Barbara’s husband movingly tells of day she asked: ‘Sorry, who are you?’
SCOTT MITCHELL has told how he has had some “fairly dark moments” caring for his wife, Dame Barbara Windsor, during lockdown.
Ever since the 82-year-old actress was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014, Scott, 57, has been her round-the-clock carer but he admits that in recent months it has taken its toll.
“The common thing people will say to me is, ‘Scott you are doing a great job here but you have got to live a normal life’,” he reveals.
“But what does that mean. How can I live a normal life... there are times where I have been out of an evening and I feel very guilty.”
Scott has opened his heart to Barbara’s Eastenders co-star Ross Kemp in a two-part ITV special on living with dementia.
In emotional scenes, Ross, who played Barbara’s son Grant Mitchell in the soap, underlines his anguish as he chats to Scott.
“I speak to you on the phone and you feel riddled with guilt but Barbara is slowly slipping away from you,” Ross says.
Scott agrees: “Yeah, it is not the Barbara that I knew. It is not my wife Barbara any more. I am Barbara’s carer. I am still her friend. I still love the bones of the woman but it is not the Barbara that I know and knew, that I lived with.”
Scott recalls the heartbreaking moment when Babs failed to recognise him. “My heart sank the first time that Barbara looked at me and said, ‘Sorry, who are you?’,” he says. “Because your whole history is just 24 years or so at that time and it has just gone in their eyes and she is looking at a stranger and that is a very hard thing to take in.
“It still flips between… I can either be the most important part of her world or she will look at me and suddenly say, ‘Do you know where my husband Scott is?’
“Sometimes I just hold my hand out and squeeze her hand and smile and I say, ‘I am here’. And she will look puzzled and look at me and sometimes she will say, ‘Don’t be so stupid.you are not my husband’.
“The other thing about this illness is it can lead you into a false sense of security.” Ross agrees: “I have seen it. She will greet me and know who I am because she has prepared it and within minutes, she will say, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ And we go on that circle, that loop again.”
Scott reveals: “There is not a day goes by when I don’t have it lurking in the back of my mind, the fear that one day that she will be somewhere without me there and she will look around her and not know what is going on.” At
Scott’s request, Ross agreed not to film Barbara.
However, there is a clip of Babs in her final Eastenders scene as Peggy Mitchell when Ross fondly remembers how she played his mother for more than a decade.
“Barbara had early dementia in this emotional scene but it shows that she had a mastery of her art right up until her very last scene,” he says proudly.
“Two years after filming this she publicly announced that she had been living with Alzheimer’s. But away from the limelight, Scott was already living with this new reality.”
Scott also recalls the moment that he was first aware that something was wrong. “There was a change in her personality,” he reveals to Ross. “Now you and I both know that Barbara had many facets of personality. But there was just something about her that started to go.
“I felt there was a bit of her joy had started to go and there was a slight vacancy that was starting to creep in, and a more serious side to her.”
Ross adds: “I remember going out for dinner, didn’t we, and she was becoming more and more reliant on you.”
Scott says: “Yes, to fill in the gaps for the stories but the difference was that I knew behind the scenes that I was filling in for a different reason and I was now becoming aware that something was slightly afoot.”
Barbara’s diagnosis came in 2014 after a series of tests and brains scans, and Ross asks Scott what it was like for him when specialists said to him, ‘It is Alzheimer’s’.
“That was the moment when she just looked at me and she held her hand out and she said, ‘I am so sorry’, and she whispered it to me and I just held her hand and I said, ‘It’s OK. We are going to be OK’. But inside I think I went numb. It was such a shock,” reveals Scott.
“I don’t know if I really comprehended the whole way forward. Her life has been incredible and to think that there is so little memory of that now, is just quite awful.
“In the UK someone is diagnosed with dementia every three minutes and 700,000 people across the country care for someone with dementia and almost all experience feelings of stress or anxiety.
“It is a case of living with a disease that isn’t going away.”
In the show Ross also meets other people and families battling with the disease but he reveals how Barbara was the inspiration behind it.
He says: “One of the reasons for making this film is that one of my closest friends, somebody who I worked with for a very long time and somebody who I loved dearly has Alzheimer’s, the most common version of dementia, and her name is Barbarawindsor.”
● Ross Kemp: Livingwith Dementia, ITV, Thursday, 7.30pm