I have been to Manchester and back today, a round trip of some 400 miles with a 3 ½ hour meeting in the middle of the journey. Last night I watched the weather forecast and everywhere was mild – too mild – I like it to be really cold in January (that’s all relative of course compared to Alaska or Toronto!). Cold kills garden pests! I set off this morning (6am) in pounding rain lasting all of the journey. When I arrived in Manchester at 9.30am it was still dark – so gloomy and black were the clouds it hardly seemed as though the sun had risen.
When I came out of the meeting and set off for home I became quickly aware of plummeting temperatures and noticed the fields were white. I realised how incredibly stupid I’d been when I got out of the car to get a hot drink in a service station and was tottering across the car park in one of my best pairs of kitten heels and a thin fabric, flimsy suit with no coat. What if I’d broken down? I’d have been in trouble! Stupid girl!
My radio was tuned to Radio 4 and I’d forgotten how nice it can be to be travelling in the car in the afternoon….The Archers (a soap set on and around a farm) followed by a play, followed by Gardener’s Question Time – what glee I felt. Making it better was the fact that I was technically WORKING – so often I should be enjoying my leisure time and I’m having to work that this was a nice change from the norm.
My happiness was short lived though, the play was about an archaeologist who’d been researching the Vikings when he came across the story of a murder in World War II. The person relating the story of the murder was telling of his experiences when, as a German Jew, he’d escaped to the UK only to be tormented by people who thought him a Nazi sympathiser. The story was very powerfully told.
It reminded me of the day I met my friend, Debbie. She was a South African, newly in England, straight out of university and had just joined our team (in my old company). I was sat at my desk when I noticed a colleague (who doesn’t deserve to be named…well actually he does but hopefully he feels ashamed enough of his actions to have sleepless nights so I won’t inflict any more suffering on him) goose-stepping along the corridor behind her. I didn’t know her well enough at the time to realise just how heart-breaking that was for her because she, like the man in the play, was a Jew. The stupid man just thought ‘white South African = Nazi’ and assumed he could easily pigeon-hole her in that way.
Anyway, Debbie and I went on to become great friends – I admired her ability to go on and develop a good career with the company despite people like him making her life a misery. She was one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, bright, funny, beautiful inside and out. She left us to go and work for a big London advertising agency and once confessed to me that she felt so lucky because they paid her to sit on a couch all day in her office reading magazines. I’m sure she exaggerated the shallow-ness of the role but her life seemed truly sorted. It appeared she had everything, a job she loved, a wonderful boyfriend and a nice flat in London. The only blot on her horizon was that her parents wouldn’t consider her marrying her man because he was not of her faith.
Or so I thought. I remember the last time I saw her so clearly, I’d arranged to meet her in London for a meal and a play. I came out of the tube station and was a couple of hundred yards behind her as I walked towards our rendezvous point. She looked wonderful in the mid-summer sunshine. We had a wonderful evening and then, as so often happens, it was months before I tried to phone her again and she’d left her job and moved so I thought I’d never come across her again.
She stayed on my mind and a number of years later, I was talking to another friend about her and saying how much I regretted losing touch with her. Jules phoned me a couple of days later and told me she’d found a contact number for her. I was thrilled. I phoned her and we spent a couple of hours catching up on the phone. Only it wasn’t the joyous event it should have been.
She truly did ‘have it all’ – she had cancer. Lymphatic carcinoma to be precise. That beautiful, waist length hair that had been swinging about in the early evening sunshine last time I’d seen her had all gone, she could only work a couple of hours a day and she had no idea if she’d live to see another year out. She had just finished a course of radiotherapy and had been describing to me how angry she’d been at the start and how frightened and alone she’d felt.
I could sympathise to a certain extent having had a cancer scare myself a year or so earlier but fortunately for me I had the ultimate relief that my ‘lump’ was benign.
The thing that has made me sad today (and I’m crying as I type this) is that the phone call was the last contact I ever had with her. I don’t even know if she won her battle. You see, I was a coward, I felt so inadequate – how on earth can you respond to someone who is going through such terrible trauma? I was too far away to offer any practical help and not brave enough to ring again in case Max told me something I couldn’t face hearing. The longer I left it the more difficult it became. The less I could face ringing that number.
One of the things she was most upset about was that if she survived, the chemo meant she’d never have children. That was such a waste because her genes truly deserved to live on through her children.
Regret is something I try not to do. This is my one regret.
