I didn’t cry when my beloved mum died, admits Carol
THE bond between Carol Vorderman and her mother was never less than close, forged in the TV host’s ‘dirt poor’ childhood.
Over the years they either lived together or close by and, for the last few months of her life, Jean Vorderman was looked after by her daughter as she battled cancer.
But now Jean has gone, her daughter says she can go a week without even thinking about her. Miss Voderman, 57, also admitted that she had not wept when her mother died in June last year.
‘When it happened, I just didn’t cry and then, this is a terrible thing, but I didn’t really think about her,’ she said.
‘We could not have a closer bond, I couldn’t have been a better daughter to my mother. And I adored her, so why is it that when she passed, that it just hasn’t come?
‘I go through a week and I think, “Oh yeah, mum”, but it’s not every day and I can’t understand it.’
Miss Vorderman was talking on ITV chat show Lorraine yesterday. She told host Lorraine Kelly: ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last year, my mum and I had a truly unique relationship.’
She told how her father walked out when she was two weeks old – after an affair at the age of 40 with a girl of 16.
She said: ‘I had a brother and sister who were seven and nine then. We moved back to north Wales, where she was from.
‘We were dirt poor, my mum and I shared a bed until I was nine. My father used to come and he never used to see me, he said I wasn’t his child. As a mother you can imagine that this baby is so rejected, the bond between us was unusual’.
Miss Vorderman said she looked after her mother financially after graduating from Cambridge University.
She said: ‘I took responsibility for my mum from when I was 21, I employed her from when I was 25, she lived with me or I bought her a flat next door to where I was living all of my life. So the bond between us was incredibly close.’
Miss Vorderman described her family as ‘a team of four’. Wherever she moved to, she took her mother and her two children Katie, now 27 and Cameron, now 21, with her
Miss Vorderman said, however, that the first anniversary of her mother’s death brought on a ‘tsunami of grief’.
She added: ‘Two weeks ago when I was thinking about the anniversary of her death coming up, it was June 7, it hit me like a wave.
‘I couldn’t stop crying for a day and then it stopped again.
‘It was like a tsunami of grief that came at me and then it just stopped. And I woke up the next morning and sort of carried on.’
Having cared for her mother for so many years, she has ‘the freedom that I didn’t have before’.
She added: ‘It was a joy to look after her for as long as I did. I was there every day, she was my every day’.
It was Jean Vorderman who famously answered a Channel 4 advert on behalf of her daughter, who was then working as a civil engineer for Sir Alfred McAlpine.
A presentable girl who was good at maths was needed to appear on a new programme – Countdown. Carol Vorderman went on to appear on the show for 26 years from 1982.
‘A tsunami of grief came at me’