There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You (3 page)

That first weekend was fantastic. I got up as soon as it was daylight and started cooking. The boys all came round for Sunday lunch and we watched Andy Murray win Wimbledon. What a triumph! Rather different from the following year as I write this. Let us not go there.

I was doing so well on this regime until about November. Then it stopped working, so Justin gave me a different set of goody bags which included Avastin which seemed to be the King or Queen of the IV-administered chemos. Another twelve sessions and things were still not improving. Then irinotecan was introduced and it seems to be quite harsh and I started to feel the side effects. I now feel very tired all the time and sick after meals. Meals? That is also a joke as my taste buds seem to have disappeared completely. Everything tastes like cardboard.

I have explained to Justin that the irinotecan is having an adverse effect and asked if there is anything else that I could have. I feel bad asking because the irritation is nothing in the great scheme of things. But it is important on a daily basis because if you are constantly battling sickness and generally feeling under the weather all your energy gets sapped away and I need that energy to keep me going. At the beginning of July 2014, I finally feel as though the illness is getting to me. The nurses were always asking me about the level of pain and asking if I had ulcers, numbness and sickness, etc., but actually I was not really suffering at all. I had managed to stave off the bad stuff longer than most, but now it is getting to me. But we are getting ahead of ourselves and we must go back to the beginning.

At that first session, I did feel tired as the day went on, but decided not to give in to a nap so I would sleep better that night. Afterwards I went for a walk round the block with my dear hubbie who was feeling a little melancholy. We talked a good deal about the future and what was going to happen.

I am not good at keeping things to myself. I can keep other people’s secrets if need be, but my own emotions are a very different thing. I think of all those films where the star of the piece has an incurable disease and does not tell anyone and I’m not like that at all. When we arrived home from seeing Justin Stebbing that first time, my youngest son, Robert, and my stepson, Bradley, were home and I just blurted out, ‘I’ve got cancer but the doctor says I am not going to die!’

Both boys burst into tears, as did Michael, and then me too. There was nothing one could say really. I pulled myself together and explained that I had these tumours in my colon and secondaries in my lungs and liver, but that hopefully with chemotherapy we could shrink the tumours and keep it all at bay. The boys wanted to know how long this would all take and of course we could not answer. Then my eldest son Michael came round and we had another heart to heart.

In a strange way I felt totally removed from the whole issue. It was not that I was in denial but it was as though I was talking about someone else. I became very calm and talked easily about the chemo. We even made jokes about it. In fact over the whole year one of the great things we have learned as a family is to keep a sense of humour. Sometimes one of the boys will come in from work moaning about a trivial event, like missing a bus or someone giving them a hard time, and I just look up and remark, ‘Well that’s nothing. I’ve got cancer!’

In fact, I was in Waitrose at the fish counter one day ordering some delights for the weekend, and there was a woman behind me who just kept tutting loudly every time I asked for something else. Then she demanded that they fetch another assistant as she couldn’t stand there all day. ‘I’ve got a bad back you know,’ she announced grandly.

I turned to her and smiled, ‘Well I’ve got cancer. So there!’

It’s how I’ve come to learn to deal with things. However, that first weekend was bizarre. The sun was shining and everything in my home looked so lovely. To have my family round me helped keep me sane, but did not help me feel better. I had bloody cancer – how was I going to deal with it? And not just with the cancer itself, but with my poor family having to watch me day in and day out and not be able to do anything for me. Well I made a promise to myself that I would find a way, but when I went to bed on Sunday night I knew I was going to have to face reality. There were decisions to be made about the play I was due to start, and what would I tell everyone? There is a way in which when the big things in life have to be addressed somehow we are able to embrace them, but all the little things, the minutiae of life, really get to you.

As I lay there in the dark I listened to my heart beating and I promised myself I would fight to the end. There was so much I had left to do in this life, I could not afford to die. This new-found strength must be coming from the blast of FU2 I had coursing through my veins. What a great way to describe my feelings towards this bloody cancer!

2

PANTOLAND AND OTHER ADVENTURES

December 2011 and December 2012

I think it is time to press rewind for a while and fill you in on the rest of my life as it was unfolding and so, I am taking you back to when I entered the magical world of pantomime, I will wave my magic wand (pencil, mouse, call it what you will) and ‘Bingo’ we are now in Birmingham!

I had such a good time doing it in 2011 that I reprised my role in 2012 and it was during that time that I began to feel unwell. Looking back it seems so obvious that how I felt then was a sign of what was to come, but at the time I just dismissed it – as we so often do.

I don’t know why I had never been in a panto, ever, in all my forty odd years as an actress. I did do something approaching a panto at the Pindar of Wakefield, a pub in King’s Cross, hundreds of years ago. I was playing Robin Hood and dressed like Douglas Fairbanks Jr, complete with moustache. It was great fun and rather bawdy, as I recall, and I usually spent most of the performances warding off drunken advances from the audience. Well it was a pub after all, but it was also famous for its music hall performances and Christmas pantomime. I remember my opening song began, ‘Give me some men who are stout-hearted men!’ Need I say more?

We finished the first half of the latest tour of
Calendar Girls
in the first week of December 2011, and unlike many of my fellow actresses, who were off to rest or holiday or spend wonderful moments with their family round the Christmas tree, I decided to attempt my first panto playing the Fairy Godmother. What else? I was persuaded by the actress Kathryn Rooney who was in
Calendar Girls
with me. She is a very talented young lady, and a vintage performer in pantoland, and also the partner of one of the great producers of pantomime, Michael Harrison. He would also be directing
Cinderella
, in which I was to appear with the wonderful Brian Conley.

It was this cocktail of talent that persuaded me to dip my toe in the magic! I have always admired Brian Conley and remember meeting him years ago when he was first ‘discovered’. Like many performers he was a non-stop showman. Nothing much had changed in the intervening years, and now, watching him rehearse as Buttons, I was so impressed by his professionalism and talent. Performing in a pantomime is probably the most exhausting job an actor can attempt, even more than a big musical, in a way, because at least in a musical there is a real story and each character can help move that story on. But in panto, the leading man or woman, that is the name in lights above the title, is never really allowed a break. It is relentless, and the audiences very much come to see their favourite stars, and demand 100 per cent. It is also an audience often made up of children, who do not sit quietly and attentively like they do at the Royal Shakespeare Company. They shout and scream and eat and drink and even run around. In some ways I was dreading it! However, it was a real challenge to me to make the little blighters sit up and pay attention, and my Fairy Godmother developed into a cross between nice grannie and grumpy headmistress!

We rehearsed in a dance studio in Fulham and my first day was so scary. The last time I had done anything vaguely musical was
West Side Story
at Coventry repertory theatre in 1971! I find dancers very intimidating. They all have such amazing bodies and seem to live in a parallel universe. Even when I was young and not too shabby myself, I would feel unattractive and lumpy next to these gazelles leaping backwards and forwards. Nothing has changed since then, and when I walked into the rehearsal room I was overwhelmed by the smell of sweat and perfume, deodorant and cigarettes. They all smoke like chimneys and eat junk food and still they look gorgeous. So I skulked into the room and sat in the corner practising my lines. We only had two weeks and I was still in
Calendar Girls
mode, up on a hillside covered in sunflowers. At least I didn’t have to take my clothes off for this production. Mind you it might have been a show stopper, the Fairy Godmother naked on a swing!

Everyone was lovely and very friendly and I soon began to feel at ease and Brian, who I knew a little, was very welcoming and we were soon making awful jokes and getting on with the job in hand. I was taken aside at one point for a costume fitting and a wonderful wardrobe master called Tony Priestley took me in hand, literally, as I was measured for my harness to fly into the show. In the end, though, that all changed and I was instead placed on a huge moon covered in lots of sparkle which flew way above the audience and was very dramatic, but because I was seated I did not wear a harness. I held on for dear life with one hand with a safety strap round my wrist, and in the other I carried the biggest wand you could ever imagine. It was huge. Oh yes it was! It had hidden batteries inside the handle, and every time I went onstage I would switch it on and it would shine like a beacon. I loved it! I had a long white dress edged with ostrich feathers and a lot of sparkle sewn on the material. Tony was a master of sparkle and had worked with them all, from Mr Danny La Rue down.

We laughed so much during that show it was wonderful. Sat in the wings, surrounded by half-naked dancers, I would watch as the ugly sisters rushed off to do a quick change and I was at just the right height – or wrong height depending on your point of view – to watch the rubber falsies come on and off, and the jock straps, high heels and the harness they had to wear when they were flown in for the ballroom scene be put on. There was a lot of screaming in high voices I can tell you. It was magical and bizarre to see dancers bending down and doing ridiculously unnatural things with their legs while standing next to a Shetland pony, a real pony, who decided to have a pooh! Happy days.

The wings, essentially the sides of the stage, at the Birmingham Hippodrome are huge. It is like being in an aerodrome, but then they need to be to accommodate all that madness. The show opened with me flying through the air on my moon and introducing myself. There is always a technical rehearsal for whatever play or show one is doing, but for a show like this, with so much going on, it is probably the most important rehearsal ever. Needless to say it goes on for hours and, in this case, for at least two days.

Unfortunately some people take it less seriously than they should, and sneak off to the pub. Naming no names, but one of the men in charge of pulling the ropes to get me on must have had a few one night. It was very funny in some ways, but scary in others because I was a hundred feet up in the air. He pulled so hard on the ropes I was taken by surprise, and was only just able to grab the handle on the moon in time to stop me tipping off as I whizzed onto the stage, then stopped abruptly, then whizzed half way off again, then continued to the other side of the stage and then seemed to dive bomb down to the floor! I couldn’t get off fast enough and spent the next twenty minutes trying to stop my legs from shaking. Still, all’s well that ends well, and nothing happened again through all the eight weeks, and all those twice daily performances we did.

There was never any time for me to go back to my dressing room during a performance so I did sit in the corner every night. When I had accepted the job I had envisioned rather a cushy little number where I popped on at the beginning, the middle and end and spent the rest of the night eating chocolates and watching TV in my dressing room. No such luck, I was on and off the stage like a lady in those cuckoo clocks, which was a shame because I had worked hard to turn my dressing room into a Christmas grotto.

I always love to make my dressing room a home from home. I developed this habit while on tour with
Calendar Girls
. Wherever I was, in whatever town, I always liked to be within spitting distance of the theatre because it made me feel secure knowing I would always be able to make the show on time. There were times when we had to stay in hotels that were further away and then I would get very jittery, so I would often go into the theatre an hour or so earlier than I needed to and sit in my dressing room. You have no idea just how bad a state some of these dressing rooms are in, absolutely disgusting. Some theatre owners spend thousands on the front of house and never bother to make the dressing rooms habitable, so I always carried throws, cushions and table lamps and such to hide some of the more unseemly and grubby aspects of my living quarters. In the old days before ‘’elf and safety’ we were allowed to burn candles, but that is all forbidden now of course. But I did buy a wonderful little fridge shaped like an egg and that just about held a bottle of wine and had room for my nibbles.

So I arrived in Birmingham with my usual paraphernalia and set up shop. However, being the festive season I needed a few extras. Straight to the font of all things useful, I went to John Lewis and bought a free-standing little deer that lit up and a very minimalist Christmas tree, which was a sort of twig with lights. I could not really have a real tree as it would be dead by the time we had got started. But this little twig was magic by the time I had hung it with chocolates and baubles. I popped out to the market in the Bullring whenever I had to fill in the time spent hanging around during rehearsals and I bought more and more rubbish! But I did create a wonderful grotto and all the dancers and the ugly sisters would come to me for a sweetie and a little Christmas cheer. The dressing rooms in Birmingham were a bit like offices, very grey and functional, so it was good to add the odd fairy light. I did have a TV which was great, though I never managed to watch anything all the way through as I was onstage half the time, but I got the gist!