In memory of their daughter. They tell Susannah Butter why they are helping other parents going through agony
of our trustees called and I was so excited that in the next five minutes I’d tell Jim.”
“It’s a cause people can relate to,” Murray continues. “This could happen to anyone at any time. Like any other young couple it could have happened to, we have suffered a tragedy and want to help others that might be in the same situation — to help advance paediatric medicine. We are just two people trying to find some positivity out of it.”
Murray talks about the children they’ve met campaigning. “There’s a boy who was knocked down by a car and because it happened to be on a day where the resources were stretched at the hospital, he didn’t get the immediate care he needed. So his prognosis for being able to walk again is foggy at best.
“If the facilities had been on hand under one roof it would have been more favourable. Now we are able to look his parents in the eye and say what we’re doing will make a difference.”
The staff who looked after Ella-Jayne will work on the new ward. Parish says: “We met them at the most desperate time of our life, you make these very strong connections when going through terrible trauma, so I love that we still know them. They work crazy hours and are all geniuses, it’s lovely to help them when they helped us. The NHS is brilliant but they desperately need charities like us.”
Now it’s back to acting. Murray is about to go to the Middle East to play Ryan Reynolds’s brother in an action film and Parish has just returned from Rome, where she was playing Lucrezia de’ Medici in TV series The Medicis: “You feel quite a responsibility playing someone who was alive.” She’s off to Manchester next month for ITV detective show Bancroft, adding that she misses Anna Rampton and “would love for W1A to come back”. When they are working in separate places they try to Face Time every night, with Nell.
“Our proper jobs sometimes do take second place to the charity,” admits Parish. “There are deadlines with huge amounts of money at stake so I accept that I’ll have to read scripts another day or just wing it. The charity is triple the work of acting. Going to Rome to film was like a holiday from the charity.” Murray chips in: “You worry that your audition will suffer and you won’t get the job. Then you get a major donor and realise that’s why we do it. It’s about keeping our daughter’s memory alive.”
This is just the start. Parish says: “Having achieved this makes us want to build on the charity. There’s a slight gulp of anticipation thinking about what’s next. This has snowballed. We have a fantastic support network whom we can’t let down.” They’ve been inundated with ideas. “To have got this far is the stuff of dreams,” says Murray. “If we can build this in two years, if we continue on this trajectory with more ambitious projects, we can make a real difference. It’s become Ella-Jayne’s legacy rather than just something Sarah and I are doing.”
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