LEGACY OF LOVE
LAST Christmas morning, Geri Horner and her daughter Bluebell sat under their sparkling tree and opened the beautiful presents lovingly chosen and wrapped by their ever-generous friend George Michael.
Hours later, they learned the terrible news that George was dead.
“It was hideous,” Geri said quietly. “Just terrible.
“George had bought clothes for Bluey and he always sent my mother a fantastic food hamper. “He was so kind. And then...” It was a day when everything changed. But now the former Spice Girl is determined to take the tragedy and sadness of George’s loss and transform it into a positive force to help children who are suffering.
She explained: “I think about him a lot – as anyone would who has lost a close friend.
“I think what I’ve realised from his passing is that the world moves very fast and that’s why we have to do the best we can while we are here. I am very conscious of that.”
It’s this realisation which has led Geri to take on a new role as an ambassador for the NSPCC and Childline.
And today Geri throws her support behind the NSPCC’s Light Up Christmas for Children campaign.
THE ambition is to help raise £500,000 to ensure more calls and online messages to Childline are being answered.
At the moment, the voices of 20 kids every hour are going unheard as Childline struggles to meet growing demands.
Following George’s death at the age of just 53, it emerged the superstar had given millions of pounds to the charity.
“After George died I started doing some research and that was when I found out how much he’d done for Childline,” said Geri.
“I met up with Esther Rantzen (the former That’s Life! presenter who founded the vital helpline).
“She was the one who told me how much he had given and it blew me away. I thought it was just inspirational.”
As a teenager growing up in Watford, Geri was a huge fan of George from his earliest days with the duo Wham!
When her own pop career in The Spice Girls exploded, she met the star at an awards show and they quickly became firm friends.
When she left the band in 1998, and again when she gave birth to Bluebell in 2006 as a single mother, George was there to support her all the way.
He opened up his home to her and did everything he could to help.
Geri recalled: “I think there are pockets of time in your life when things aren’t going well and that’s when you find out who you are and who your friends are.
“George was always there for me. He was very kind to me.”
So while the scale of George’s secret support for Childline may have surprised Geri, his generosity of spirit did not.
Geri knew too just how much her old friend adored kids.
“George loved children,” she said, sitting in the cosy kitchen of her London home, surrounded by pictures of Bluebell, now 11, and her baby son Monty.
Geri gave birth to Monty three weeks after her friend’s death and he has George as a middle name.
“George used to come here when Bluebell had her birthday party,” said Geri. “When she was six years old, it was me and about 10 children and George.
“He was totally into it – he loved seeing children having fun.
“He was very, very sweet with them and just liked their innocence, I think.”
After George’s death, Geri learned more about Childline’s work and visited the charity’s London HQ after making contact with Rantzen.
She said: “It is a massive open-plan office full of people, most of whom are giving up their time voluntarily to help children who need someone to talk to.
“These people are inspirational and a great reminder of how much light is in the world, when we can often feel there is just so much darkness.
“During the evening and night, it is difficult to get enough volunteers and that is often when kids are desperately in need of someone to talk to.
“This is why Childline so needs money to answer the calls. On the wall of the offices, a board shows how many children are in a queue waiting for their call to be answered. “They know if a call isn’t answered in about three rings the child will often give up. That is devastating. It’s why this charity so need our support.”
The calls coming into the Childline centre that day – and every day – ranged from less serious to truly traumatic.
There are calls on family troubles, bullying and a whole new range of anxieties created by the digital world. “I heard something recently that in a survey 50 per cent of children said they wished digital media didn’t exist,” said Geri. “And that’s awful”. She added: “When I was a kid, there would be bullying of course but you went home at the end of the day and there was respite from the bully.
“That’s not there nowadays.
“It can be
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