How I found you’re never too old to fall in love — or have blazing, tearful rows
She was 66. He a decade older. And in her enthralling autobiography, the new Bake Off judge spares no detail about their fiery romance
I fell in love like I was 16. Was it Nature, Cupid—or HRT?
FOLLOWING my husband’s death, the phrase that angered me most — and I heard it many times — was a kindly: ‘You’ll find someone else, you know.’
Even nearly four years after Rayne’s death, I was — if not exactly desire-free — certainly not looking for physical love.
No sexual gratification could compensate for the embarrassment that undressing would have brought. My pale and unlovely 66-year-old body had barely seen the light of day, never mind a lover’s gaze, for many years — which was, I thought, as it should be.
Then, one day I realised I had designs on an old friend. We were driving along a coast road, the car warm, conversation sporadic and relaxed.
But my attention was less on Ernest’s commentary than on his body. How could I, an old-age pensioner, be transfixed by the sight of a 76-year-old man’s bare brown arm?
My eyes kept returning to the strong wrist, the pianist’s fingers on the wheel, the hairs on his forearm glinting orange in the sun. I longed to put my hand on it . . . DURING my first months of widowhood, early in 2003, I was a little mad. I went back to work like a demon. Yet I also must have done more crying in that first six months than in my previous 62 years.
Occasionally, in those first years, I’d come back from London and pick up my car at the station near my home. And, thinking of the empty house awaiting me, I would sometimes wail out loud.
Then, one night when the rain was drumming on the car roof, I suddenly realised there was an element of pleasure in the howling: I was hamming it up, crying deliberately louder as the car ploughed through the puddles and the rain pelted down.
What with the tears and the rain, I could barely see. I stopped to find some tissues to deal with the misted-up windscreen and with me. I found myself smiling, mocking myself for being such a drama queen.
Gradually, I discovered some small benefits to widowhood, like being free to read at midnight or having sole dominion over the TV remote.
Two years after Rayne’s death, the greyness of grief had noticeably abated. That feeling of there being no point in anything, that life is somehow flavour-free or lived through thick glass, came less often. IN OCTOBER 2006, almost four years after Rayne’s death, I went to the Canaries to spend a weekend holding the hand of a friend, Sir Ernest Hall. I’d known him and his wife, Sarah, for years, mainly through my chairmanship of the Royal Society Of Arts, for which Ernest had provided free space and help.
According to mutual friends, he was depressed by the double whammy of retirement from his business and separation from Sarah.
Ernest has had an extraordinary life. Born in Bolton, he grew up in a working-class terrace house with washing hanging in the yard and a privy out the back. Determined to become a pianist, he went to the Royal Manchester College of Music.
Eventually, after going into property development, he bought — with his son and a partner — 18 derelict carpet mills in Halifax and turned them into places where work and art could flourish side by side. He also became, late in life, a professional pianist.
Anyway, Ernest met me at the airport. And after fewer than three hours in the car, I was longing to lace my fingers over his.
I didn’t have long to wait. After a second day of sightseeing, we were having a glass of wine in the Moroccan courtyard of Ernest’s house in Lanzarote.
The tiled pool glinted through the potted palms and the air was soft and balmy. Ernest put his hand on my wrist and slid it up my sleeve and that was it.
I never even thought to be embarrassed. It was magic. Nature, or Cupid, or maybe HRT — or more likely the combination of sun, wine and music — took a hand and it was exactly as I remembered the last time I’d fallen in love: with my husband 40-plus years before.
The talking all night, discovering how lovely the night sky is, a sudden interest in reading and writing poetry, feeling sick, shaking, every sense alert, the whole world singing. There is not a cliche in the book that lovers don’t feel at 60-plus just as much as at 16.
But the course of true love did not run smooth. The first time Ernest gave me cause for alarm was in spring 2007, six months after we’d fallen in love.
We were on our way to Klagenfurt, to one of those Alpine health clinics where you’re lucky to get a spelt biscuit to eat with your hay-flower tea.
It was a disaster from the start. I was following Ernest through the departure gates at Heathrow, when he abruptly stopped in the middle of the stream of hurrying travellers to scramble in his shoulder bag for his passport. I reached for his arm to pull him out of the traffic flow. He rounded on me, flinging my hand off angrily. ‘Will you stop nannying me!’
I was astonished. He’d never been rough with me. ‘But darling, you’re right in everyone’s way.’
‘They can walk round. I will stand where I like. Just stop interfering.’
Moments later, he set off in the wrong direction. ‘Darling, Gate 32 is this way . . .’
Now his irritation was more like rage. ‘I know what I am doing. Do you think I can’t find my way on to a plane?’
I trooped after him, down an escalator in the wrong direction, anticipating the satisfaction of him saying: ‘Sorry, darling, you were right.’
No such luck. Ernest eventually realised that he’d gone wrong and simply plunged back the way we’d come, with a cheerful: ‘It’s this way.’
Barely speaking, I left the matter of travel leadership to him. On arrival in Frankfurt, where we were to change planes, I buried my head in my book, with the result that we missed our connection.
On our eventual arrival, we were taken on a tour of the spa hotel. Ernest was interested only in where he would find a piano on which to practise.
The poor girl kept telling him that we would soon come to the dance studio.
When we did, she said, smiling: ‘This is the piano, and you can use it any time you like except 11 on Tuesday morning, when there is a
dance class.’ ‘ Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ Ernest replied, ‘I don’t mind playing while a dance class goes on.’
Then I made, for the third time that day, the mistake of trying to help. I explained that she meant the dance class would need the piano.
‘Will you stop interfering! Just stay out of it.’
I ducked out through the nearest door into the garden and burst into tears. I was totally unused to being shouted at.
I grew up in a family where politeness ruled. I never heard my parents even raise their voices to each other. In my business life, differences were settled in civilised tones. Even a rude shopkeeper or angry driver makes me shake.
Once we got to our room, we had our first full- scale quarrel. Blind with rage and tears, I slammed out, dragging my suitcase behind me. Halfway down the hideous swirly carpet, I realised I’d be going nowhere. It was 9pm and I was up an Austrian mountain.
I calmed down a little and asked for a separate room. Of course, I spent the night tossing and churning, longing for a word from Ernest.
I wrote him a letter protesting at the unfairness of his behaviour, telling him I loved him and suggesting we meet in the little front garden and talk about it.
At dawn, I put the letter under his door and parked myself in the garden. He did not come. After two hours, unable to bear it any longer, I knocked on his door. He was sitting in a chair, writing.
He’d been working on his autobiography since 4am, he explained, and didn’t have time to discuss anything. I must read his letter. I took it and left.
The letter amounted to a declaration that he was too busy with the important work of writing his book and composing music to bother with my histrionics.
Take it or leave it. It was up to me. Not a word of apology, not an ounce of sympathy.
This ‘your choice’ was a recurring theme, often with some mad condition attached. Every time we quarrelled in the next three-and-ahalf years, he’d lay down his rules (we should not meet until after lunch; we should have separate bedrooms) and tell me to take it or leave it.
Back at the hotel, our quarrel ended when I rang him in tears, asking him to put his arms around me. His arrival in my life had shown me just how bleak life without a mate had been.
I did not think: am I prepared to put up with this behaviour again? I just wanted us to be back where we were before.
AFTER Klagenfurt, I soon found the price of Ernest’s love was having to accept that eruptions of fury and occasional bouts of unkindness were part of him, as were the plunges into despair and self-loathing.
I did not know who the real Ernest was. The hateful egomaniac? The silent melancholic? Or the man I’d fallen so in love with?
It was Ernest’s daughter, Viv, who explained bipolar disorder to me. I was complaining to her about her father’s changing moods when she said, ‘Dad’s bipolar. Manic depressive. I am, too. It’s hereditary.’
I had a look at a bipolar website. Ernest ticked ten out of ten of the boxes for mania and nine out of ten for depression. I showed them to him, but he brushed them aside: ‘Stop worrying. I’m fine.’
With me pressing him, he eventually agreed to taking the drug Depakote to lessen the symptoms of depression. But in all those three-and-a-half years, he never admitted to the mania.
I think this is common with bipolar. The patient will do nothing that might endanger the euphoria of the extreme highs, while being willing to do anything to alleviate the misery of the black hole.
We spent a good deal of time at his house in Lanzarote, most of it blissfully happy. And in June of 2007, when we had been together eight months, Ernest, to my astonishment, gave me a Mercedes sports car. That summer we drove around france in it.
The first night’s B& B was a converted mill house. There was a piano downstairs and Ernest, who was setting to music some of the love poems I’d been writing, seated himself at it to compose. Later, we sat talking in the garden as dusk fell and the stars came out.
It was concentrated happiness. But the next morning, when I asked Ernest where my poems were, he went up like a roman candle: ‘How would I know? I’ve not touched them!’
‘But you had them last night. I gave them to you, remember?’
‘I never touched them! Don’t tell me I had them when I’ve had nothing to do with them!’
Deep breath. Keep calm. I found them downstairs, still on the piano. No apology. No admission of over-reacting.
Mostly, we were very happy. In an email, a friend described us as ‘exuberant, skipping round the world like adolescent lovers’. Embarrassing, but accurate.
Typically, Ernest was up for three months, then depressed for two. When he was down, it was horrible for him and not much fun for me. He barely spoke. Naturally generous, he would suddenly think the price of a taxi would ruin him. All he wanted to do was sleep or, better still, kill himself.
In the spring of 2009, he was so low that I managed to persuade him to check into a specialist retreat. The place turned out to be run-down, short of staff and crammed with a collection of damaged souls — some mad, some addicts, some suicidal. I loved them.
CURIOUSLY, the retreat did make a difference to Ernest, or rather his fellow inmates did. Between them, they convinced him of the need for both medication and therapy.
It helped that things were so good between Ernest and me. Three weeks of incarceration together somehow cemented our love, and one day he proposed marriage.
This made me consider what I really wanted. It amounted to this: I wanted to one day be married to him, but I needed to be sure I would not walk out on him. Which meant he had to stay on his medication.
If after, say, a year, he was stable and sane, I said, then I’d want nothing more than to throw in my lot with his.
Over the summer and autumn, the periods of depression duly diminished. We became more convinced of the possibility of happy-ever-after.
We went to the music festival in Verbier and heard a young mezzo soprano, Catherine Hopper. If Ernest ever finished the music for my love poems, we decided, we would have her sing them in a concert for family and friends.
One of our great pleasures was the conversion of a falling- down old tithe barn — in the grounds of my house — into a home that we thought we might share.
We spent a happy day at a reclamation yard, where Ernest ordered a beautiful centuries- old french stone trough. And we decided his enormous black piano would grace the middle of our biggest room.
So Ernest was more and more in the warp and weft of my life. One day, he rang from Lanzarote to say he’d bought the property next door. for a concert theatre. ‘What concerts? Are you mad?’ The answer, of course, was probably yes. He set about his grand scheme for Camel House Concerts on Lanzarote, recruiting an old friend, the renowned pianist Paul Crossley, as artistic director and Paul’s partner, John Brakband, as administrator.
And I soon became enthusiastic