes, nor do I, I want her to lie in the churchyard, which is just down the road from our house, and which is on the way to her favourite place which is called White Bridge where she used to go on her walks. And so, when we got back we got onto the local priest and we have a wonderful neighbour, who is a conductor, and Alice was a babysitter to his boy.He came in and he said, What can I do? I mean I can play, would you like me to play? For her funeral And I said, Oh that would be completely wonderful And I said, I would, I’d like to have Didos Lament and he looked really shocked. He said, But you can’t, it’s the most tragic piece in opera and I said, Well this is the most tragic thing that has happened to me And then I remember he came back the next day and said, I’ve been thinking about Dido, and I think if I got a really true voice that wasn’t operatic, then it could, it could work, it could work And of course in fact, Alice had been to see Dido and Aeneus that week, during that fortnight that she was back, when she was feeling low, she’d gone with her cousin, and had come back really very stimulated and said how wonderful it was. So it was appropriate. And so I feel really lucky that we had this wonderful man in charge of the music, and we gave her a really beautiful funeral. Our church holds 400 and it was standing room only.

The only funeral that my sons had ever been to was that of my sister, who was a priest in Birmingham, and whod died of cancer. Most of her congregation was from Barbados, and so she was buried in the West Indian manner, where everybody stands around the grave and sings. And so that’s what my boys assumed you always did at a funeral. And so we asked the undertaker and luckily the undertaker had spent some time in Barbados and knew of this tradition, and said it was unusual in England but he was perfectly happy to arrange that, and my brother in law, whos a priest, and was used to this kind of ceremony, he officiated that part of the service. So when the coffin went out of the church we all followed out into the graveyard, all 400 plus of us, and her cousin, whos got a beautiful voice, was in charge of the singing. She had got Alice’s old friends from her choir at school too, because Alice sang beautifully, they led this unaccompanied singing and we all sang the hymns round the grave while Alex and the boys filled it in. Then other people, cousins and friends all started picking up the spade filling in the grave while we sang and it was a very moving thing, which people seemed to find quite cathartic, to be able to do this.