Why the little girl in this happy family photo can’t bear to look at it any more
So moving. So powerful. A loving sister’s story of loss that will strike a chord with millions
UnTIL last month I had a photo on my wall. It had been there so long I barely noticed it, but when I did it always made me feel happy.
It shows a little girl in a pretty cotton frock and a home-made cardigan. Smiling very shyly into the camera, she is clutching a well-loved pink stuffed cat. Lined up protectively behind her are her two big brothers, her big sister and her parents.
Her dad looks a little startled — he is used to being behind the camera but has just discovered the miracle of the delayed shutter, and managed to sprint into the line-up.
It is a perfect snapshot of an ordinary Sixties family — three teenagers impatient for the future and one cherished little girl, posing in the dying light of a late summer’s day.
Until last month, the photo of my family, taken in the back garden of our home in Germany, where my dad had been posted as a teacher with the Army, was inconsequential. Like most people’s family photos, it was little more than wallpaper. But not any more. now the wall is empty; the photo is hidden at the back of a drawer. I can’t bear to look at it.
The fact that it shows every member of my family doesn’t make me smile. It doesn’t make me happy as I recall precious childhood memories. It makes me want to beat my head on the floor and howl in anguish because every single person in that photo is now dead. except me. My parents Jim and Tess, my sister Hilary and my brothers Andy and Simon are all dead.
nobody remembers that day now, apart from me. no one shares any of my childhood memories. And the loneliness I feel is indescribable.
My world is full of people I love and feel loved by. I have my daughters — ellen, 25, and elise, 24. I have nieces, nephews and wonderful friends, some of whom I’ve known since childhood. I also have a loving partner, richard.
But there is no one left who completely understands, without a word being spoken, not just how I tick, but why. There is no one left who shares that unique dnA which came from my parents. There is no one who shares the easy familiarity siblings take for granted.
There is no one I can lean on, in the total trust that blood will always be thicker than water. At the age of 58, I find myself not just orphaned but bereft of every one of my siblings.
On June 5 my funny, uniquely talented, totally beloved brother Andy died. He was just 67.
Imagine a gloriously anarchic, sweetly funny, charismatic cross between Peter Pan and the Pied Piper and you will understand a little of what made my brother so exceptional and so very treasured.
He was known to millions as the creator of the BBC children’s TV series Bodger And Badger, which ran from 1989 to 1999. Andy starred as Simon Bodger, who had a badly behaved companion, a talking badger with a love of mashed potatoes.
In the days after he died of cancer, it felt strangely surreal to see my big brother’s death reported in national newspapers and on TV and radio programmes. It felt bizarre to read obituaries in the broadsheets, and outpourings of genuine sadness from strangers on Facebook and Twitter.
It also made me cry even more. It reminded me how very special he was. Quite simply, wherever Andy was, you wanted to be. And wherever he was felt like a party. He didn’t just light up a room. He came with his own built-in megawatt spotlight.
One stranger wrote of meeting Andy on a train journey from London to Brighton a few years ago. It was just before Christmas. There was an accident on the line and the train stood still for three interminable hours.
‘What should have been hell turned into one of my favourite nights of all time, with Andy as the ringleader,’ this man wrote. ‘ Andy pulled a massive bottle of red wine out of his bag and began sharing it around. Before long, everyone in that carriage was telling stories and sharing whatever food and drink they had.
‘It turned into the ultimate Christmas party — like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. I went off into the night feeling lucky to have been around such a generosity of spirit.’
Andywas such a vital, charismatic character, such a huge part of my life, that even now, two months later, I can’t really believe he’s gone. I can’t believe my entire family has been obliterated, my sense of where I belong in the world eradicated.
I veer between shock, anger and — most unattractive of all — self-pity.
As the youngest sibling — Andy was eight years older than me, Simon ten years, and Hilary 12 years older — I guess I was statistically likely to be the last survivor. But not like this. not in my 50s. And not while there was still so much life to live together.
The story of my quirky, talented family, which once made me feel so blessed, now resembles a Greek tragedy. Lives with so much promise have been cut brutally short. The stage is littered with corpses.
My sister Hilary, a writer, was the first to go. She was just 25 when she died in a car accident in 1973, leaving behind two daughters, then aged two and four. Losing Hilary so young meant I treasured my brothers even more. Secure in their uncritical love, I was the cherished baby sister who could do very little wrong. Lucky, lucky me.
Then in March 2014, Simon — who had been divorced for many years — suffered a massive heart attack and died while on holiday in Turkey with Andy. He was 66 and left behind two sons, then in their early 30s.
Andy was stoic. I was in pieces. Simon, who had just retired from his job as a high-flying economist with the United nations in new york, was far too young to die.
Helping Andy arrange his funeral — a full Catholic Latin Mass — I felt grown-up in a way I never had before, certainly not when my parents died. My mother died very quickly of cancer of the oesophagus in 1995, aged 77. When my father died in 2013 at the impressive age of 98, I was sad. But the pain was softened by knowing he had enjoyed a rich, long life.
And the joy Simon, Andy and I all felt in celebrating dad’s life brought us even closer.
But when Simon died so suddenly with no chance to say goodbye — just like Hilary — the shock was devastating.
Andy and I clung to each other. And then in early 2015, the unimaginable happened. Andy had a rare condition diagnosed — cancer of the duodenum, part of the gastrointestinal tract.
CreATIVegenius and hugely intelligent man that he was ( he read english at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Andy was also almost childishly unworldly. So he didn’t ask questions. He didn’t rush to the internet to research his prognosis.
But I did. So I knew Andy’s cancer was cruel. I knew that, however nonchalantly he told people after surgery to remove the tumour ‘I did have cancer but it’s gone now’, the truth was more complicated.
And so it was that for the final two years of his life, Andy left his home in Brighton to live largely with me in Winchester, while he underwent first chemotherapy and then radiotherapy.
He had been single since the end of his long-term relationship with the actress Jane Bassett, who voiced Mousey in the Bodger And Badger series, and I convinced him that he needed looking after.
yet while nominally I was ‘ looking after’ him, and he was frailer than I’d ever seen him, it felt like an aberration. He would soon be looking after me again — as he always had.
It was Andy, aged 11, who walked three miles to buy me a little plastic pony he’d seen in a toy shop, just to cheer me up when I was sick in bed.
He was wonderful at presents. I’ve been married twice but he is the only man who has ever been able to buy me clothes. every year he went to my favourite clothes shop, Jigsaw, and picked out something he knew I would love. He always got it right.
It was a pattern set in childhood. There is a photo of me aged three wearing a cowgirl outfit. Andy had bought it at the school fete, persuading other children to move aside because he needed it so desperately for his little sister.
When I was 16 he gave me my first grown-up party dress. It was floorlength, electric blue and made entirely of polyester. In short, it was the height of fashion in 1974.
no wonder Andy was the first boy I fell in love with. I wanted to marry him. When I finally understood that this was impossible, I also understood that it didn’t really matter. I was his special little sister and we would be together for ever anyway.
Until I married and had my two daughters, he was the person I loved most in the whole world and I always knew he loved me, too. I adored him more than I can say.
Of course I feel lucky I spent so much time with Andy — he had also lived with me in the 18 months before
Dad died, so we could care for him together. Andy helped me write a book about the experience: Take Me Home.
But it means there are memories of Andy everywhere. His half-eaten jar of mayonnaise is still in the fridge. His bottle of Tabasco is in the cupboard. His slippers, affectionately chewed by my dog, Milo, that he solicitously walked for me, are still under his bed. His cagoule is on the coat rack.
Inside is a receipt from Sainsbury’s. Just thinking about it makes me cry. Typically caring, silly Andy, he’d bought a box of chocolates to share while we watched TV — and a bag of watercress. I’d once told him watercress was supposed to be a natural way to help ward off the return of the breast cancer I’d suffered in 2007, and he never forgot.
Now the world is a chaotic place. The future I’d imagined has been obliterated. With each baby step I’m trying to navigate a future I never imagined — one without my brothers.
I haven’t just lost my future. I’ve lost my past, too. All the memories Andy and I shared — the tiny insignificant things that made us who we are — are cast to the wind.
He was such a huge, wonderful part of my life, there is barely a memory that doesn’t include him. When I really annoyed him, he used to say he couldn’t take me seriously because he remembered me as the silly little baby he used to sing to in the bath. Now there is no one who remembers me as a baby.
He called me Teezy — the only person who ever did. I will never hear that name again and that hurts, too.
Now I am left alone, the gloomy custodian of a dusty family mausoleum which no one visits, no one cares about. I am now the only person alive who knows all the idiosyncracies of my family and treasures them for no better reason than that they shaped us all.
There is no one to reminisce with about the love poem Dad used to write for Mum every Christmas, or Mum’s irrational fear of cats.
All the expressions, redolent in family history, are now meaningless. Shortly before he died, I made Andy a meal. ‘Eat it while it’s piping hot,’ I said and we both laughed. It was Simon who always insisted food should be ‘piping hot’.
Andy — given to singing snatches of songs at every opportunity — would often sing: ‘In any case I am 100 years old.’ This was the completely unconvincing boast I used to make as a very little girl, driven to futile fury by my bigger, cleverer siblings.
DESpITEbeing tone deaf, Andy loved singing. The last time we spoke, just before he went into the operating theatre for the emergency stomach surgery from which he would never regain consciousness, he was singing. We’d already had Feeling Groovy.
As he waved me goodbye, he started crooning: ‘ So long, farewell.’ Everybody in the ward recognised it as from The Sound Of Music. But only Andy and I knew all those other layers of meaning it threw up: our shared childhood in Germany, the convent where Mum taught; the mock battles in the woods that Andy and Simon used to fight.
Over and over, Bodger And Badger fans wrote that they felt they’d lost part of their childhood. But Andy — eight when I was born — wasn’t just part of my childhood. He was my childhood.
He was my daughters’ childhood, too. They adored him with a passion as powerful as mine. The milestones we have to face over the next few months — Ellen’s birthday, my birthday, Christmas — without Andy’s magical presence seem insurmountable obstacles.
I know that I have to build a future without him, for all our sakes. But right now I don’t have the strength.
My family story wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. And writing a new chapter — one with any semblance of joy or hope — seems too hard just at the moment.