The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
I marvelled at how good these two very different people were together
Three years before the pandemic hit, I sat beside Derek Draper at a dinner party, watching him chat with his wife Kate Garraway, listening to him joke about the woman he called “Babushka”, and marvelling, as always, at how good these two very different people were together.
You can tell a lot about a couple’s relationship by the way one person looks at another when they’re talking in public. Often people don’t bother looking at all. They’ve heard all the anecdotes before; they’ve sort of lost interest. But Derek was looking at Kate with something that is – in my view – better than love, even if it’s a crucial part of it. He was looking at her with respect, with admiration, with pride. All of it shot through with a humour that was the foundation of their 20-year bond.
Talking about that bond to me in October 2021 – six months after her husband had finally been discharged from hospital and allowed to return home – Kate explained how, when the former political adviser’s habit of “ruffling feathers” would occasionally cause friction between them, Derek would try to appease her by saying: “Darling, I’m the grit in your oyster.”
It was the perfect way of putting it, and we’d both laughed before she grew serious again and murmured: “Now, I feel I have no grit in my oyster.”
I was tempted to tell her she had enough grit for both of them, but I didn’t want to belittle the enormous challenges Kate, Derek, Darcey and Billy were being confronted by each day.
Kate shared those challenges in unflinching detail in her awardwinning ITV documentary, Finding
Derek. And although she did hold certain things back – “Because I didn’t want to show him at his most vulnerable; that was too private” – she knew that her husband would have wanted her, as an ardent mental health campaigner, “to be as honest as I could be. Without sugar-coating it. And once Derek started to come out of his coma, I felt we had moved past the really desperate part.”
After 12 months in hospital, however, Derek was still barely able to move or speak, and in their family home, doorways had been widened and ramps fitted to accommodate him, with the ground floor sitting room turned into Derek’s new bedroom and a wet room installed in the bathroom. Even favourite board games like Headbanz had been adapted to make it possible to play with him.
And there were extraordinary moments, she told me, like the time they all sat down to watch TV together, only to realise they’d forgotten the Sky pin. Then, out of nowhere: “Derek says: ‘6969’.”
The future was unknowable, but there was so much hope, and I can’t help but think that helped him hold on as long as he did.
When I heard the news that he had died, my heart broke for Kate, Darcey and Billy; for the whole of Derek’s family. Their optimism and bravery touched the hearts of people across the country, and their story will never be forgotten.