Our closest neighbours in the street knew, as of course we had needed their help at various times, and so did Margaret’s sister, Pauline, and my sisters, Marion and Annabelle. But otherwise, Margaret did not want to talk about it to anyone, refer to it in any way, and as for writing about it, the very idea made her nauseous.
We never for one moment thought she had it beaten. She always knew there was no cure. All you can hope for was a remission, for months, or for years, if you were lucky.
Several articles in newspapers, then and now, do suggest people can bring cancer upon themselves, which of course is rubbish. People go on about ‘fighting it’, which is also nonsense. Margaret particularly hated all talk of it being a fight. Of course it isn’t. It is a one-sided attack. You cannot fight it. You just have to live with it, be sensible, hope for the best.
The most depressing cancer stories to read in the newspaper are about people announcing they have ‘been cured’, closely followed by news of the latest miracle breakthroughs. When cancer comes into a family, you suddenly notice all these cancer stories which you had not been aware of before. The most depressing of all is when they produce statistics to prove that with all the different types of cancer, the success rate in the UK is rubbish, usually around the twentieth position in a list of thirty European countries, miles behind Scandinavia and even Eastern Europe. In the end, we decided to give up reading them all.
In late 1977, Margaret’s cancer returned. This time it was in her right breast. The prognosis was more serious. There was no talk this time of how unusual it was for it to happen to such a healthy person. The cancer had spread to lymph glands so there was no alternative but another mastectomy.
Micky Day, our GP, had been on holiday when the final decisions were being made for the first mastectomy. But when she heard about Margaret’s experience with the Royal Free, she said that Margaret had to go into the Marsden, the specialist cancer hospital, situated in the Fulham Road, in Chelsea.
I moaned a bit, after I looked at the map, realising how hard it was going to be, for appointments and visits, and then getting back for the children. But from the very beginning, Margaret loved her surgeon, Mr McKinna, and was willing to put up with any inconveniences. He was a small, smiley, pawky Ulsterman, gentle and kind, always exhausted-looking, but not at all off-hand or fierce, as the Royal Free surgeon had been.
I went with Margaret for the initial appointments and he did not give her any false hopes, explaining how serious it was, surgery might not work, the cancer might return again quite soon. She would need at least six months of chemotherapy after the operation.
Conditions at the Marsden were far less pleasant than the Royal Free. Building work was going on, some wards were closed, there were queues everywhere. She was not in a room on her own but shoved into a large cancer ward where people were lying with their faces half cut away, some were screaming in pain, some were dying, and the whole situation was a nightmare, just what you don’t want when you are going through your own nightmares. But throughout it, Margaret had total faith and perhaps even took pleasure in Mr McKinna’s gentle touch and calmness.
I have just found some notes I wrote each day in January 1978, while Margaret was in the Marsden. They are full of details of the endless delays, the blood tests, the biopsies, results getting lost, waiting in agony, trying to work out what it all means, what we should do.
The descriptions of the other patients were even more horrific than I had remembered – patients screaming, coughing up blood, nurses shouting at them to shut up.
I had also forgotten how long drawn out it had been before the actual operation. There had been endless tests and delays and discussions during the whole of December. Then of course nothing happened during the Christmas holidays, which at least meant we could have as normal a Christmas as possible, without ruining it for the children.
On 3 January, I wrote in my diary notes that M seems so well and fit and healthy, as if she was waiting to go in for a voluntary op, one that was not strictly necessary. But on the other hand, after almost three years since the last one, we were now back to square one. And now she did know what to expect.
I did mention the word mastectomy one day in talking to Margaret. She was quite upset. She thought she had banned that word from my lips or her lips. ‘It was a glimpse of her being worried,’ so I wrote, ‘but trying to convince herself there might be hope.’
On 11 January 1978, she had the right breast removed. So now she had had a double mastectomy.
I took Caitlin, aged thirteen, Jake, aged eleven, and Flora, five, into the Marsden to see her. How can I have done that, when the place was a nightmare? I assume I wanted to prove to them that Margaret was alive and well, that she did exist, that it was just another routine op and she would be out soon.
When I arrived, Margaret slipped me a handwritten note – telling me on no account to make any comments about how she looked, which of course was awful.
I took Flora a second time, as she was harder to leave at home, and she was fascinated by all the machinery and all the drains. Jake declined. He could not bear to go again.
On 18 January, I went to see Margaret on my own, and wrote down what was happening.
M still worried that lab reports had not arrived, but looking better for once, sleeping more, thanks to strong sleeping pills and Brenda (the woman in the next bed who screamed) had been quietened.
That night McKinna himself rang me at home. Some good and some not good news. Out of the 20 lymph glands he took out, two are bad with secondaries in them. So bad news. It means it’s spreading. But he says the rest are ok and shows her body is fighting. So better news. She will go on chemo for six months to stop the spread.
She’s to take pills for six month. They will decide which pills ‘by taking them out of a hat’. His actual words. They are trying out various types of drugs for people at this stage, to find which works best. Sounds appalling and scary. I ask how on earth they will they know which has worked. We get into slight hassle as he tries to explain to me what it means, which I can’t follow.
Margaret is going straight on the drugs tomorrow and, if ok, will come out on Friday. The drugs will have side effects, but not much of her hair should fall out.
I am in tears after the phone call. For once I felt utterly broken. We had got used to this awful new stage, having to have another mastectomy, got our minds accustomed to it, had all the bad news, assimilated it, learned almost to live with it, thinking once this is over and she is out and gets fit, life can carry on.
Now I know it just goes on. Life could not be worse. How could it be worse? Apart from being dead. The next butchery can only be worse than the two so far.
Later M rings. She has been told what McKinna told me. She sounds awful. She is ringing because she said she would. She has nothing to say. So there is silence. I try to chatter, saying the source of the primary has now gone, the bad glands cut out, so surely there is nowhere it can come from next time . . . ? But I am not very convincing. It is clear to both of us that it is spreading, and going to spread, whatever happens. M is dreading the chemo.
Somehow I go straight to sleep, but wake at 5, feel awful, get up and make tea, eventually get back to bed, but never get back to sleep.
Flora is the only nice thing in the whole world that I can think about. But I worry that when she and Caitlin are older, the same will happen to our two daughters. Despite myself, and our vows, I have read all the stories about breast cancer running in families.
Sometime after the operation, Margaret was given an appointment again to see the prosthesis people, to get fitted it up with, well, whatever they might suggest.
This time, she decided to have nothing, not even a padded bra. Having two breasts off, it meant she was balanced. So why pretend. She took to wearing long loose jumpers and in bed a loose night shirt, which she never took off.
Six weeks after the operation, and before she started on the chemotherapy, we went up to Caldbeck, to ope
n up the cottage, now that some building work had been finished. It was just the two of us, me and Margaret, staying at the cottage for a few days. My sister Marion had agreed to stay in our house and look after the children for a long weekend.
We explored all the walks around and over the Caldbeck fells, most of which we did not know. We did nothing too energetic, and slowly Margaret did appear to be getting her strength back.
Back in London, the chemo lasted nine months, not six. Her white blood cells fell, which meant delays and endless blood checks. Her hair did not fall out, despite the threat of it, but she felt sick and tired most of the time. But, as she kept on saying to anyone who commented, you do feel tired most of the time with three young children. As before, we did not tell the children the truth about what had happened, or her parents, or most people.
It was only many years later that Caitlin, our oldest, revealed to us that aged eleven, a kind girl in her class had said to her one day, ‘Your mum’s got cancer, that’s why she’s in hospital.’
Caitlin did not believe it, she said, and so ignored it, so she said. But the fact that she did not tell us about it at the time suggests she might have been worried that there was some truth in it, but did not want to know the truth. A bit like me really.
As the months and then years went by, I grew to believe it wasn’t true either. I wiped it from my mind. Margaret seemed so healthy and fit again, just as she used to be, much fitter than me, climbing all the fells, waiting on the tops for me to come up, panting. Once again she would carry our little rucksack on our long walks, except when going past houses. Then I would carry it, just for show, trying not to look like a wimp.
She would stride away, her back straight, her gait perfect, slim and athletic-looking with her marvellous skin and healthy glow, compared with me, all hunched, shambling, moaning and groaning, how long to go, Marg, are we nearly there yet, Marg? In the next few years, no stranger, seeing her striding over the fells, would ever have guessed what had happened to her.
It was all history. Something that happened to another person, in another life. That’s how I saw it, that’s how I coped.
According to Margaret, I was in denial. What’s wrong with that, I would say. I have wiped it from my mind. Which I had.
And that’s how it went on. Year after year. There was no sudden recurrence this time. The double mastectomy seemed to have sorted it. So we settled down, got back to our living and working and family routines, while I, as ever, looked forward to many more years of married bliss and happiness.
14
FAMILY AFFAIRS
When you are the oldest in a family, you don’t really spend much time thinking or worrying about your younger brothers and sisters. They are just there, hanging about, getting in the way, or so you often think. You are expected to look after them, look out for them, so your parents or teachers might tell you, or people assume, but you try to ignore that.
They look up to you, and also in the sense of looking forward, to what you are doing now and what they might be doing at your age, yet knowing you will always be older than them, ahead of them. But you don’t really look back to them. You are too concerned with your own self, your own life.
In my case, I was off and away at the age of eighteen to university, and never returned. When I did, I was a different person from the one I had been, doing different things, with a different life, with very little in common with my family any more. So I thought.
The twins, Marion and Annabelle, three years younger than me, had to share the burden of my father as he got more and more ill, and worse tempered, throwing his food around till he died, in 1958, aged fifty-three.
Their lives, and my mother’s life, began to change for the better after that. In the 1960s, there was eventually a phone in the house, a washing machine, an immersion heater so we had hot water and could have a bath, all things we never had when I was growing up there in the forties and fifties.
The twins both left school in Carlisle, the Margaret Sewell, aged fifteen, with no qualifications. The school did do GCE O-levels, at sixteen, as my school did, but they were not put in for it, not being in the A stream. Annabelle left and went into a bookmaker’s office. Marion went into a tyre factory.
Marion then announced she was emigrating to Australia as a £10 emigrant with another girl, which upset my mother. She had a fantasy that now my father was dead, her girls would be her best friends in life and never leave home. She often slept with them, even as teenagers and young adults. They did love her of course, felt sorry for her, but it must have become uncomfortable and cloying, hence Marion wanting to get away.
Marion got all the emigration papers but at the last minute her friend met somebody and wanted to get married. Marion did not fancy going to Australia on her own, so lost her £10.
She then met Jeff, a male nurse, and they got married and moved to a very nice house in St Aidan’s Road, near the river and near the football ground. Jeff had gone to a sec mod but started taking courses, often staying with us in London while attending some college. He eventually qualified as a sister tutor, teaching nursing to nurses.
Annabelle had already moved to London, getting a job in the Guildhall in the City of London, and shared a very smart flat with three others girls in Chelsea. She then met and married Roger, a Yorkshireman, who had gone to grammar school and then into the civil service. He didn’t have a degree, so it took him a while to advance, but then he began to move up the civil service grades. For a time he was working for Shirley Williams in the House of Commons in the 1970s, when she was a Minister in Harold Wilson’s Government. He was her private secretary, preparing answers for her on trade matters.
He then got posted to California, a really glamorous appointment, something you do not expect to fall into the lap of a humble civil servant. He was made the UK commercial consul in San Francisco, spending two years setting up a British trade fair which Princess Alexandra came to open.
Afterwards, back in England, back in Whitehall, he became unwell, staggering and shaking, all the symptoms my father had displayed all those decades ago. After endless tests and treatments, it was confirmed that he had multiple sclerosis, just as my father did. So my sister Annabelle twice in her life had to witness a loved one suffering the same awful disease.
Roger struggled on for years, going by train from their home in Leighton Buzzard in a wheelchair, travelling in the guard’s van, where he was often left if the message had not got through to the station staff about which train he was on. He ran a campaign for his Whitehall office to install ramps, to accommodate disabled workers like him.
He was honoured with an OBE and retired not long afterwards. He was confined to a wheelchair at home, unable to move himself, but he still managed to study for an Open University degree. I never had anything but awe and admiration for him and how he coped. And also for my sister Annabelle. She used to come on holiday with us, and her two children, Ross and Lindsey, when Roger could get into a care home for a week. Annabelle, who had long given up office work, somehow managed to retrain as a teacher. She then got a job in a large comprehensive, teaching office studies and typing.
Marion meanwhile remained in Carlisle but she too decided to get some qualifications. It was being presented at work with an ornamental tyre, to mark her ten years working in Tyre Services, that made her think, what I am doing with my life, there must be more to life than this.
So she started studying for A-levels at the local tech, after work each day. She and Jeff had no children. She had helped him while he had retrained, going off to college in London, now it was his turn to support and encourage her.
She got through her A-levels and then some union official at work suggested she should try for Oxford – and blow me, she got in, to study social sciences at Ruskin College. This is the trade union college, mainly for mature students, but still a proper part of Oxford University. She hoped her studies, if she passed, would lead her to become a social worker.
Meanwhile
Johnny, my little brother, five years younger, had left school and become an apprentice electrician. At twenty-one, when he was qualified, he got paid off. He then got a job for the Carlisle State Management, which owned all the public houses in the region. From there he got a job in a local approved school, looking after the boys.
Johnny was very blond when young, and always big and strapping, unlike me, so the boys in the home did not mess him around. Part of his job was to teach them basic electrical work. He did it so well, enjoyed it so much, that it was suggested he should have proper training. By this time he was married to Marjorie and they had two children, Simon and Clare. So off he went to study at Newcastle Polytechnic, now part of Newcastle University, in order to become a residential social worker, never in his working life till then having written anything apart from his time sheet.
So, by the end of the 1970s, my two sisters and my brother, with none of the fast-track educational advantages I supposedly had had in life, had all become mature students and were now doing useful jobs, which society needed, helping the community. Compared with me, a jobbing author and hack, writing so-called funny columns or books about football, which the world was not exactly crying out for. I was contributing very little to the general good of society. Unlike them.
When Marion was at Oxford, she was seduced by a female tutor. She had not realised till then she was a lesbian. She immediately told all her friends, and her husband, proud to be gay and out. But she did not tell our mother. That would have been a step too far. My mother’s general health was deteriorating and this would have worried and confused her, when she was already becoming highly confused.
Marion returned to Carlisle after Oxford, working as a social worker, but Carlisle in the 1970s, like most other small provincial towns, was a bit limited in its facilities or venues for lesbians to meet each other. It meant she had to go to places like Newcastle to mix with like-minded people.
A Life in the Day Page 16