Bring on the Colander Girls
Hugh Massingberd
WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP? by Deborah Hutton Short Books, £7.99, pp. 251, ISBN 1904977391 Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in the world anyone would ever choose to join: ‘The Cancer Club. The only club in the world I can think of that is both rigorously exclusive and has no waiting list.’ But hold your horses, don’t flip to another review; this isn’t going to be a ‘Me and My Cancer’ piece. (I remember a ghastly girl exclaiming when Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti, ‘Oh, no! Now we’re going to be bored to death just because he had cancer.’) Although, astonishingly, it was published in this magazine ten years ago next month, my late Telegraph colleague Martyn Harris’s superb article ‘This is not the time to die’ really said it all. Indeed, quite rightly, Hutton quotes liberally from it. Here are a couple of my favourite extracts:
One decision I made early on was to ignore all the ‘positive attitude’ merchants who suddenly started targeting me by letter and telephone. ‘You must think positive,’ they told me, as if it was some great secret only they were privy to — as if, without their important insight, I would be smearing myself with ashes and rolling in the dunghill.
Harris also had no time for ‘healers and homeopaths and herbalists’ recommended to him ‘on gritty recycled paper from old friends in Glastonbury’. He particularly resented:
the implication which lies beneath complementary approaches that a disease is always your own fault. You ate the wrong food, lived the wrong lifestyle or thought the wrong kind of thoughts.
The mordant humour to be had from the crass things people say to those living with cancer struck a special chord with me. The late Ruth Picardie dubbed the types who ask meaningfully, ‘But, Ruth, how are you?’, Rubber-neckers. The actor Hugh Grant’s father categorised the ones who send ‘cards with sunset or soft-focus autumns, saying effectively, “in deepest sympathy”,’ the Ghouls.
Yet before I was diagnosed with cancer myself I remember making just the sort of stupid remarks to afflicted friends that Hutton helpfully suggests are best avoided, such as ‘Cancer is a word not a sentence’; ‘ “Look on it as a gift” (What did you get for Christmas?)’; ‘Is it terminal?’; ‘ “It’s not surprising. You’ve always had such stressful jobs/relationships/life experiences” (Delete as appropriate)’; ‘ “I know how you’re feeling” (You don’t)’; and, perhaps most irritatingly of all, ‘ “I know everything’s going to be fine”(You don’t)’.
The great strength of this anthology is that it gives clear and supremely practical guidance to the family and friends of PWC (People with Cancer), who long to do something to help but don’t know how to go about it. Hutton, herself a health writer who had previously been proud of being ‘the healthiest woman on the block’, had to learn to set aside her ‘super-competent, I-can-handle-it-myselfthank-you-very-much persona’ and say, ‘Well, do you think you could possibly ... ?’ The examples include listening (rather than advising), presenting yourself as the housework/laundry/garden/chauffeur fairy, becoming a clinic companion, planning treats, setting up a supper rota (Hutton was soon blessed with 18 ‘Colander Girls’ who took it in turns to cook her family’s evening meal in north London), and dealing with paperwork, such as grants, sick pay, etc.
Having been a sceptic about ‘alternative’ medicine (‘a short step away from believing in little green men from Mars’), Hutton discovered that things look very different from the other side of a Stage IV cancer diagnosis. Her discussion and analysis of the alternatives to the conventional medical orthodoxy (nicknamed ‘slash, poison and burn’ by extreme homeos) is intelligent and instructive, though she is wary of clinics ‘that showed much more interest in the expiry date on my credit card than in extending any possibly expiry date of my own’.
Sadly, Deborah Hutton died earlier this month, aged 49. Her royalties from the book are going to Macmillan Cancer Relief. Every one of the millions who live with or around one of Britain’s 270,000 new cancer patients each year should buy it and thereby learn the truth of the declaration by Maggie Keswick Jencks, inspirational founder of the Maggie’s Centres, ‘All that matters is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying.’
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