How cancer made our marriage into one of equals
DJ Johnnie Walker and his wife Tiggy tell Judith Woods of the challenges they faced in nursing one another through illness
‘When you make your wedding vows and promise to love someone in sickness and in health, you don’t expect the nightmare to begin on the bloody honeymoon,” says Tiggy Walker, wife of veteran Radio 2 DJ, Johnnie.
“We’d been engaged for a year, never lived together – barely knew each other, really – then tied the knot and flew to Kerala. Johnnie became ill with what turned out to be cancer, and suddenly I went from blissfully happy bride to stressed-out carer, not that I even knew there was a name for it. I looked at this angry, sick, frightened man making demands of me and I felt so cheated and lonely.”
Tiggy, still a vivacious beauty at 59, touches her husband lightly on his sleeve to ameliorate any sting her words might carry. He simply smiles at her with absolute love, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
Johnnie, 75, understands the raw grief and emotional conflict as only a fellow carer can – because, a decade later, it was his turn to nurse Tiggy through breast cancer. “Tiggy warned me it was harder to be the carer than the patient. I wouldn’t say it was easy but, because I had been through cancer, I wasn’t thrown in at the deep end the way she was,” he explains.
“She says I drove her to 73 medical appointments – but I never counted, I just tried to find a balance between being positive and being realistic. Some days, it was a real struggle.”
The couple met in 2001. It was a classic coup de foudre. She was a successful director of commercials with her own production company. He was a household name, thanks in part to his Radio 2 Drivetime show, and twicedivorced with two sons.
The day after their introduction, Tiggy telephoned her mother and told her: “I’ve just met the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” They married in 2003 and their future appeared to be mapped out – Tiggy hoped she might even get pregnant.
But Johnnie was tired and unwell during their honeymoon, which meant she disconsolately dined alone, night after night. “We assumed Johnnie had a bout of Delhi belly, but after a few months passed and there was no change, he went to the doctor, who ran tests,” she remembers.
He was diagnosed with non-hodgkin lymphoma. When Johnnie eventually broke news of his illness to his fans and explained why he would be off air during treatment, he played Simon & Garfunkel’s bittersweet anthem Bridge Over Troubled Water.
But when he told Tiggy on the first awful afternoon of his diagnosis all he could say, over and over, was: “Sorry.”
“I was devastated that I was going to become such an awful burden,” says Johnnie. “I had finally met my soulmate, this fabulous, gorgeous woman I wanted to be with every waking moment and I was ruining everything.”
Johnnie underwent aggressive chemotherapy, which made him extremely ill. Complications, including severe bleeding, saw Tiggy rush him to hospital on numerous occasions where he stayed for days at a time. During one emergency surgery, he almost died.
“I barely slept. I was in a permanent state of high alert in case Johnnie would throw up in the night, or worse,” reflects Tiggy. “But the blood, guts and gore was far easier to manage than the psychological impact. It was emotionally draining being the one trying to keep everything together without any support.”
Tiggy had given up work; her sole purpose was looking after Johnnie, willing him to survive and trying to get to grips with a role she never imagined she would be taking on in her 40s.
“The chemo affected his moods at home – he would lash out verbally and be so difficult to please,” says Tiggy. “I was barely coping. At times, I thought: ‘Oh my God, have I married a monster?’ What really hurt was that the one person I could have talked to about my feelings was the one person I had to hide them from – Johnnie.”
Tiggy is unflinchingly honest about her emotions. For his part, Johnnie nods in sympathetic acknowledgement; they may have been on the same cancer journey but they each experienced the path very differently. He felt supported, cared for and loved. She felt the polar opposite. “Everybody was asking after Johnnie, nobody ever asked how I was doing. I had given up my life, was cut off from my friends and falling apart inside but there was nobody there for me.
“I wish I’d known about Carers UK back then – just to talk to someone who genuinely understood that it’s entirely possible to feel love, resentment and fear at the same time.”
Carers UK is one of four charities being supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. There are an estimated 13.6 million unpaid carers in the UK, more than 4.5 million of whom started this year, due to the pandemic. For many the support services they have relied upon stopped overnight at the start of the first lockdown, and are yet to return to normal.
Estimates put carers’ annual, unpaid contribution to the UK economy at £132 billion – close to the cost of a second NHS. But, unlike NHS staff, they have no training or infrastructure to support them.
Having come out the other side of cancer, Johnnie and Tiggy could see their relationship had been damaged by the stress, but they worked hard to heal it with marriage counselling and kindness. Then came the second bombshell: in December 2013, at the age of 53, Tiggy discovered a lump in her breast that turned out to be an aggressive grade three cancer.
It was Johnnie’s turn to take on the carer’s mantle.
“I felt so helpless,” he admits. “I kept saying: ‘You can’t die. What would my life be without you?’ But then at other moments, we would try to lighten the mood by referring to our ‘equal opportunities’ marriage.”
Tiggy had a lumpectomy to remove the tumour, followed by both chemotherapy and radiotherapy When her hair started to fall out after the second round of chemo, Johnnie tenderly shaved her head, all the while telling her what perfect bone structure she had.
“I was a weepy, shouty and furious patient,” admits Tiggy. “The chemo drugs unhinged me and changed my personality, the way it did for Johnnie. At one point, I refused to go through any more chemo cycles; he bribed me first with a Mulberry handbag, then a weekend away in Cornwall. It worked.” So, too, did the treatment.
Astonishingly, Tiggy asked a photographer to document her during the whole painful period. The pictures are raw and harrowing, yet shot through with her indomitable spirit.
The couple say they are now closer than ever. Indeed, during lockdown, Tiggy joined Johnnie co-presenting his Sunday afternoon show on Radio 2, Sounds of the Seventies, and proved to be a lovely, lively foil to his trademark mellowness. Whenever they look at each other, their faces softly settle into laughter lines.
“My heart goes out to anyone plunged into the nightmare of becoming a carer,” says Tiggy. “My world shrank, I felt overwhelmed and ashamed of thinking about myself when Johnnie was so unwell.
“If only I could have called up someone and said: ‘Dear God, I’m going mad’ and they could have listened without judgment and reassured me I wasn’t.
“Just being allowed to talk about my feelings would have made such a difference. Carers are the silent backbone of so many families – they need care, too.”
‘I felt so helpless. I kept saying: “You can’t die. What would my life be without you?”’