Her father’s infidelity, her mother’s suicide and the awesome forgiveness of Melvyn Bragg’s daughter
TWO days after the Westminster terrorist attack claimed five lives in the heart of London, a woman priest — luminously pretty, with a dancer’s graceful bearing — led a minute’s silence in memory of the dead and injured.
The Rev Marie-Elsa Bragg, duty chaplain of Westminster Abbey, stood in the unaccustomed stillness of Parliament Square and addressed a crowd of 12,000, gathered in an act of collective respect and mourning.
‘It was an attack on our democracy, on our constitution...on the tolerant and inclusive life we have built,’ she said, concluding that, despite the country’s shock and grief, the outrage would only confirm ‘our resolution not to give in’.
‘It was very moving, because the crowd just roared and clapped after I’d made the little speech,’ recalls Marie-Elsa when I meet her, a fortnight later.
‘Then thousands of people bowed their heads in silence — you could feel the respect, people are incredible — and Big Ben chimed quarter to the hour, and I’d never heard it chime into a silent city before.’ The occasion was poignant on many levels, not least because Marie-Elsa, who has just published her first novel, had feared for the safety of her father Melvyn Bragg, 77, the author, broadcaster and Labour peer, who was on his way to the House of Lords when the attack took place.
‘It was distressing because I knew my father would be on his way to Westminster,’ she says.
‘He walks the route across the bridge and I kept hearing bits of news; that people had been run over on Westminster Bridge; that Parliament was in lock-down.
‘I kept trying to phone Dad but I couldn’t get hold of him, so I jumped in the car and drove towards Westminster. You run instinctively towards the people you love at times like that.
‘Eventually I got him on the phone. He was still on his way in, stuck in traffic because that day he’d decided to drive, and when he said he was OK it was such a blessing.
‘We’re very close. We live not far apart — he’s in Hampstead, I’m in Finchley — and we have supper together every Sunday.
‘When I was a child, I was always on his coat tails. He’d take me to work with him and we’d walk across London to get there. Dad and I were inseparable in our grief.’
Marie-Elsa, 52, is referring to the tragedy that still binds them: when she was just six, the suicide of her mother, Marie-Elisabeth — known as Lise — shattered the happiness of her childhood and changed her life for ever.
Although misfortune on an epic scale has beset her — eight years of her young life were virtually wiped out by an illness that rendered her semi-conscious (more of which, later) — she exudes warmth, goodness and optimism.
Her mother’s early death was, of course, formative. Lise, a writer and painter, was Melvyn’s first wife. They met when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. It was a coup de foudre and an attraction of opposites: he was a working-class grammar school lad from Cumbria, she a French aristocrat three years his senior.
Within a year they were married, and Marie-Elsa was born in 1965.
FOuR years on, however, Melvyn’s media career was on a sharp ascent and he’d left Lise and his young daughter in the family home and moved out.
There were attempts at reconciliation, but the marriage ended when he began a relationship with Cate Haste, who became his second wife.
‘Mum really loved my dad,’ says Marie-Elsa. ‘She really invested in the relationship with him. She was a brave woman, creative, and I think the intensity of her love made her vulnerable.
‘1971 was a very bad summer and my mother could have survived it. I think both my parents were in very difficult places. Dad was having a breakdown and my mum was really heartbroken, and for some reason she slipped through the net into despair.
‘Mistakes were made, but we all have feet of clay. You have to forgive, move on, and grow a wiser, deeper sense of love and understanding of this difficult, messy, extraordinary world,’ she says, picking her words carefully.
Scrupulous never to imply blame, she reproaches no one.
Marie-Elsa had spent the 1971 summer holidays before her mother’s death with her and her grandparents in Provence, south-eastern France, where they lived.
‘We’d go up into the mountains, collecting flowers and grasses, which Mum taught me to plait. She’d read me The Little Prince so often I knew everything about it.
‘She was so loved by her friends that even now they talk about her as if she’d only just died.’ She smiles.
The night they returned from France to London, Lise took a fatal overdose, locking herself in her bedroom so her daughter would not find her.
She’d made provision for Marie-Elsa to be looked after the next morning. Telling a neighbour she would have to leave the house early, Lise asked her to get her daughter’s breakfast.
It is hard to imagine the distress Marie-Elsa felt as events unfolded. ‘As a child, I knew something terrible had happened, like a storm, especially with the grief of the people around me and the shock and confusion that my mother was missing,’ she says.
‘I had been used to getting up at 5am and getting into her bed every morning. That day I couldn’t get into her room. She wasn’t discovered until 8.30am, so by the time my father got there and everyone had worked out what was going on, I was in an emotional fever.
‘I felt overwhelmed and weak. And for years after, even though it made no sense, part of me still waited for her to come home.’
She recalls how her father took her to the local church on Kew Green, West London — where her mother’s funeral was later held — to try to explain what had happened.
‘I remember sitting on his knee in the front row and him weeping, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. I was such a little girl.
‘As a child you feel the shock viscerally — that something terrible has changed your world and it will never be the same again.
‘I’ll never fully understand it, although as I became an adult I understood more. I know what it’s like to work really hard to get through grief, to take one day at a time.’
I wonder if there is any residual anger towards her mother for leaving her. She seems surprised by the idea.
‘I didn’t see it as her leaving me,’ she says. ‘I was lucky to have had my mum. I adored her, and have done consistently; almost more because of what she went through.
‘Some people go through terrible things and don’t have that love.
‘And Dad still loves her, too. These tragedies are to be lived with. You can love deeper than the tragedy can hurt you.’
BRAGG has said, too, he’s been unable to ‘get over’ his first wife’s death, which has cast a ‘long shadow’ over his life; he addressed it in his autobiographical novel of 2008, Remember Me.
There was no forewarning of Lise’s descent into despair. Though sensitive, she had no history of mental illness, says Marie-Elsa, but had been seeing a Jungian psychoanalyst, who had herself committed suicide six months before Lise took her own life.
‘It meant that Mum didn’t have anyone to turn to, which must have been quite shocking for her,’ she says.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, friends and family rallied. Marie-Elsa went to live with her father; she remembers the solace she felt from the gift of a kitten, Marmalade, from
her godmother, Jay Wheldon, wife of broadcaster Sir Huw Wheldon. ‘She gave me the kitten that same day, after we were in the church,’ she remembers. ‘You can play with a kitten for hours.’
It was, however, her father’s close-knit Cumbrian family — most notably her grandparents Ethel and Stanley, who then ran a sweet shop — who enveloped her in the love that helped heal her.
‘I spent a lot of my childhood in Cumbria and whenever I went I felt as if I was going home,’ she says.
‘On my first evening cuddled up with my grandma there was such a sense of warmth and belonging.
‘She spent hours with me, patting my back, singing to me — lullabies, Vera Lynn songs — soothing me to sleep. She did that for years. She became my second mum.
‘I used to go into her bed in the morning and be allowed to walk down the street in her shoes.
‘It took two hours to buy a paper because we’d be talking to everyone, admiring the shop windows — because grandma knew what it was to dress her own shop window. She had a poster of the Queen in it and at Whitsun there would be a Union Jack. My grandparents were old school. They stood up for the national anthem, even at home, in the days when it was played on the television after broadcasting finished.’
Marie-Elsa has always had a special affinity, too, with the Cumbrian countryside surrounding Wigton, the market town where her father was raised.
Her debut novel, Towards Mellbreak, is, in part, a hymn to this landscape in which she still finds solace, and a celebration of the traditions of its rural communities.
‘And I feel that Brexit is also a cry from communities that feel they’ve lost their identities,’ she says.
‘It’s a call to rejuvenate them and reclaim the spirit they had.’
She had become a priest 15 years earlier, after a life-threatening illness, and following years of frontline campaigning for Anglican women bishops she was ‘exhausted’. The germ of her story took root on restorative walks of her beloved fells.
Her talents are many and diverse. An Oxford graduate, she also trained as a dancer. Then, using her skills in choreographic notation, she worked with the Dian Fossey Research Centre — set up in memory of the murdered American primatologist — at the University of Stirling, researching the body language of marmosets.
HERE, aged 21, she was struck down by a tropical disease — caused, doctors believed, by monkey urine infecting a cut on her finger — which rendered her semi-conscious, in hospital, for almost a decade.
‘My liver and kidneys broke down, my hair fell out, I couldn’t walk. I was near to death,’ she says.
‘I don’t have much memory of any of it because I was in a semicoma most of the time. For almost ten years, my life was suspended. Lots of my friends thought I’d died. My poor dad!’ she sighs, smiling.
‘Then, after seven years my liver began to regenerate.’
As she emerged back into the world, she began to explore the spiritual. She considered joining a Cistercian order of nuns, then, recognising that her calling was to be ‘out in the world’, trained at Oxford for the priesthood.
Today she is also a spiritual director and, aside from her Westminster job, moves between different London parishes that have no permanent priest.
When we meet she is elegant in clerical garb: a long black skirt made for her by her Cumbrian great aunt Margaret, a standard issue vicar’s shirt and collar, and a black waistcoat that she bought in a sale.
She has the aura of a glamorous suffragist, carries a battered carpet bag and wears stout boots whose soles are falling off. (There’s probably a joke to be made about attending to others’ souls before her own.)
Amicably separated after a short marriage that ended five years ago, she has no children. However babies are swelling the ranks of her Cumbrian family, which is a delight to her.
‘I baptised my cousin Sharon’s daughter Jodie. We’re very close,’ she says, ‘and I have two goddaughters who are hilarious.’
Her half-brother Tom — from her father’s marriage to Cate, which ended last year — recently became a father, too.
Melvyn now lives with Gabriel Clare-Hunt, 60, and Marie-Elsa says: ‘I’m very glad they’re finding a new life where they can be happy. Dad and Cate are legally separated and there’s no shame in that.
‘But I think Dad was very oldfashioned and worried about it.’
Marie-Elsa has a rare gift for mining happiness from the most unpropitious of circumstances. Despite the tragedy that has beset her she believes in the redemptive power of love, and that life is fundamentally good.
‘I’ll always love Mum and miss her, as I will my grandmother,’ she says.
‘I’ve been unlucky and really lucky, but the gift is that I’ve been able to count my blessings alongside feeling genuine sadness and loss.’
Towards Mellbreak by Marie-elsa bragg is published by Chatto & windus, £12.99.