Autobiography

It was a miracle none of us expected. At one
stage I went to the hospital with Ralph to say a
final goodbye to her.
Mr Flavell the surgeon came out of the
operating theatre after a long, gruelling
operation, shaking his head as he told us he
had removed one of her lungs and had done all
he could, adding darkly that he wasn’t hopeful.
When I went in to see her I burst into tears,
put my hand on her and said goodbye as
though she were already dead.
I did the same thing on another occasion when
my sister Marie’s husband, Kenny Mould, a
dedicated ambulance driver and a dear friend,
drove his beloved motorcycle into the back of a
parked lorry in the early hours of the morning
coming home after a late shift. It didn’t kill him
straight away and, incredibly, there was hardly
a mark on his body. He was kept in intensive
care at Atkinson Morley Hospital, and weeks
later, when all hope was lost, he was moved to
Mayday Hospital in Croydon where we watched
him pass away peacefully. I put my hand on
Kenny’s body as a goodbye gesture and
thought back to when I believed my mum
would not survive until the morning.
Some time later I also put my hand on my
close friend David Tearle’s dead body as I sat
alone with him for an hour after he died. I
gave the eulogy at his funeral and told the
story he had told me a couple of months before
he knew he was dying of cancer. He told me
how lucky he was. He had a grown-up son,
Paul, from his first marriage, and had decided
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