2023? It was my annus horribilis

CANDID, CONFESSIONAL, CONTROVERSIAL

A fortnight after Benji, two weeks before Christmas, I receive an email, headed, ‘Sad news’. My sister in Australia has died. My nephew sent it, adding he didn’t appreciate me writing about his mum’s illness, saying I must not write about her passing: ‘Let’s keep this a family matter, yeah?’ That last line? I lose it. She was my sister. We never had a cross word. I’m mourning, too.

I’ve been watching the funeral of Shane MacGowan online, listening to the eulogies, his music. Death is the great leveller, but when someone who isn’t famous dies it seems not to matter. Isn’t it strange that someone special to you doesn’t get an obit in The Times, a headline on the Six O’Clock News? I have my memories of Lynnie. Don’t these belong to me?

I doubt I’ll be invited to the funeral. So this is my eulogy. What I would read out loud, if allowed…

* * * * *

The earliest photo I have of Lynnie was taken when she was three. She’s in a nurse’s uniform, a red cross on her chest. She’s clinging to my dad’s legs; he’s dapper in his Army uniform. It was around 1953 and our family had been posted to East Africa. Lynnie’s eyes are puffy, but then she always looked as though she’d been crying. Mum is beautiful in a summer dress. Our brother Nick, with his blonde mop top. Eldest sister Clare. All gone. All ghosts.

My earliest memory is her sprawled on the sofa, encouraging me to batter her thighs with a table tennis bat. She thought this would slim them: it was the 1960s, era of Petticoat and Nimble bread. I always looked up to her: that perfect retroussé nose, the long, muscular legs. She wanted to study ballet but instead ended up in the knitting department of Dickins & Jones, thinking that working just off Carnaby Street would get her closer to swinging London. Of course it didn’t. But she’d bring home Beatles and Rolling Stones magazines for me. We watched, on our rented telly, the Beatles play Shea Stadium. ‘I didn’t blink once,’ I said, trying to impress her. ‘Don’t be silly, of course you did.’

She trained as a nurse, fulfilling the promise of that infant costume. The 60s didn’t do young women any favours: men no longer had to marry them. I remember when the 70s began and Lynnie came home, hair dyed jet black, a guitar slung over one shoulder, her latest boyfriend in tow – someone my dad would forever refer to as ‘that long-haired layabout’. She fell in and out of love: the doctor with the red sports car. The TV presenter.

The world-famous surgeon.

She progressed to running intensive care at the National Heart Hospital. When I moved to London, I’d meet her in the pub opposite after her shift and she would tell me tales of cracking ribs open. The job took its toll, but I still get emails from those who worked with her: ‘Lynnie worked as a night sister with patients who had just had surgery, it was very stressful. She was a beautiful girl, and a very good nurse. She supported all those with less experience and was fun to work with. Jane.’

All Lynnie really wanted was to be a mum. She met a much younger Australian backpacker. I have a photo taken on the night before she flew to Sydney: jeans, bare feet, her ‘Jenny Agutter’ face glowing with the knowledge she was going to be happy at last. She did indeed have two boys. I hope she’s now with her elder, Nick, who died aged 21. Tom, her younger: you are her spitting image. She’d say that leaving her family and career to get married was worth it, because she had you two. I’m at the edge of that photo, and I look so anxious, so upset to be losing her. That she would go on such a momentous journey when, living just off Wigmore Street, she’d never venture further than Debenhams.

I did visit Australia, once. The boys were very young. Nick would refuse to eat, and when we tried to strap him in a car seat to go to the beach, he would scream and squirm. Lynnie never lost patience, or raised her voice. Only a year or so later did we learn Nick had leukaemia: his tantrums were a sign that something was wrong.

The last time I saw Lynnie was when she stayed in my flat in London before a flight home. This was not long after her son had died. She had fallen out with the person she was staying with. Her crime? She had been smoking: understandable, given her grief.

Her hostess had screamed: ‘You want to burn my son in his bed!’ and chucked her out, so she came to me. She said she needed space, so I left her. I got a call from a number I didn’t recognise: ‘I’m with your sister. She’s forgotten the address of your flat.’ Luckily, she had my number on her.

Typical Lynnie. She had the ditsy blonde persona, but all she wanted was a loving family. I think the years spent in nursing hastened her end: she always complained of back pain. She only went to the pub to dull what she’d witnessed. I’m sure the patients she couldn’t save will be waiting for her, clapping and cheering and banging on pans.

In the earliest photo I have of Lynnie, she’s in a nurse’s uniform