Life goes on - Gloria Hunniford interview

Published on Friday 3 October 2008 15:16

THERE is always a special poignancy about photographs of the dead. The way the camera captures and retains them in a way life couldn't. So alive in that moment, sunlight streaming on their hair and shadows on their skin; the outward expression of who they are captured in a moment, suspended forever.

It's impossible to view them without asking the childlike, the obvious. Where are you? It's a question that Gloria Hunniford found herself voicing after her 41-year-old daughter Caron Keating died of breast cancer in 2004. She has a photograph montage of Caron on the walls of her Kent home. "Sometimes I just look at it in amazement and say out loud, 'Where have you gone?'"

Researching the interview with Hunniford, so many television clips and pictures bring Caron alive in different moods. Smiling, mischievous, glamorous. She had a fine-boned, fragile kind of beauty, particularly towards the end. But one photograph stands out beyond the others. Caron, pale and devoid of make-up, is wrapped in her brother Paul's arms. Their emotions are naked; he is looking straight at the camera, unsmiling, almost defiantly protective, a skin of grief beginning to form already on his face. But so intensely is she wrapped in his arms that Caron seems to have forgotten the camera is there, her eyes so tightly closed her eyelids crinkle, lapping up his love like a cat lapping up the sun. It was the last time Paul saw his sister alive.

As well as the pictures, there are the words. So many words written about this mother-daughter relationship. Hunniford has just completed her second book. The first was Next to You, the story of Caron's seven-year battle with cancer and her move to Byron Bay in Australia with husband Russ Lindsay and sons Gabriel and Charlie, in search of healing. There were a few critics – there always are – who said Caron had kept the illness secret in life and why was Hunniford writing in such detail about it after death?

Strange to deny another person words, to will their silence. Words are fundamental to what we are as human beings. They can be powerful, healing; there are few ways we can reach out more directly. Hunniford's second book Always with You is an example of that. This time, she charts not Caron's battle, but her own battle with grief. The book is not just her words, but the words of strangers sent in the thousands of letters she received.

Words come easily to Hunniford. We meet in a BBC dressing-room and she's a tiny figure, immaculately groomed, professional, far younger-looking than her 68 years. The Irish often have a capacity to simply pour out words in a torrent – it's what makes them a nation of great writers – and Hunniford has that facility. That's who she is. That's why she has written two books. Those silent years were hard for her. But it would be a mistake not to see beneath the ease of language to the difficulty of the emotions.

Hunniford's book puts you up close to death. You walk every step of Caron's departure. You feel Hunniford's trapped panic, the bitter-sweetness of her preparation of Caron's last meal: melon and small toast squares. It was what Caron liked as a child – and she was still Hunniford's child. Afterwards, she kept Caron in an open coffin until the funeral, going in constantly to see her, touch her, love her. She retouched Caron's make-up because she didn't like the way the undertakers had done it, chose her clothes. Closing the coffin lid was torture. She would have kept Caron there forever if she could.

Hunniford in her book says the things that people don't often say. She doesn't want the restraint of silence. Just as she doesn't want people to cross the road when they see her because they don't know what to say. Say anything, but speak to her. She loves talking about Caron. It keeps her daughter alive. "Wouldn't it be awful if nobody ever talked about her?" she says. "Wouldn't it be awful if they didn't know anything about her?"

It is an irony of bereavement that you can only begin to heal when you accept you will never be fully better. Eight thousand letters taught her that. Some were from old friends and boyfriends of Caron's, describing what they had learned from her enthusiasm for life. Most were from bereaved strangers who gave her the benefit of their experience. She took it. Even the advice that seemed hard, like the letter that told her to weep when she needed to but to remember that she could weep until the day she died and it would change nothing. That was a catalyst. She established the Caron Keating Foundation, which she administers personally, and which has opened cancer treatment rooms all over the country with the money raised.

But grief isn't linear. Publicly, she is positive. Privately, she is sometimes back in the black pit. In all the words that flow in the interview, Hunniford's composure wobbles only once: when I ask about that picture of Caron and her brother. "I'll weep now if I think about it too much," she says, and then quickly busies herself. She keeps that picture by her bedside. "It is," she says, "the last thing I see at night."

THE TROUBLE WITH death is that it doesn't just steal the future; it tries to take the past too. For a while, you have difficulty seeing the dead person as they were when alive. They are constantly dying; all memories of them wrapped up in the pain of departure. And it makes stereotypes of those it swallows up. Caron has become forever defined as tragic victim, a role she never wanted in life, while Hunniford is labelled grieving mother. But what of their relationship before death came along?

Another picture. A word picture this time. A little girl's pink, broderie anglaise dress. It hangs in a wardrobe, unworn. "The biggest row we had when she was small was that I had bought her this rather expensive dress which she never wore. "I used to say, 'Look at that good dress hanging up and you've never worn it.' And Caron would say, 'But I never wanted it and I never asked you to buy it for me.'"

It was typical of Caron and the woman she would become. She was artistic, never went for the conventional. "She had a very wacky sense of dress," says Hunniford. "I never quite understood it. She was a very unusual girl, quirky. She'd try to make you think she was doing everything you wanted her to but there was no doubt she was her own person. She had a wicked sense of humour and a wonderful side-on way of looking at life, so no matter what your problem, she would come at it from a different direction. The bottom line was that Caron was the woman I liked talking to best in the world. She just was."

Coming from Scotland, she says, I'll understand Irish mothers. It's a Celtic thing. "No Irish mother wants to be away from her children. She wants them just around the corner, popping in for cups of tea, coming round for Sunday lunch. I'm lucky to be close to my two boys, but the reality is a girl will have more in common with a mother so I never had to look for Caron. She was always on the doorstep. We were in the same business, so we'd ring each other up about people we'd interviewed and share research notes."

Living in Northern Ireland also meant Hunniford kept closer tabs on her teenage daughter than most mothers. Or so she thought. "You had to know which pub or club they were going to because it was all bombs, bullets and barricades. I used to tell her to bring whoever she wanted to the house because I would rather have them there having a beer than being in a pub. Afterwards, though, I discovered half the time Caron had been up the Falls Road in drinking places. I only thought I knew where she was."

Hunniford's own upbringing in Portadown, Co Armagh, had been less troubled. The modern troubles began in 1969 and the only thing marring her childhood was the B Specials who patrolled the north-south border. She was terrified of them. "They used to have shiny red torches and I heard stories that if you didn't stop for the shiny red torch, they shot you."

But Hunniford, a Protestant, did live with segregation. It was only when she spent a year in Canada at 17 that she discovered, to her relief, a world where religion didn't matter. "Nobody asked your religion. Nobody cared. It was a great revelation to me and set my parameters for life." Later she would marry a Catholic, Don Keating, a producer and cameraman. Her parents did not try to prevent it but did not attend the wedding. The couple divorced in 1992 and Hunniford married hairdresser Stephen Way in 1998.

Her father was a newspaper advertising man by day and a magician by night. There wasn't much money but her memory of childhood is of her mother's homemaking skills. "She cooked the way people aspire to now. Everything was grown in the back garden. It was fresh soups, stews and homemade bread, and there were always tins full of the most marvellous cakes and biscuits." She had one older sister, a younger brother, and her memory is of enormous security. "I never had to question whether I was loved or not. I knew."

She was a singer, and as her father belonged to a concert party, she too performed. Her father used to queue up on a Saturday for sheet music to teach her new songs, and at the age of eight, she was performing three or four nights a week. "We'd come in at midnight or one in the morning. My mum would give us all a cup of tea and put me to bed and then I'd be up at seven for school. Looking back, I don't know how we did it."

It was singing that led to her broadcasting break. She was asked to record a song that Lulu had shortlisted for the Eurovision song contest and it went to number seven in the Ulster charts. That, says Hunniford, meant nothing – except that the producer phoned her the next day and said that since she wasn't short of a word or two, did she fancy giving broadcasting a try? Broadcasting was her father's dream. He wanted Alan Whicker's job in his next life. Hunniford was brought across to London in 1982 as a stand-in for Jimmy Young, and then given her own Radio 2 show. She continued singing, appearing on Saturday-night programmes like The Val Doonican Show, but broadcasting took over. She also moved into television, presenting a variety of shows including This Morning, Heaven and Earth and Cash in the Attic.

Caron followed her mother into broadcasting, presenting Blue Peter and, later, This Morning. She married her agent Lindsay and had two sons, but in September 1997, months after the death of her father, she received the shock diagnosis that she had breast cancer. She was only 35 and had recently given birth. At first, the family remained positive. "Caron did everything right," recalls Hunniford. "It was caught very early on, she had a lumpectomy, then another to make sure they got it all out when they realised it was positive, then a mastectomy, chemo… Even her own doctor doesn't know why it became very aggressive, became a different kind of cancer. Honestly, hand on heart, looking back on Caron's life, her immune system was very strong. She was hardly ever ill."

Hunniford's mother also died of breast cancer. Was there, perhaps, a genetic link? "I don't know," she says carefully. "I haven't gone down that road. I did ask a professor I know in Northern Ireland if I should go for genetic testing and he said I should just keep a careful watch. I do get mammograms very frequently, and obviously it's a worry but I try not to concentrate on it too much."

Caron had periods of remission but the cancer spread, and in December 1999 she was given just 18 months to live. In a search for both privacy and alternative treatments, she moved to Australia and survived another five years. Hunniford says she went on a spiritual journey, and in her diaries, Caron herself wrote that cancer had been "an amazing teacher". Just days before she died, she had been in Switzerland with her family, her mother and stepfather, painting eggs for Easter. But things changed so quickly. Lindsay drove through the night to get her back to Hunniford's home to die. In his eulogy, he said that his wife had "done so much work on herself in terms of spirituality that she had no fear. She reached personal peace and calmness".

Hunniford is unstinting in her praise of Lindsay; has always said she loves him like a son. The press made much of her staying away from his remarriage to Sally Meen two years after Caron's death, but it would be unrealistic to expect a mother to feel comfortable in those circumstances, however happy she was for her former son-in-law. And she was happy for him, Hunniford insists. They had their own family dinner to celebrate his marriage. "I always knew Russ would find another partner because he's a very beautiful man. You may not love in the same way, and it's not replacement, but you learn to love again and I knew it would happen. I didn't want Russ and the boys sitting miserably in a house on their own somewhere, so I am very pleased that he found happiness. And they make sure I see the boys, so I am grateful for that."

The boys are hugely important to her. Apart from the Foundation, it's how Caron's spirit lives on. "I try not to get angry because I'm not an angry person by nature and it's very negative for your system. But at the start I was so conscious of the loss and what we were missing. I still think of that, of course, because I want to be sitting having a cup of tea and talking to her but now I'm angry at what she's missing. I looked at Gabriel up on stage playing a part in Hairspray a few weeks ago… Caron would have loved that. Why isn't she here? I see the boys shopping and their wacky sense of dress, their sense of fun... it's Caron; the genes have gone straight through. Why isn't she here to enjoy this?"

She tries not to talk too much about Caron to the boys but she does want to keep her alive for them. They are loved and doing well but she knows that key stages of their lives – graduation, marriage, fatherhood – will be marked by the absence of their mother. The world may see confident young men but internally they carry difficult memories. A few days after his mother died, seven-year-old Gabriel knocked on the door of the room where she lay. "Mummy, you've been asleep too long," he said. "It's time to wake up."

ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH. It was given to Hunniford recently and is of Caron when she was very small. She is standing with other children, holding a doll. "That got to me more than anything. When I look at a childhood photograph, I see all the expectations. I look at a photograph of her when she was born and think of how you expect your child's life to unfold. That's what's hard to get to grips with. I have no answer to that."

A photograph album of a life. Words and pictures might seem all that's left but there are other influences. Hunniford has changed. Sometimes, she thinks she's a nicer person, appreciates life more and has a deeper understanding of people. Other times, she's more impatient of people's moans. "Stop banging on about paltry things, carrying resentments about wrongs that mean nothing. Get over it. Live your life."

Some people get irritated by the "death is nothing at all, I have slipped into the next room" argument. They celebrate the life well lived, the love that was shared, but believe death is the end. Hunniford cannot accept that. She never prayed so much in her life as when Caron was ill, but despite her prayers remaining unanswered, she chooses to hold on to faith. She needs it in her life. "I have to believe I will see Caron again one day or I would go mental. I don't know where that is, or when that will be, but I have to believe that I will."

In life, she always knew where Caron was. Now she doesn't. Yet even those without faith would sense around Hunniford that, wherever she is, in some very real and human way, her daughter is somewhere close by.

• Always with You (18.99, Hodder & Stoughton) by Gloria Hunniford is out now