by Sue Johnston
Dad didn’t have to stay long in hospital, which was a huge relief to me and I returned to Margate to finish filming. When I returned to Warrington, Dad was recovering well from the stroke. But the Benson & Hedges, it turned out, were playing heavily on his mind. One day I was at their house when I said that I was leaving to go into town. As I set off I decided to go straight home instead.
As I was in my lounge I looked out to see Dad’s Allegro driving past the window and parking up. I waited in the hall as he let himself in, and seeing me he jumped a mile.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, clutching his chest. He was dressed in his pyjamas and his overcoat.
‘I might ask you the same thing, sneaking around.’
Looking sheepish, he said, ‘I’ve come for those fags.’
I shook my head. Those bloody fags. ‘You’re not having them,’ I said. ‘Not until your chest gets better.’
Dad went away fagless and fed up.
I did eventually relent. When his chest cleared up and he came looking for them again, I handed over the box and Dad opened a packet, took out a cigarette and, before lighting it, snapped off the filter tip. He was so used to strong untipped cigarettes that he thought that Benson & Hedges were too mild!
On one occasion when I was taking him home from a check-up Dad asked me to make a detour to the bank. My father had always handed over his wages every week to my mum and been given some spending money for the week. This was quite commonplace with people of their generation, the woman would take the money in order to run the house.
I wasn’t sure what Dad could have wanted from the bank but when he came out he handed me three hundred pounds in cash. He had obviously been squirrelling this money away for years, unbeknownst to my mum, and now he wanted me to look after it. Dad and I shared a look of understanding: this had been my dad’s bid for independence, something he had that was his own. We didn’t speak about it again but I knew that he had withdrawn it because if anything happened to him, he didn’t want this money to go unclaimed.
*
It seemed to take an age from the filming of Goodbye Cruel World to it being aired. During this downtime I threw myself into being with Joel. I would take him to school and pick him up, I’d spend my days cooking – looking through recipes to see what I could make and thinking about whom I could invite round to eat it. I spent time with my parents. But after a while the dread that I might never work again crept up on me. Usually I trusted that of course I would work again, that something would come up. But the part of me that knew that a few months out of work and I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage was beginning to take over, and I became increasingly occupied by this concern. I decided that I would take whatever came up, that no part would be too small as it would mean that I could meet new people and hopefully gain work that way.
I had a part in Inspector Morse, which I was very pleased to get, although I did feel a bit cowed when John Thaw was taken in his big Jaguar car to set and I had to follow behind in a much less grand vehicle. I played Sean Bean’s older wife and had to sit at his bedside as he was stripped to the waist. I felt like ringing my agent and saying, ‘Don’t charge them for today, the pleasure was all mine!’ Sean Bean is a lovely man and we chatted the day away about everything from the TUC to football – he is a passionate Sheffield Wednesday fan. I also worked on A Touch of Frost, which was in its first series at the time. I remember sitting in make-up alongside David Jason, wondering if I should say something. He felt like such a big star and me a jobbing actress. I decided to keep quiet and let the make-up girl get on with her job.
After this I filmed a play called Bitter Harvest, for the ITV series Screenplay, with Rudolph Walker and Josette Simon, which was shot in the Dominican Republic in 1992. It was a small crew and I was delighted to be working with some of the people from Goodbye Cruel World. We were staying in a five-star hotel but then we would go and film in places where people were suffering from the most abject poverty. It made you feel embarrassed that we were staying in such luxury while the locals had to live in squalor. Families were living next to a river that they used as their drinking well, laundry and toilet. Their houses were precariously perched on the banks and had to be moved when the river rose. I watched a little boy pulling around a plastic bottle with a piece of string tied to it as if it was the most treasured toy in the world. I really felt for these people.
To mark the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus discovering the Dominican Republic, the government had erected a huge cross on the coastline that could be seen from miles away at sea. It was illuminated, but the only problem was that every night when the cross was switched on, the lights went out across the island. Only buildings with their own generators were unaffected by this blackout.
We had a Winnebago with us, which I’m sure seemed rather grand to the locals, but when it refused to move we had to go cap in hand and ask if we could borrow some help to move it. One of the villagers kindly lent us his oxen, which dragged the Winnebago to the next location. It was such a fascinating place and the people were exceptionally friendly. We tried to get out as much as possible and I think that one of the advantages of filming somewhere like that is that you get to see the real unvarnished version of a place.
I returned home and after a few months Goodbye Cruel World finally aired. After the first episode finished the first person to call me was my dad. He told me how wonderful he thought it was and that he loved my performance and that he was very proud of me. I was so thrilled. To hear that from my dad meant more than any award in the world. He also said that my mum had enjoyed it, which was a relief.
The second episode, screened the following week, didn’t fare quite so highly in my mother’s estimation. In fact, it went down like a lead balloon. I knew when they didn’t call that my mother probably wasn’t happy. There was a scene in which I was in the bath naked and I thought that must be what had pushed her over the edge. I picked the phone up and called.
‘Dad, it’s me…’ I said nervously.
There was a pause and then Dad said gravely, ‘I think you’d better come and see your mother. It was the swearing, Sue, she really didn’t like the swearing.’
I’d said ‘fuck’ twice, or rather my character had. A woman with motor neurone disease had said fuck twice as all control over her faculties left her – it seems reasonable enough in the circumstances, but try explaining that to my mother!
I went round to see Mum, she was sitting there, arms crossed, her face set as if she’d just sucked a lemon.
‘Well,’ she said, with utter disapproval, ‘I don’t know how you expect me to go into the post office again after that!’
When my mother was alive, the family would watch anything that I was in on two levels: for the programme itself and for my mother’s reaction. They all said that they watched Goodbye Cruel World with hoots of laughter, knowing that my mother would be horrified with me, boobs akimbo, swearing like a navvy.
Later that year I was nominated for the Radio Times Performance of the Year Award for the role. The ceremony took place at lunchtime and I was absolutely thrilled to win it. I called Dad and told him. He went quiet for a moment and then said how pleased he was for me. He was a man of few words, my dad, but I could hear it in his voice, he was very proud. Then he said, ‘I’ll tell your mother, she’ll be pleased.’ At least an award might see my mum venturing to the post office again.
I used to give any awards I received to my mother. She liked to have them around her house. Although she could never articulate the fact that she was proud of me, and would often be close to despair when people asked her if she was, little things like this suggested that she might have been.
*
I had been worried about work for some time, as nothing regular had come up, so I was immensely pleased when I was offered a part in a series called Medics. I played the administrator Ruth Parry, opposite ‘general surgeon’ Tom Baker, and it was to film in Manchester, which was great for m
e as it was near to home and my family.
Soon after we began work on Medics my dad started to suffer from chest pains. Dad was the opposite of my mother. She had spent much of her life suffering from respiratory problems and being happy to be indulged because of her asthma. Dad hated being ill and really resisted it; like me he would go to bed and hide until he was better. So to hear him complain that he had chest pains I knew that he must be ill.
The fact that Dad was poorly didn’t stop my mum insisting on him doing his quota of ‘jobs’ though. I went round to the house one day, to find my ailing father on his hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor.
‘Dad!’ I exclaimed, horrified. ‘What are you doing?’
He knelt up with the scrubbing brush in his hand and wiped his brow. ‘You know what your mother’s like if the kitchen floor isn’t done.’
I was livid: to hell with the kitchen floor – Dad wasn’t well!
The doctor referred Dad to the hospital and he was X-rayed to see if they could pick anything up. They found a shadow on his lung. I could tell that Dad was very frightened. They told my dad he had cancer, and that it had spread to his bones. The consultant explained that he would undergo radiotherapy, with the reassuring words that ‘In six weeks, Fred, you’ll see a difference.’
I’m not sure if this doctor knew that dad was dying and just wanted to give him some hope or genuinely thought that the treatment would work. Dad was given morphine to take at home to ease the pain and I would ferry him to the hospital to receive his radiotherapy.
Towards the end of his six weeks of treatment my dad’s condition suddenly deteriorated. We arrived at the hospital but the doctor on admissions insisted that Dad have an X-ray. My father was crying out in pain but this man was obviously keen to tick his procedural boxes. I tried to reason with him, but he wasn’t listening. By chance, the doctor who had diagnosed my father with cancer was passing by. I threw myself on his mercy, pleading with him to give my dad some pain relief. He quickly administered some morphine. I was so thankful to him for easing the pain of a dying man. My father was admitted straight away but I was so angry with the other doctor, in fact, I still feel that way now – how dare he ignore my dad’s pain in that way?
I was at my dad’s bedside for the last three days of his life. Just before I made that final trip to the hospital I had woken up that morning and put on Veron’s brown Wallis dress, the last thing I saw her wear. Her sister Di had given it to me after Veron died and this was a thing that I had treasured but never yet worn. I’ve no idea why I was drawn to it that day, I think it was a way of me feeling protected by my friend, of wrapping her around me.
It was close to Christmas and outside there was a holiday feeling in the air, carol singers came on the ward and I popped out to hear them sing. I cried as I listened to the singers, knowing that Christmas was so near but feeling sure that my dad would not be with us by then. Gradually, Dad lost consciousness.
I was sitting at his side looking at him, in profile he had a large nose and as he had lost so much weight his features were sunken. I squeezed his hand. ‘Bloody hell, Dad, you look just like Geronimo.’ I was thinking of the pictures of the Native American I had seen with his prominent nose, small eyes and shrivelled skin.
Dad laughed faintly and said slowly, ‘I feel like bloody Geronimo.’
In these last few days he rarely spoke as he was so heavily sedated. At one point he suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, his big blue eyes open wide, and said, ‘Mam!’ He then slumped back into the bed and into sleep. His breathing became extremely laboured and I began to worry that he had stopped breathing altogether. I hovered over him, and then his chest rose; I could relax a little. I began to count the seconds between each breath and got to eighty-nine at one stage. I was very close to running and grabbing a nurse when his chest rose again.
I had such an intense love for my dad and really needed to be by his side. I cried so much in those final days, but as with my mother I was privileged to have this time with my dad. I told him that I loved him and chatted to him. During this time his next-door neighbour Peter came in every day and chatted to him about his garden. Dad had always loved his plants and Peter was a professional gardener so they would swap tips. When I was younger we had the most wonderful garden with herbaceous borders running down the side and red-hot pokers spiking out of the flowerbeds. Dad had a greenhouse where he would grow tomatoes and cucumbers and chat to the resident frog who, like my dad, was named Fred. He then built a pond and we had goldfish swimming around in it. It was a little oasis for my dad. Even now that he was older he loved his garden and it was still a little place for him to escape to.
Joel came in to see him but he found it difficult to see his grandad so ill; he had always been more like his father than his grandfather. My mum came in every day but it was so overwhelming for her, I really felt so sorry for her.
On the third day of sitting by my dad’s side in Veron’s dress, my mum and Aunty Millie came in to see him. Joel had been dropped off at the hospital by a friend and I decided that I would take Joel home and have a shower. I have no idea why I chose that moment but when I arrived home I received a call saying that Dad had gone into a steep decline. I jumped back in the car with Joel and drove like a bat out of hell. The traffic was ridiculous and I weaved around cars, shouting in frustration at the traffic, but I was more frustrated at myself for leaving the hospital when I did.
When I arrived, I ran to the nurses’ station. I could tell by the look on the sister’s face that it was bad news. ‘I’m sorry, Sue,’ she said. ‘Your dad has passed away.’
I was distraught; I should have been there.
‘We see this a lot, you know,’ the nurse explained gently. ‘He might not have wanted you to see him die.’
I thought about this and realised that there might be some truth in what she was saying, but I don’t think it was me he would have been worried about; it was Joel. Joel was so special to my dad that I think he would have done whatever he could to make sure that Joel wasn’t upset in any way.
I went into the room and Dad was lying in the bed, my mum and Aunty Millie at his side.
‘Touch him, Sue, he’s still warm,’ Aunty Millie said.
I think she just needed something to say and this was what she arrived at! I kissed him, and then stood back and looked at him. It wasn’t my dad, it was his body lying there, but it wasn’t him. It was then that I realised that our bodies are really just what carries us, our essence, around – a shell. My dad had gone, but where? Where had all that knowledge, that humour, that gentleness gone? Mum and Aunty Millie went to the visitors’ day room for a cup of tea and I stayed with Dad, but after a while I knew I had to leave. I felt awful saying goodbye for the last time.
The following day I went to pick up the death certificate from the hospital and was given two carrier bags that held Dad’s stuff. I took the bags home and put them in his shed and didn’t look at them for eighteen months. When I finally did, I salvaged his watch and his slippers, which I still occasionally wear now. I went with my uncle Gordon to the registry office to register Dad’s death. We were sitting there waiting our turn, Christmas decorations hanging on the wall. I felt shocking, as if I was dreaming, as if everyone else was going about their lives around me and I was just standing still.
As we sat there in silence, a woman leaned over and said, ‘Are you who I think you are?’ She paused as I looked blankly at her. ‘It’s Sheila Grant, isn’t it?’
This really wasn’t a good time to be recognised. I nodded that I was as Gordon stared at her, trying to get her to twig that I was upset and didn’t really want to have a chat about my days on Brookside.
Dad died on 21 December 1993. I was convinced that we would have to wait until after Christmas for the funeral, but we were told that there was a space on Christmas Eve. I discussed it with my mum and we decided to take it.
I began ringing around to see if there was anywhere we might have the wake but of course
everywhere was filled with Christmas bookings. In the end, my friends Dean and Janice organised a buffet for us and set it all up while we were at the church. I was so thankful to them for doing that. At the church we sang ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and my father’s favourite poem, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, was read. At the crematorium they played ‘To Be A Pilgrim’, which made me smile sadly as I thought about my dad – one of the silly little things he would do was to change the words around so that he sang, ‘To Be a Grim Pill’. Another thing that my dad used to say which always sticks with me is ‘From the sublime to the cor blimey’ instead of ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous’. His funny little sayings used to make me laugh and it made me upset that I’d never hear him say those words again.
At the end of the service they played ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. I was distraught hearing this Liverpool anthem and thinking about how much my dad meant to me. I knew I should be getting out of my seat to speak to people and thank them for coming but I just sat there sobbing.
Afterwards everyone came back to my mum’s; Dean and Janice had done us proud. They had put on a wonderful spread and I felt very much supported by my great friends and family. After a while I noticed that Joel wasn’t around and I went to find out where he’d gone. He was sitting on the edge of my dad’s bed.
‘Joel, are you all right?’ I asked. I knew how hard this was for him.
He nodded his head, then after a bit of thought said, ‘Mum, can we start Christmas now?’
Poor Joel, all this sadness and focus on my dad’s funeral had totally taken away from any Christmas preparations. My dad would have agreed with Joel; he loved Christmas and loved to see Joel’s face when he opened his presents. I gave my son a hug and a kiss and said, ‘Course we can.’
Mum, Joel and I had a quiet, sad Christmas together. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves – Dad’s death was so recent and we missed him desperately. But my mother and I gave Joel his presents and tried to make sure that he didn’t miss out on the day.