‘I didn’t think I could go on without Linda, but now I hear her laughter’
SIR Tom Jones has spoken of how he thought he might not be able to go on without his late wife, Linda.
Saturday will mark the fifth anniversary of the the chart-topping singer, 80, losing his wife, Linda, aged 75, to lung cancer in 2016.
The couple had marked 59 years of marriage together.
Reflecting on his loss, Sir Tom said it was the “lowest part” of his life, but now he fondly remembers his late wife laughing.
In a new interview, he told The Observer magazine: “Losing Linda five years ago was the lowest part of my life. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through it.”
The singer, originally from Treforest, Pontypridd, said he turned to a grief therapist to get help to navigate the darkest time in his life.
He added: “I had to go and see a grief therapist because I kept thinking, ‘Did I do enough? Was I on the case? Did she slip away without me really realising what was happening?’
“But the therapist said, ‘No, she had lung cancer, there is nothing could have done.’
“Now every time I step on stage, Linda is with me. Before she died, she said, ‘Don’t think of me dying, think of me laughing.’ That’s how I remember her.”
Unable to stay there without her, Sir Tom sold their Los Angeles mansion. you
The singer then made the move back to the UK, where he now lives in an apartment in London.
He previously said: “I didn’t feel comfortable there any more – she decorated the whole place – and she wanted me to come back to Britain.
“She was always homesick and then she got sick.
“She always said she wanted to come back and then she couldn’t do it, so then she told me to do it in the last week she was alive.”
The couple’s love story started in Treforest way back in the early 1950s when a young Tom – then known as Tommy Woodward – developed a crush on elfin blonde Melinda “Linda” Trenchard at school when he was 12.
In his autobiography published in 2015, Over The Top And Back, he tells of watching her walk up the hill to school and of her sometimes giving him a smile.
She was “a cut above me academically and a cut above me socially, too”, he noted. just
Her family owned cinemas locally and Linda was in the A stream while Tom, who had undiagnosed dyslexia, struggled in the C and D streams. He left school at 15 and they started dating.
The pair married in March 1957 when they were both just 16. Their only child, Mark, was born just a month later.
In the autobiography he recalls how he fell in love with her and then “never had that feeling for anyone else... I don’t think you can fall in love more than once”.
Speaking after her death, he said: “I got married when I was very young . . . We loved one another dearly. She knew that I loved her more than anything else in the world. And that held it together.”
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