Did Jane’s illness have an impact on your relationship?

Yes, well, it did a bit towards the end. I mean, obviously, obviously, the physical side of things and we were sort of sleeping in separate beds [coughs] for the last sort of two or three months I suppose. She, trouble with it was that, yeah, she, she Jane was a very, very even tempered, calm person, very gentle and that in the last two or three months, she could get quite difficult about silly little things and started complaining about things, you know. All silly things, you know, like a door that hadn’t been closed, which possibly was creaking and therefore irritating her, but there were little things and a lot of it was directed at me, why wasn’t I, why hadn’t I sorted out? And I did one at one point I sort of said, you know, something, words to the effect of, which was when I snapped at her. I sort of said, How come everything round here seems to be my fault And I said it in a rather a sort of unpleasant way, and I actually walked out the room because I sort of, [grrr] sort of a bit cross. But then she called me back and said that she apologised. She said she was, it was sort of heart breaking, she sort of apologised for upsetting me.

But she did change in that sense, that she became very demanding. She’s not a demanding person normally but she became very, very demanding and you know, [click] Snap to it And, you know, I remember once when she she’d sort of rung my phone in the middle of the night to go to the loo, and then I’d just got back, just going back to sleep and the phone rang yet again, and she wanted a glass of water, and part of me felt we could have done both those together. But Jane hadn’t seen that. She wasI was just there to sort of do things for her, and she lost a lot of her sort of sensitivity. But equally, at other times, she could be incredibly sensitive while all this was going on, so it sort of tended to vary a bit. But she was very sensitive, you know, when she had the chat with, sort of last full conversation we had just before she died about sort of how she wanted me to lead my life. And that was very, very sensitive and very understanding and caring. So it could change, but, yes. It did change a bit.

Well, that was when I, through looking at it in the, on the internet I sort of realised that it was potentially terminal. But I think it was the first interview with the oncologist, just after her three operations, when I sort of thought it didn’t sound, I think Jane’s friend came to see her in the ward or, well, in her room that, that evening and I went out to see her and I said, I can’t believe what I’ve just heard. I think he’s told, just told Jane that she’s got about a twenty five per cent chance. He hadn’t said it, but sort of that’s what I think I’ve just read into it And, But I said, don’t for God’s sake tell Jane because she seems to be, you know, thrilled that she’s making such good progress But that so, I mean very early on I sort of read into what they were saying that it was very bad.

How did you cope with that?

How did I cope with it? Just gritted my teeth and got on with it. You know, there’s nothing I could do other than to give her all the support I could and you know, make sure that she was getting, where possible, the best possible treatment. But I’m not a sort of, I don’t [laughs], I just get on with things [laughs]. I deal with things in my own way so I did, just sort of gritted my teeth. I mean I was going through a sort of private form of hell, you know, you sort of, did sort of dream up stupid things to sort of, keep you going, like sort of, I’d walk back from the station every night and I’d say, If a number 36 bus doesn’t pass me before I get back home, Jane’s going to live forever You know, it’s that sort of stupid thing that you go through your mind, you sort of make up these silly mind games to sort of keep you going, and then the 36 bus hasn’t passed you by the time you got to the front door, you think, Yeah You know, I know it’s ridiculous but it’s those kind of games I play with myself that kept me going. And, and also the determination, well, to see Jane right and also to, I wanted her children to know that, who also had been very supportive, to know that they were, that I was sort of there for her and doing my bit. And just because I’d had sort of a relative short, very few, very good years with her didn’t mean that I was going to desert her when she needed me. So that was very important to me for them to know that I was there for her.

My first bad experience that I suffered at that point, was that the surgeon, who was a female surgeon and very, very nice and very sympathetic to us, had said that I and two of Jane’s children, her sons who had both grown up, could go and see Jane in the in the, now, which ward was it? It wasn’t intensive care but it was something similar to intensive care, and although it was two in the morning, she said, the surgeon rang through to the this ward and said that arranged for us to go down and see Jane. We got there and it was quite clear that the young doctor there did not welcome our presence at all. By the way, we were now in an NHS hospital. I should explain that. We’d gone from private, second, second operation was done privately. The third operation, because they’d had a different surgeon, was done in a, in [Town] in an NHS hospital. The young doctor made us all feel terribly uncomfortable. He clearly didn’t think we should be there and he was very hostile and it was very, very upsetting. And I’ve never mentioned that to anyone before but I did feel that, I almost wrote to the hospital and said, you know, This is not the way to treat people who’ve not gone through what the patient’s gone through but who the nevertheless are going through absolute hell and who’s, who need to keep their strength and their spirits up in order to be able to help the patient So that was my first bad experience with a doctor.

The, at this point, when it was clear to all of us except Jane that it was terminal, we got in the Macmillan nurses, and they were absolutely brilliant. They did all the things that we weren’t sure about. Sorted out everything, they, they arranged for Jane to have a new bed brought into the house, which sort of she could press buttons and sort of lift up and all that kind of thing. They arranged for, I’m just trying to think what else they did. They, they just took over and all the sort of admin side of it was sorted for us. They knew exactly what to do. They were incredibly nice people, and I mean I can’t fault them. They were absolutely brilliant.

Did you feel that you were cared for at all in your role?

Well, only in the way that people dealt with me in a very, very sympathetic way, yes. Again, I’m going to go back to the Macmillan nurses, who were I found a huge source of strength for myself as well because, just because of the way they dealt with me and talked to me and made life seem normal, in a way, in a funny way. They were so sort of straight-forward and kind and practical.

And then two days before Christmas 2006, I normally would have would have been playing tennis. It was a Saturday morning but I, thank God I didn’t. I was upstairs wrapping presents, Jane was on the telephone downstairs, and I heard a thump, called down and asked, said, Are you alright And there was no reply, so I went down. I wasn’t particularly alarmed. I thought she might have just dropped something, and found her on the floor having a seizure.

And now, I’ve never seen anybody have a seizure, well, a seizure, an epileptic fit, I think is probably what it was. I’ve never seen this before actually and I did think she was dying. She was, you know, shaking compulsively. She was frothing at the mouth. I was absolutely horrified. I hadn’t sort of, I’d had no warning of this. I mean I had, never occurred to me and it certainly never anybody said that possibly, the cancer could have spread to her brain, which, of course, was what had caused it but I didn’t know that at the time. So I was absolutely distraught by that, just the sight of seeing her there, something, you know, ten minutes earlier she’d been happily preparing for Christmas.

So I held her and dialled 999 on my mobile phone – thank God for mobile phones – and I have to say the ambulance service were brilliant. They were round very quickly, very, very sympathetic and, to my surprise, Jane was already beginning to come round when they arrived and was, actually, you know, even sort of joking with them a little bit and seemed to be okay. So went into [Town] Hospital again.

The people were very aware of what I was going through, you know, because Jane and I were in a fairly new relationship and, you know, we were very, very close and, you know, it was sort of one of those things that was working very well and everyone thought it was very sort of tragic and terrible bad luck that this had happened. When we’d sort of both found unhappy, happiness after a, for both of us, quite a long period of unhappiness, and so some of my men friends would ask me out and take me out for a meal and chat it through. This is when I was at work during the day, so I would sort of meet up for lunch. And equally, Jane’s girlfriends could not have been more sympathetic or more supportive or helpful. I mean they were they were brilliant, yeah.

We were exceptionally lucky living in that funny little neck of the woods in London, where everybody is, there’s an enormous sort of network of very good friends who will go out of their way, and the support that Jane’s friends gave her was unbelievable, absolutely incredible. People would turn up, you know, knock on the door and they’d bring round huge suppers for us all to have, and Jane would be brought downstairs, and they’d just deliver up this fantastic food. And people came round every day with things, food and presents and flowers and make-up, you know, and it was absolutely brilliant the, that side of it.

We, when we were told that Jane had bowel cancer I knew nothing about bowel cancer at all. I mean I’m, it meant nothing to me. I didn’t know where it was in the range of cancers or anything. And I went on the internet and was absolutely shocked to discover that sort of, there was a sort of fifty per cent chance of dying within the first five years. I just couldn’t believe it. And, I never went on the internet again in connection with the illness. Jane’s eldest son had this, exactly the same experience. He was shocked, because we all thought Jane was, you know, immortal, you know, sort of couldn’t believe that she had anything wrong with her. And so it was a question of how much you want to know.