‘A million different acts of kindness’
Gaby Wood talks to friends of Bernadette Mcnulty, the former Telegraph music editor who died this month
‘When I think of Bernadette, what comes to mind are a million different acts of kindness,” remembers Bernadette Mcnulty’s school friend Sarah Smyth. Bernadette, who was an editor and writer at the Telegraph for 11 years, died on March 2 while on holiday in Oman. An obituary was published last week; you can read more about her life and her worldview there. Here, we’d like to try to conjure the texture of her presence, and some of the particular ways in which she mattered to those of us who miss her.
Many have mentioned the number of friends Bernadette had. That is true, yet the span was less significant than her attentiveness to each. Her close friends have said, independently of one another, that she knew them better than they knew themselves. In remembering her, a curious inversion emerges: she was in large part about others.
Which is not to say she was a soft touch. Trish Onderdonckyoung, who went to nursery school with her, recalls that Bernadette had high standards early on. The day a fire engine visited Weoley Hill Play
School in Birmingham, Bernadette, already advanced in the art of scepticism, appeared puzzled that the rest of the class was so easily impressed. Much later, when the pair were in secondary school, Bernadette’s gift for discussion and debate blossomed. “At times it seemed that she wanted to argue for argument’s sake, but of course she was simply developing her art,” her friend points out fondly.
Her wit was dry but never merciless. One colleague reflects that it was “the precision of the piss-taking” that impressed him. Her irony contained insight and indulgence: because she cared to know the worst, her exposure of your foibles felt somehow celebratory. “Please lie down in the grass for five minutes,” she once advised a panicky friend – a characteristic instruction, both tree-hugging and Jean Brodie. “I was lucky to have her as an ally,” says Neil Mccormick, who as this paper’s rock critic spoke to her almost daily for years. Bernadette used to refer to a friend’s young daughter as a “loving warrior queen”; the phrase contains much of her own compassion and fierceness and resilience.
All of this, though, was barely a match for constancy of another kind. Often, she behaved as though she were older than her older friends. This was remarked on even in primary school. In adulthood, when someone joked about her being a certain colleague’s “office
wife”, she replied: “Sometimes I feel like I’m his mum.”
Her own mother, a nurse, died of cancer the year Bernadette took her GCSES, and Bernadette, whose father had been disabled in an industrial accident, had taken time out to look after her. Onderdonck-young points out that “the impact this had never left her”. Her friend Helen Brown thinks that it was perhaps because of her sorrow that “she really knew how to treasure fun. It was hard won”.
In the matter of fun, Bernadette was contagiously anarchic. Smyth remembers hitchhiking with her as a teenager: at one point Bernadette leaned out the window of a moving truck to pass a lighter to a man in another moving truck.
Her hunger for vintage clothing was almost unquenchable, and her ability to wear it well without peer. She loved music and all the different ways it could make you feel – in your heart or your dancing feet. When she wrote about it, for this paper and others, she could make you feel it, too. Listening to the Ramones, she wrote, “you can almost feel the scorching New York pavements through your sneakers”. She was always the first on the dance floor. One ex-partner refers to dancing as “her superpower”, and a friend and former colleague, picturing her dancing at his wedding, calls it “dancing as a public service”.
Bernadette was diagnosed when young with scoliosis, a condition that curved her spine into a question mark. Refusing the rod offered by surgeons, she answered the question with swimming and yoga. She was devoted to both – swimming was her passion, and offered the chance, as she put it, to “fly weightlessly”. Recently she was contemplating becoming a yoga instructor, but worried that she wouldn’t be able to demonstrate certain poses because of her spine. Her teacher and friend Debbie Blunden felt the reverse was true. “She was very inspiring to watch. She had learned to align herself so that when she did a headstand she was able to become straight.” Blunden adds: “I don’t think she ever saw the beauty in her own practice.”
That could stand for much of what Bernadette didn’t know she had, or didn’t know she gave. Many of us can see it still.