SHEILA HANCOCK: From Brexit to her daughter’s cancer, scruffy Jeremy Corbyn and her own illness

When one of our best-loved actors began writing her new book, she imagined a gentle record of her later years. It didn’t turn out like that. From Brexit to her daughter’s breast cancer, scruffy Corbyn and her own painful illness, the world seemed intent on driving her mad. The result: a sparkling memoir as funny and insightful as it is moving… 

November 2020

In 2016, I began writing a book that I hoped would be a gentle record of a fulfilled old age; an inspirational journey. It hasn’t turned out like that. As I wrote it, my own life and the wider world descended into chaos.

Yet it started so well.

January 2016

The year has begun with my neighbour Delena’s annual New Year party. A gathering-together of old friends. I feel positively sprightly compared to one guest with a broken femur, another with a failed back operation, two stroke survivors and an assortment of less than successful hip and knee replacements.

The general trend of the conversation was the increasing inability to learn lines, the depressing types of roles we were being called on to play, the lack of projection in younger actors and, shock-horror, that some are actually being miked. (Good thing, too, I think. Makes life much easier.) The moans were conveyed with loud hilarity at past adventures and present ills.

One erstwhile roué was still relentlessly flirting from the sofa, undaunted by the fact he couldn’t get up off it. Old age was mocked and defied by this joyous gathering.

May to June 2016

Luckily, my profession continues to consider me employable, although the roles increasingly require me to die or go senile. One that didn’t is the film I’ve made over the past two months.

Edie is about an old woman who, having been for years the carer of her unlovable husband, decides, on his death, to go to Scotland and climb a mountain. I duly met the producer and director in a club, and laughingly said: ‘Of course, the climbing will be done with green screen, won’t it?’

Silence. The long and the short of it was that, no, they wanted me to actually climb the bloody mountain.

It is the mark of my still-lethal ambition that I took the part. So it was all systems go. Every other day in the gym, lifting weights, speeding on the treadmill, developing bulges in arms and legs which hadn’t been there for years.

At the foot of Suilven mountain, the first assistant director took me aside and said: ‘This is your last chance to back out, Sheila. The climb is going to take two or three days, shooting as we go, and we will be sleeping in tents. Once you start there is nowhere for a helicopter to land apart from the top, so you will have to continue.’

A ghillie was assigned to work out where I should put my hands and feet when scrambling over the rocks. His technique to keep me going was, if I managed a tricky bit, to reward me with a jelly baby.

One night I did actually think I might die. We had to camp on a ledge above the clouds. I had on thermal underwear, several layers of clothes, hats and gloves, and a supposedly insulated tent. What I had forgotten, when layering myself up, was the state of my bladder. It was pitch-dark with a sheer drop to oblivion outside my tent. Stripping off and crouching outside, I have never been so cold in my life.

The last lap was the toughest. Crossing a metre-wide, very long path with a vertical drop either side was the only time I actually wept with fear, my whimpering allayed by an extra helping of jelly babies.

After the final rock scramble, flat on my stomach, I wriggled on to the top. The sheer wonder of what I experienced as I stood on that unexpectedly grassy summit took my breath away.

Miles and miles of wilderness on all sides. No sign of life. Not a road, not a house.

Throughout my long life I’ve had a few experiences that have shaken me to the core of my being — transcendental, revelatory. This was one.

I did not feel diminished, a tiny human in this vast world; I felt part of it, absorbed, part of Nature. I felt I belonged to this wild, bleak, magnificent place. My body had lain against the mountain’s cliff face, I’d clung to it with my hands, trusted my feet on its stones, and it had befriended me.

June 2016

The night before the referendum vote as to whether the United Kingdom wishes to leave the European Union, I went on a television debate and tried to explain why I personally wanted us to remain.

The gist of my contribution was that, as a child during the war, I was bombed, and my friends and neighbours killed, by the Germans. At seven years old, my case was packed, my gas mask put over my shoulder and a label tied to my coat.

I was sent off to the country and billeted on strangers. I was terrified for most of my childhood.

And I hated the Germans.

My first husband, Alec Ross, served in the RAF during the war, when he was involved in destroying German cities and killing thousands of their citizens.

And the Germans, in their turn, hated him.

Sometime after V-J Day, the Fricker boy from next door came back skeletal and mute from the horrors he had endured in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

One of the first things my second husband, the actor John Thaw, who had a similar bad bed history, did when we fell in love was to buy a beautiful brass bed that had belonged to the handsome matinee idol Ivor Novello, who by all accounts had as much fun in it as we did

And I hated the Japanese.

Then we did the unthinkable. Not once but twice, we backed the United States in obliterating two huge areas of Japan with atomic bombs. Killing and maiming thousands.

And surely to God they hated us.

But somehow, out of this maelstrom of hatred, came the idea of a united Europe. Encouraged by our hero Winston Churchill, the countries that had been involved in two world wars, killing 40 million in the first and 70 million in the second, would unite to create a better, more peaceful continent. It was a step towards a united world.

In one day, June 23, 2016, all that has gone. The result was 51.89 per cent to leave and 48.11 per cent to remain. (I will always worry that the 3.78 per cent margin was my fault.)

July 2016

A friend suggested that we are like all old people, who don’t embrace change and moan about how wonderful life was when we were young. For me it wasn’t. War was vile, and poverty was grinding.

October 2017

Decided to buy myself some silk bed linen. Felt in need of a bit of a treat. I am slightly obsessive about beds. I blame the war.

In the air-raid shelter I was on a narrow bunk with no mattress, and all hell going on outside.

When I was evacuated, in my billet I slept on an ancient, cracked, leatherette couch and the toilet was down the garden — a wooden seat with a hole in the middle. You even had to pass a savage dog to get to it. No wonder I wet the bed.

The night before I sat my exam for a scholarship to grammar school, there was a particularly noisy air raid, and when we heard the German bombers retreating my worried mother decided that, to prepare my brain, we should leave the shelter and try to sleep in the house.

As Dad was on ARP duty, tending to the wounded and clearing up the debris from the raid, she said I could even sleep in their bed with her.

My mother had made what she called a ‘dusty-pink’ satinette eiderdown for the super-comfortable bed. On that night she had to shake off some plaster dislodged from the ceiling by a nearby landmine before we could nestle under it. Not usually given to physical expressions of love, she gently stroked my forehead, hoping to quell all fears of the coming ordeal the next day, which would allow me to ‘better myself’.

This year, the remembrance service at the Cenotaph is marking the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The night before, stuck in traffic, I was irritated by the roads being closed around the Royal Albert Hall for a big commemoration with the Queen present. Shame on me.

Later, in theatrical digs, I shared beds with fleas, bedbugs and the occasional cockroach.

One of the first things my second husband, the actor John Thaw, who had a similar bad bed history, did when we fell in love was to buy a beautiful brass bed that had belonged to the handsome matinee idol Ivor Novello, who by all accounts had as much fun in it as we did.

I sleep in it to this day. Now under silk sheets. Bliss. I would like to end my life in its sensuous embrace, as did John.

November 2017

I was in France gathering black figs from the garden when the phone rang.

‘Mum, I’m afraid I have some bad news.’ It was Ellie Jane, my eldest daughter.

‘What? Tell me?’ My whole being cringes with fear.

‘OK. I have breast cancer. Sorry. Unfortunately it’s rather an aggressive one. Grade three. But don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’

‘Of course you will. I’ll get the next flight to London.’

I put the phone down and went into the newly installed downstairs toilet and vomited. Then, clinging to the table, I said out loud, quite calmly: ‘OK, so, yes, now I want to die.’

I genuinely meant it.

How could I go on without my beloved daughter? How obscene if she, at 50, should die, and I, who had already lived for 84 years, should continue.

Back in England, I have watched as Ellie Jane is swallowed into the vortex of endless tests, scans and agonising waiting for results. I sit in the corner making notes at doctors’ meetings, bring cakes into the chemo ward, search the web for the latest research and sort out wigs and headgear for the inevitable hair loss.

I do my best not to show my horror at the chemical bombardment on her beautiful body, but when I get home, alone, I howl with grief.

My three daughters are in constant contact with one another, something that pleases me because I know they will be there for one another when I’m gone.

They came together as a family very suddenly. When I married John, he had a little girl, Abigail, and I had Ellie Jane. They were both thrilled to go from being only children to having a sister, and very soon along came another one, Joanna.

As a threesome they have supported one another through some fairly hairy times. I just wish they would still let me support them a bit more.

I’m not sure when the role of mother changes from being in control to taking a back seat. As a self-reliant, proactive person, it is not a situation I relish. It coincides with being ignored by waiters and bartenders, and not being expected to join the cast and crew for a drink after a day’s shooting.

Looking back, I realise I was exactly the same with my mother. She yearned to be an intimate part of my life and Ellie Jane’s upbringing, but there was a yawning gap between her disciplined approach and my Swinging Sixties lifestyle.

How Ellie Jane was ‘turned out’, with clean white socks and shiny shoes, was a top priority for her. It was way down my list.

Ironically, with my grandchildren, I have turned into my mother. I insist on good table manners, especially in restaurants, and putting away books and toys at bedtime — rules happily abided by when I have them on my own, but when my daughters are there I have to bite my lip until it bleeds.

The gap of understanding between my mother and me was, I think, bigger than happens nowadays. I was a snotty grammar-school-educated girl, as my parents had strived for me to be, then earning reasonable money and living in some style.

My mother left school at 14, and ended up living in a mobile home on a caravan site, which she seemed to like.

I look back with huge regret that I did not make more effort to find out how she really felt about life. You just didn’t have those sorts of conversations with your parents in those days. She was always busy doing something, and no fan of idle chit-chat.

The one behaviour I did inherit from my mother is allowing the household to revolve around the moods of the paterfamilias. ‘You just wait until your dad gets home’, became my, ‘Don’t upset Daddy, he’s in a bit of a mood.’

We all smile now at the memory of the first visits home of my sons-in-law, who were greeted by a grunt or snarl from John, then frantic, compensatory prattle from me. John didn’t like people invading his space.

My mental pain has become physical. I had a sudden searing pain in my right hand. Then my left hand developed an agonising pain too, rendering it useless.

The film Edie (pictured) is about an old woman who, having been for years the carer of her unlovable husband, decides, on his death, to go to Scotland and climb a mountain. I duly met the producer and director in a club, and laughingly said: ‘Of course, the climbing will be done with green screen, won’t it?’

After sitting for an hour studying a script, I stood up and found I could not walk. My right leg was hurting more than anything I can remember, except perhaps childbirth.

The next day it had recovered just enough for me to drag myself to my doctor, who took a blood test. At one point, my lovely GP said: ‘Oh well, thank goodness it’s not rheumatoid arthritis.’

‘Why?’

Her face said it all.

‘Don’t let’s go there.’

December 2017

Unfortunately, that was exactly where we did go.

January to April 2018

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease, which means that your body has turned against itself. The mechanism that is supposed to protect you — your immune system — is attacking you. If my body had heard my desire for death when I learned about my daughter’s cancer, I wish it had chosen a less agonising method of achieving it.

Not all that long ago, a diagnosis of RA had a hideous prognosis of increasing disability, gross deformity and terrible pain, leading often to death.

It is still incurable, but brilliant medical science has come up with modern drugs that make it quite possible to go into long, and even permanent, remission.

My immediate problem about commencing treatment was that I was about to start rehearsals for a stage version of the film Harold And Maude.

As I rather simplistically understand it, the new biologic drugs work by killing off the part of the immune system that has run amok. This presents two problems.

First, it is a long process to discover which is the most suitable drug, and some can affect you badly.

The second problem was that the theatre was below ground, airless and somewhat overcrowded with actors, stage staff and a large resident population of beetles and mice. Not ideal for anyone with a vulnerable immune system.

So I decided to postpone the drug trials until the show finished and meantime survive on large doses of steroids. These had a dramatic effect. They gave me frenetic energy.

With no trace of my usual stage fright, I ricocheted about the stage, climbing ladders, dancing, and spouting long speeches not always completely accurately.

In the wings it was a different story. My wonderful dresser had to negotiate pulling dresses off and on with me being unable to raise my arms above my head because of the pain.

May 2018

When I eventually left the cast of Harold And Maude, having miraculously never missed a performance, I did some publicity for Edie. I sat in a hotel room, chatting to journalists about what a miracle I was at my age to make such a film.

Climbing a mountain at 83! What was my secret? Little did they know that, when they left, I could barely walk across the room to the toilet.

It is not vanity that has made me want to conceal my illness, but my old credo, dinned into me by my father, of not letting people down.

Pull yourself together.

Stiff upper lip.

Don’t be a burden.

Why the hell not.

November 11, 2018

This year, the remembrance service at the Cenotaph is marking the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The night before, stuck in traffic, I was irritated by the roads being closed around the Royal Albert Hall for a big commemoration with the Queen present. Shame on me.

I was even cross that the police stopped me for ten minutes outside the Palace to allow this 92-year-old woman past, to grace yet another event with her unyieldingly sad presence.

She doesn’t seem to care that her solemn face can be read as grumpiness. No false smiles for her. She is what she is. She does her duty, quietly and efficiently — all that standing around, and walking backwards down Cenotaph steps, and trying to make conversation once a week with Theresa May.

Her hair is the same old-fashioned style, lacquered into the same neat curls and waves that it was in the 1960s, the style of her coats and hats unchanged over the years. A frumpy, tiny, stalwart figure that fills me with love. A good woman.

With her on the balcony on Remembrance Sunday were the seemingly rather jolly Camilla, animatedly trying, unsuccessfully, to chat with the Queen, and the Duchess of Cambridge, coiffed immaculately and demurely dressed in what looked like a run-up to her Queen role.

In the middle, sombre, watchful, stolid, was the real thing. I will feel less safe when she goes.

I suppose, if I think it through rationally, with my hatred of the class system of which our aristocratic Royal Family is the apex, I should be a republican. When it comes to something like Remembrance Day, I only know that I am comforted by the royal presence.

She is not one of the ludicrous cartoon figures that dominate our world now. She is not the disgusting Trump, the gadfly Boris Johnson, the determined toff Rees-Mogg, the shambolic David Davis, the pompous Dr Liam Fox or the guffawing Farage.

Nor the scruffy Jeremy Corbyn, in his shabby anorak and tiny, miserly poppy brooch as he laid his wreath at the Cenotaph, when everyone else had on their Sunday best to honour the dead. What kind of message was that?

Michael Foot, in his notorious duffel coat, was obviously trying to keep warm; Corbyn’s dishevelled outfit seemed like some grotesquely misplaced gesture of defiance.

November 14, 2018

I aspire to be a pacifist. It is one of the things you sign up to when you become a Quaker, as I did in 1993.

Following Quaker practice, if I see a parent shouting at, or even walloping, a child in the supermarket queue, I force myself not to belt the adults, but to offer help: ‘Oh poor you — it’s stressful, isn’t it? Can I take your kid while you pay?’

I then try some of the distraction techniques on the child that I use with tricky schoolkids I sometimes teach, and with my grandchildren. Parent and child are usually so flabbergasted that someone is understanding, rather than being silently or even vocally critical, that the situation calms down.

Anyway, the batty old lady won’t let them get a word in edgeways.

I once intervened in a quite violent altercation between a man and a frightened woman in the dead of night on Hammersmith riverside. After a bit of a struggle, vocal and physical, I managed to stop the large attacker.

Sadly, not with my Quakerly anger-management approach, but because he recognised me off the TV show Gogglebox.

January 2019

Went to another funeral. I have reached the age where my friends are more likely to be buried than wed. When he was very old, John Gielgud was reputed to have said, after yet another ceremony: ‘It’s hardly worth going home.’

February 2019

I am trying to organise my affairs to deal with infirmity and dependence, should they occur. I have installed a lift and made all my cupboards more accessible.

Death is a reality, but from what I have observed in others I will know when to let go. Years ago, I did a TV monologue, depicting a woman going to Zurich to die. When I went on a television programme to discuss it with MP Diane Abbott, she was so adamant that legal euthanasia would lead to people being coerced into dying, to get them out of the way and steal their money, that she could barely bother to engage with me, making it clear a silly actor did not understand these things.

When I pointed out that it was her job to frame a law that encompassed any possible danger, she could not be bothered to reply.

I want the right to manage my own departure, when I choose, where I choose. I am gradually destroying diaries and letters, offloading belongings and refusing any more gifts, trying to make it as easy as possible for my daughters to tidy up after my death.

Then, when all that is done and dusted, I will settle down, with the help of my friends, to bloody well enjoy my decline. 

Old Rage by Sheila Hancock will be published by Bloomsbury on June 9 at £18.99. © 2022 Sheila Hancock. To order a copy for £17.09, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £20. Promotional price valid until June 4, 2022.

Sheila will be appearing live in Ilkley (June 6), Richmond (June 7) and Chester (June 16). Tickets at fane.co.uk.