by Sue Johnston
‘What?’ I asked.
‘We’ve just spent all day being you,’ Dawn replied.
‘Being me?’ I exclaimed. I couldn’t think what she could mean.
‘We’re doing Waking the Dead for the Christmas Special,’ she explained. ‘I’m you and Jennifer’s Boyd.’
I laughed, extremely flattered. I have to say that, in my opinion, to have French and Saunders perform a skit of your show means you’ve arrived.
‘Right,’ I said, sitting down next to them. ‘Do you want some tips?’
I let them into a few trade secrets, one of which was that when we remove our glasses and put them back on again, it’s usually because we were looking at a script. When the sketch came out they had us putting on and taking off the glasses almost constantly throughout.
The next time I would meet Jennifer would be by pure coincidence but it would be the start of a new friendship.
*
Susie and I had gathered a group of us together to stay in a pub in Devon for the New Year. My cousin David had recommended the pub-cum-B&B and Susie and I had discovered it for ourselves the previous summer. It was on the moors with roaring log fires – picture perfect. My friend Anna Keaveney was meant to be coming with us, but she had sadly passed away after a hard battle with lung cancer in November of that year, 2004. I was very saddened by her death and she was, and is, sorely missed. I was very pleased, though, that her partner Mark was able to come.
On New Year’s Eve, I got dolled up and headed to the bar to meet with my friends and family. As I was sitting there, who should be in a corner of the bar with her husband Ade and their children but Jennifer Saunders. It turned out that the landlord was Jennifer’s brother.
I got a drink and went to sit with them, and Jennifer said, ‘I’m writing a series for you, Sue.’
I was delighted. I loved French and Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous and I was thrilled with the idea of being in Jennifer’s next show.
‘And,’ she went on, ‘the woman I’m basing it on is over here, come and meet her.’ She took me over to meet her friend Cindy and we had a good chat. And this is how I first heard about Jam and Jerusalem.
The evening descended into drunken debauchery and we all had a marvellous time, playing parlour games that none of us could quite keep up with and chatting into the wee small hours.
I awoke the next day with a sore head and then returned to London hoping that I would hear from Jennifer but putting it to the back of my mind for the time being. Eventually, months later, my agent rang to say that a script had arrived. I loved it and was delighted to hear who else was going to be in the cast. Among them was my friend Maggie Steed who I had known since the early seventies.
When I arrived in Devon to begin filming it was to discover that my home for the next couple of months would be Jennifer’s brother’s pub. My overriding memory of my time on Jam and Jerusalem was how much we laughed. Again, like on The Royle Family, I was surrounded by funny people. It was great to be an audience with this many fantastic performers. Jennifer and I had a great rivalry. She is a massive Manchester United fan and of course I am Liverpool through and through.
We would have great evenings out after filming and I remember one evening sitting in the pub getting merrily merry when I got chatting to one of the supporting artists. He was very friendly and asked me if I’d ever considered a tattoo. I hadn’t, I told him, but now that he mentioned it…
So I sat with him for the rest of the night, carefully planning what my tattoo was going to look like, I was going to mark my dedication to Liverpool for life. I stopped short of suggesting Stevey Gerrard’s head and decided on a simple Liver Bird, the symbol of the club.
The following day I awoke with a hangover and when I arrived on set the tattooist was there, ready for me with all his equipment. I looked at him in horror. I had to politely tell him that I wouldn’t be requiring a tattoo after all.
I really loved the camaraderie on Jam and Jerusalem, of working with this great gang of women. It was a very supportive environment and one in which I felt I could share what was on my mind with the girls. Which was something I became very thankful of.
Chapter Nineteen
IT WAS AROUND this time that I noticed a real decline in my mother. Things had been going downhill for the past few years but now it was getting serious. My mum had, of course, always been a forceful character and that extended to telling me her opinion of old people’s homes.
‘You’re not putting me in a home!’ she had told me on numerous occasions.
So when the strong, forthright, no-nonsense woman I had grown up with began to be beset by health problems, I, at first, tried to care for her myself.
Mum had always been so well turned out that even now, at ninety, she was still determined to look after herself and look the best she could. I would head home at the weekend to take care of her.
I arrived home one weekend from filming Jam and Jerusalem and I waited in the sitting room while she was getting ready; she refused any help, she was too proud. It had begun to take my mother longer and longer to perform her ablutions. Eventually I got up and went to investigate what was going on.
‘Mother, what are you doing?’ I asked, standing outside the bathroom door.
‘I’m getting a wash,’ she snapped back. ‘What d’you think I’m doing? Flying a kite?’
She was having a full body wash while standing by the sink. The idea that she might smell petrified her, but she had stopped having a bath some time ago for fear of having a fall. And she wouldn’t have a shower because she didn’t trust them. ‘Too much like a watering can.’
After what seemed like an eternity she eventually emerged, dressed immaculately with her pearls and red lipstick on.
Over the past few years her respiratory problems had worsened. She had also begun to suffer falls that were becoming increasingly severe. I had to admit that she was a danger to herself, doing things like leaving the gas on and not realising she had. Her mind was becoming affected by dementia; one day she would be fine, the next she would be imagining things. She began to have an ongoing hallucination about a young boy who lived on the roof whom she could see through the window.
Sometimes I arrived to find her particularly agitated. For instance, one day she was very concerned.
‘He’s getting wet,’ she said anxiously.
I sat down in the chair next to her. ‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The boy on the roof. It’s raining and no one’s brought him in, poor love. He’s feeding them birds but who’s feeding him?’ She looked worried. ‘I’m not sure he’s looked after,’ Mum added, straining her neck to look at the roof outside.
I strained my neck too, knowing full well that there was no one there. After a good while of listening to my mother’s tales, I headed into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. On my return she looked much happier.
‘Next door have put a telly in the top room for him so he can watch his programmes,’ she said, satisfied.
‘That’s nice of them, isn’t it?’ I said agreeably, supping my tea.
We used to have these conversations over and over again. At times I did feel like I was going doolally myself but I didn’t want to burst my mother’s bubble. The doctor said it would frighten her if she were to be confronted with the truth when she was so convinced of what she imagined.
One day, one of my uncles came to visit. My mother was happily telling him all about the boy on the roof when he snapped at her, pulling back the curtains and gesticulating out of the window. ‘For God’s sake, Margaret, there’s no one there!’
My mother’s face crumpled. She looked distraught and went very quiet. When my uncle had gone she became tearful and said to me, ‘They think I’m mad, don’t they?’
I hated seeing her like this, upset and frightened. In cases like this it was far better to pretend that what she imagined was actually happening.
But sometimes I had to disillusion her for her own good. She would call me in the
middle of the night, confused and distressed. She would have fallen asleep and then awake not knowing what time it was, got dressed, put on the TV and fallen asleep again in front of it. Whatever was on the TV so late at night would form the backbone to her confused state.
Once, the phone began to ring at two o’clock in the morning. I jumped out of bed. ‘Hello!’ I shouted into the receiver.
Although I knew at the back of my mind that it would be my mother, there was always the fear that it was someone else ringing because something had happened to her, if she’d managed to get out of the house and was wandering around, or had a fall, or something even worse.
‘Susan!’ she shouted hysterically. ‘Your leg! What’s happened to your leg?’
‘Nothing, Mum,’ I reassured her. ‘My leg is fine.’
‘It’s not. It’s on the telly now and it’s gashed open. There’s blood everywhere.’
‘Mum, I’m looking at both of my legs and honestly, they’re fine.’
‘It’s hanging off!’
‘It isn’t, Mum!’
‘Have they stopped the bleeding?’
‘There isn’t any bleeding, Mum, honestly.’
‘But it’s on the telly, Susan, I can see it.’
Mum sounded so utterly distraught that I was desperate to calm her down. Knowing that there was little I could do to allay her fears from two hundred miles away, I put the phone to my legs, stamped on the floor several times and shouted, ‘Look, I’m fine, Mother, two legs, in perfect working order.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone as Mum tried to take this in. Then she said quietly, ‘Oh well, okay. If you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure, Mum. Try to get some sleep.’
She eventually believed me and went back to bed. These incidents were so distressing for her because she believed in the reality of them. And it took a lot of reassurance to convince her everything was all right and being so far away made this difficult to give.
Throughout my mother’s dementia she would see members of the family that had long since died and inform me that they had just been in to visit. But she only ever imagined that she had seen my father once. I arrived one day to find her sitting quietly, looking very displeased.
‘You all right, Mum?’ I asked.
She nodded towards the bedroom. ‘He’s in there, sulking.’
‘Who is?’ I asked.
‘Your father,’ she said, adamantly. ‘I’m not going in there while he’s in there.’
I went into the bedroom and came back out again. ‘It’s all right, Mum, he’s gone,’ I said, and after that she never claimed to have seen my dad. Of course she would talk about him and refer back to things that they had done together but she never imagined she’d seen him again.
*
The guilt that I used to feel leaving Joel as a boy when I went to work was now replaced with the guilt of working while my mother was ill. Throughout this time I soldiered on, trying to look after her myself and work at the same time. I was living life on an ad hoc basis, with no time for myself, just work and spending time looking after my mother. My aunty Jean and other members of my family were brilliant and mucked in constantly and Susie was always on the other end of the phone ready to help out with my mother while I was away working. My family and Susie lived nearby and were an absolute godsend.
My mother, on the other hand, didn’t quite see things the way that I did. While everyone else was busy making sure that she was looked after, she made her feelings quite clear on the subject of me being away working half the week. I should give up work and move back to Warrington to look after her. She wanted me near. ‘Why couldn’t you have married a plumber?’ she would still ask with great disappointment.
I might have had the same thought myself on the few occasions that my shower leaked or I couldn’t find the stopcock but I didn’t necessarily see it as an essential component of a fulfilled life!
One day I arrived at my mother’s, laden down with shopping bags, and set about stocking the fridge. She must have felt that she had exhausted the ‘Why couldn’t you have married a plumber?’ line of attack so instead she said, ‘I wish you’d never had an education!’
I took a deep breath, bit my tongue and continued stocking the fridge. I didn’t think that going into the whys and wherefores of my education would be particularly constructive so I took the eggs out of the box and put them into the fridge compartment instead, trying not to smash them in frustration.
Of course, my mother’s disappointment in me was nothing new – she’d been saying things like this all my life – but it was frustrating. I was working flat out, flying up the motorway any time I had a day off, only to be greeted with constant criticism.
I knew that I couldn’t move back home and become my mother’s full-time carer, although the guilt often saw me toy with the idea. My friends and family were quite clear with me, they knew that I would go stir crazy if I did this, and I would resent my mother for forcing my hand. They also knew that my mother was definitely wearing her rose-tinted spectacles. If I had been around her twenty-four hours a day, not only would I have gone potty, I would have driven her to distraction too.
For the first few years of her decline I gave her lots of options rather than being firm with her and making the decision I thought was right. A good example of this was the Meals on Wheels episode. My mother was adamant she wasn’t having Meals on Wheels. ‘Who do you think I am?’ she would snap.
Whether she felt that cooking her own food was one of the last vestiges of independence that she wasn’t willing to forgo or it simply was plain snobbery I’m not quite sure. So for over four years, every week I would drive from London to Warrington, go to a Marks & Spencer food hall – it had to be M&S, not Morrison’s or Tesco, thank you very much! – and stock her fridge full of food so that she could cook for herself. The idea of this seems like such a short-term solution to a long-term problem now that I think about it, a four-hundred-mile round trip to take my mother shopping, every week! But at the time it felt like the only option. I was literally running up and down the country to keep my mother happy.
I suppose I’d had a lifetime of trying to keep the peace, always going out of my way to not offend my mother. On a more basic level, of course, I wanted to know that she was getting regular good food. In the end I had to put my foot down and with a heavy heart I ordered in Meals on Wheels. She was adamant she would only have three meals to begin with and she was very sniffy about the food at first. ‘There’s no salt in it!’ she declared, insisting the food was tasteless and bland.
‘Well, put some salt on it, then!’ I said in exasperation. It might not be the healthiest thing but it was a simple pleasure and meant that she stopped complaining about her Meals on Wheels delivery and started to enjoy them.
She soon realised that the food she was being brought was good, home-cooked food, so she allowed me to order in more meals for her. And eventually she forged a relationship with the man that delivered the meals, a man from Liverpool with a great sense of humour whom Mum always hugely looked forward to seeing. One of the advantages of having Meals on Wheels was that they would just leave them for you, you didn’t have to be in. But Mum always wanted to make sure she was back so she could have a bit of banter with her new friend. Something that she had resisted for so long became one of the highlights of her day.
There were regular battles like this. She refused to have a wheelchair for a long time, insisting on getting about with a Zimmer frame with wheels on. I understood that accepting that she would be better off in a wheelchair was a huge step for her so I didn’t push it, but I gently tried to urge her to think about it. When she finally relented she realised I could push her around in it, like the Queen Mother, which suited her just fine! It meant for me that we could get out and about together a bit more and see more of the world without a constant battle over her waning independence. We would go to the park, to the garden centre (somewhere my mother loved to visit ‘for a look
’), to get a cup of coffee and a cake and of course we could go to Marks together too.
As my mother’s health began to get worse, I was receiving constant worried phone calls at work. Yet I was still trying to make this impossible situation work. When she had a fall that saw her hospitalised again I knew that I had to do something but I really didn’t want to go against her wishes. Meanwhile, she was constantly anxious and imagining things. I decided that I needed to get some outside carers in to help with my mother. Mum was extremely truculent when presented with these women invading her space, as she saw it.
I would no sooner be through the door than Mum would grab me and whisper conspiratorially. ‘Them nurses,’ she hissed referring to her carers, ‘they’re taking my tea bags. They stick them in their pockets and go out with them.’
I would tell her that I didn’t think that was the case.
‘They do!’ she would protest getting upset. ‘You don’t know what it’s like because you’re not here to see it.’
I managed to talk my mum round and convince her that the carers were a good thing, but she still kept an eye on her PG Tips.
*
A few months earlier I had received a call from Caroline Aherne. I thought that she was calling up for a chat but she said, ‘Sue, I’m going to do another Royle Family, are you in?’
She explained that she had been to her grandmother’s funeral in Ireland and it had made her think that she wanted to do another Royle Family. The one thing she would be really sad about was to kill Nana off but if we were coming back after six years then it had to be for something big.
Meeting up with everyone again was fantastic. Six years on, Anthony was all grown up and we were all back in the house with Nana living in the living room. Caroline had written in the script that Nana picks up a magnifying glass and we see her big magnified eye through it, something she had seen her own grandmother do. I was in hysterics watching Liz do this and it still makes me smile now thinking about it.