My pride in you, the real stars
SOMETIMES I love being proved wrong, even if it takes years. In 1985, at a graceful ceremony, an American charity presented me with a literary award for my journalism (which had crossed the pond before the internet!)
Some words from one of my articles were chosen for the beautiful calligraphy on the framed citation. It was a tribute to my working-class Liverpool grandfather and this is the quotation:
‘There are no obituaries for ordinary people. Perhaps the men and women commemorated in The Times did important things, but their lives were touched and enhanced, each hour of each day, by the unknown existence of others like Bill Mooney — working people with little opportunity for achievement, yet with an incalculable story of goodness, honesty and quiet happiness.’
So I want to share with you my delight that now there are ‘obituaries for ordinary people’.
Each week I read the Mail’s brilliant pages, Extraordinary Lives, with fascination, humility and sometimes tears.
It may seem odd that I should flag up something in this very paper, but I just want to direct your attention to the gift of these marvellous stories each week. Because they matter — and I know you like that.
Of course, this column tells some sad stories of ‘ordinary people’ but the obituary pages explode each week with a pride and joy that uplift the spirits. Somebody’s father, grandfather or beloved mum; somebody else’s brave brother, or hardworking gran . . .
Each story of love, loss and pride make me feel the better for having read it. I learn such a lot, too.
In this age of vacuous celebrity, it’s heartening to be reminded of the truth of a wonderful poem I copied out when I was 17. The Russian, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017), wrote: ‘No people are uninteresting/ Their fates are like the chronicle of planets.’ That means we all matter.
So when you share your very own extraordinary people with this paper, you introduce us to the real stars.
BEL answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.
MY WIFE JUDY
Music and friends: those were the two cornerstones of Judy’s world, and she’d filled her life with both since her early childhood. Naturally charismatic, she gravitated towards performing when she was a teenager and by her early 20s, just after World War ii, she joined a prestigious touring repertory company. she later recalled how, after meeting him at a party, she’d been asked to audition by none other than Noel coward.
Alas, it didn’t work out quite as she had hoped: after giving her boyfriend her handbag to hold while she performed in front of ‘the Master’ he told her that she wasn’t right for the part — but he was interested in casting ‘the boy with the handbag’.
Judy’s first husband, Leo, was an RAF boxing champion who she’d met when he picked her up after she’d slipped and fallen right in front of him on the platform at London’s Victoria station.
They had two children, Roly and Barney, and Judy trained as a teacher while she was raising them. she and Leo divorced in the early seventies. We met three years later in a local pub when she was 43 to my 26.
Not that the gap made a jot of difference — not when i heard her magnetic laugh. We hit it off immediately, and when she asked me to move in with her a few months later i didn’t hesitate. ‘she’s only after your stereo,’ her daughter Roly teased me.
We married in 1975 and a lot of people said it wouldn’t last. How wrong they were: while all around us the naysayers got divorced our love affair went on for 40 years until the day Judy died.
Life with Judy was never dull. i remember how once, in the middle of a wedding reception, she suddenly remembered that she was meant to be taking part in a music competition in chichester.
she was three glasses of wine down by then, but we jumped onto the back of my motorbike. i watched her pull off her helmet and leathers and walk on stage to sing her piece just at the very moment they called her name. Then we hopped back on the bike and went straight back to the reception. Needless to say she won!
Judy loved throwing parties at our home, where musicians, performers and poets would dance, chat and sing until the small hours. Her unbelievable operatic voice always stood out from the crowd.
Judy lived by these words: judge not, lest you be judged, and she was the first to help the underdog, taking part in a great deal of charity work. Together we were founding members of the local Human Rights group for Amnesty international.
Towards the end her health deteriorated, but Judy’s spirit was unquenchable and she was still singing from her hospital bed. i miss her every day and night.