A Leftie, Who Saw The Light: What The Cruel Death Of My Parents Taught Me About Our 'Caring' NHS

Devoted: Melanie's parents Alfred and Mabel Phillips in the Forties

By Melanie Phillips

When I was 12, my mother developed what she described as tingling in her legs and ‘funny feelings’ when she walked too far. She consulted a neurologist, after which she described her nameless and strange affliction as her ‘condition’, which was what her doctor had called it.

Neither my father nor I ever thought of questioning this meaningless diagnosis. A quarter of a century passed before we learned the truth.

In 1987, they were to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and I was planning a party for them. But my mother was being difficult about this: disengaged, even churlish. I begged her to end the secrecy and tell me just what was going on.

And so in a flat voice she told me. Her neurologist had finally told her the true nature of her ‘condition’. After treating her for 25 years, he was now retiring from practice — and he chose this final consultation to tell her that what she had was multiple sclerosis. How could this possibly have happened? For the neurologist to have kept this from her meant there must in turn have been a conspiracy of secrecy for a quarter of a century between him, her GP, the psychiatrist who treated her for depression and everyone else she’d seen in the NHS.

She had never been told what was actually wrong with her — until the day her neurologist dumped this knowledge on her and then abandoned her. How could he have been so cruel? Or did he understand that she was mentally too fragile to hear the true diagnosis?

Over the following 17 years, she was caught in a downward spiral which, when she also developed Parkinson’s disease and vascular dementia, was to rob her progressively of mobility, vision, control of her natural functions and eventually her mind.

There are people who, faced with a devastating and progressive disease, refuse to go under. They constantly adapt and, taking every day as it comes, manage to extract from the world around them every ounce of life.

My mother was not one of them. 

Faced with the truth about her illness, she went under and allowed it to take over. And as her world shrank into a space defined exclusively by her disease, an intolerable burden was dumped on my father.

He looked after her with spaniel-like devotion. Refusing to accept a walking frame, my mother would shuffle around their flat, clinging onto a wooden tea-trolley for support. And my father would follow a few paces behind, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The experience of those years also told me that something was going very wrong with the Welfare State.

It wasn’t just the lack of provision, which meant that the only care available for my mother from the local authority was a few hours a week, often from untrained girls who had been recruited off the street.

It was also a callousness and indifference among the supposedly caring services. It was the hospital nurses who, when my mother broke her hip and through her feebleness was unable to move at all in her hospital bed, left her food and water unwrapped or out of reach and refused to make her comfortable.

During her mother's illness, Melanie realised that, in the National Health Service, Britain's sanctified temple of altruism, compassion and decency, if you were old, feeble and poor you just didn't stand a chance

When I complained, the ward sister told me with a straight face that my mother, who could barely put one foot in front of the other, had just a short time before been ‘skipping round the ward’.

I realised that, in the National Health Service, Britain’s sanctified temple of altruism, compassion and decency, if you were old, feeble and poor you just didn’t stand a chance.

In 1998, my father died, one month after being diagnosed with cancer. Although he was my mother’s principal carer and had rapidly become very weak, no nursing was provided for him other than a weekly visit by a district nurse.

I was with him one Sunday morning when she arrived at the flat where my parents had lived all my life. I told her I thought my father needed nursing. ‘All he needs is some TLC,’ she snapped (using the common abbreviation for ‘tender loving care’).

By sheer good fortune, my mother’s carer that day was a wonderful woman named Elizabeth. She certainly had not been recruited off the streets and had once been a senior nurse. She had lost her entire family during a fire-bombing in South Africa’s Soweto, and she regarded my mother as a kind of surrogate sister.

She looked at my father and told me what I knew, that he was dying. ‘I will stay with you until it happens,’ she said. ‘I will not leave you.’

Melanie's experiences during her younger years made her realise that something was going very wrong with the Welfare State

In the early evening, Elizabeth told me that the end was not far off. My father was in some internal discomfort and we called the doctor. He diagnosed a minor stomach complaint. Confused, I asked whether my father wasn’t in fact dying. ‘Who knows?’ said the doctor breezily. ‘He could last for several weeks more.’

Elizabeth raised her eyes to heaven.

A few hours later, my father died in her arms. When the same doctor returned that night to certify the death, he had the grace to blush.

I was now entirely responsible for my mother’s care. She was adamant that she wanted to stay in her own home, and for a while that was feasible after I found a good private care agency, and set up a rolling system of live-in carers.

But eventually she had to go into a nursing home, where she lived for nearly four years. To begin with, she fought it; she stayed in her room, kept her distance from the other residents who, she noted in horror, were so very old and frail, and insisted on being addressed as ‘Mrs Phillips’.

But then, finally, she submitted; she sat in the lounge with the others, stopped noticing her increasingly dishevelled appearance and became ‘Mabel’ (her first name).

I don’t know which tore me apart more.

I was told by social service professionals I knew that this home was ‘as good as it gets’. There was not a week, however, when I did not feel the utmost anguish as I relentlessly noted every deficiency in her care — her spectacles coated with a film of dirt, the flowers left dead in her vase.

There was not a week when I didn’t fantasise about spiriting her out of the home; not a week when I did not bitterly reproach myself for having effectively put here there — though I knew I could never have coped with her illness.

In my sleep, I dreamed that my mother rose from her wheelchair and, gently smiling, walked again. As her mind disintegrated, my mother gradually left me.

In 2004, a few minutes into her 80th birthday, she died.

Ever since I was 16 and at school, I had been going out with a boyfriend, Joshua Rozenberg. What really hooked me to him — for life, as it turned out — was that he made me laugh. He was fun to be with.

Fun to be with: When Melanie was 16 and at school, she had been going out with a boyfriend, Joshua Rozenberg, who she went on to marry

When our son, Gabriel, was born in 1980, motherhood hit me like a wrecking ball. I felt trapped and wretched — and deeply ashamed, because I considered this to be an unforgivable response to the great gift of a healthy, beautiful baby.

I was rescued by Frances, a children’s nanny of great competence, and after four months returned to work, writing leading articles at The Guardian part-time, embarking on the daily maternal guilt-trip and juggling the irreconcilable pressures of work and children which even a splendid nanny could not alleviate.

Two years later I had Abigail, too, and I continued at The Guardian.

Somehow I managed every morning to fit in reading all the papers, listening to the news and getting the children up, washed and breakfasted before the nanny arrived; later I even managed to fit in the school run. It was a military operation that left some male colleagues shaking their heads. 

Then, to everyone’s surprise (including mine), I was appointed news editor, a critical, fast-moving role on a daily paper.

On my very first day, I collapsed on the floor with what turned out to be a stomach complaint.

But as I lay there, dizzy and in pain, I heard the inevitable whispered speculation: ‘Do you think she’s pregnant?’

Ill as I was, I ground my teeth that at The Guardian, of all places, you couldn’t be sick without also falling victim to an anti-feminist stereotype.

But the liberal, progressive bien pensant Guardian was always much more deeply macho in its culture than it liked to think, particularly among the predominantly male editors and sub-editors, called the ‘back-bench’.

Their interests were football, cricket and drinking, not necessarily in that order. Evening breaks were spent propping up the bar in the pub where they would stand, beer glass in hand, legs apart and jingling coins in their pockets. I had never previously even been into a London pub. I joined them, drank fruit juice and would soon be gasping for breath in the nauseating and omnipresent fog of cigarette smoke.

The language of the back-bench was composed overwhelmingly of cryptic half-sentences, in-jokes and cricketing metaphors, like some Mad Hatter’s tea-party.

I struggled, even after the night editor, in desperation, took me off to a Test Match at Lord’s to teach me the rules of cricket and thus provide me with the rudiments of communication.

It would not be entirely accurate to say I had fallen victim to anti-woman prejudice. There were other women there who could hold their own on the subject of football and were themselves to be found in the pub sinking halves of bitter. But alas, even the trip to Lord’s didn’t turn me into one of the lads.

But nor, I discovered after I stopped being news editor and went back to writing, was I a signed-up member of the Sisterhood. My feminist views and theirs were very different.

This became apparent when the ultra-feminists who were willing the breakdown of the traditional family and its values became ever bolder in attacking their real target: men.

Offensively and stupidly, they were declaring that men were a waste of space and that no sensible woman ‘would take one home’.

Such women appeared merely to need men as sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional au-pairs.

Icon: Margaret Thatcher struck a national chord when, in 1990, she talked about strengthening the system for chasing absentee fathers for maintenance, which Melanie approved of

I disagreed with this, but there is no doubt that the issue of men in modern society was a complex one.

Margaret Thatcher struck a national chord when, in 1990, she talked about strengthening the system for chasing absentee fathers for maintenance. I approved of this. It was outrageous that so many absentee fathers failed to pay for their children’s upkeep. But then I realised that this was really singing from the same bash-the-man hymn-sheet as the ultra-feminists, and I radically changed my mind.

It seemed to me that reducing the duty of a father to a purely financial role debased the much bigger responsibility involved in fatherhood.

It also undermined the family as a unit because it gave a woman an incentive to have a baby and then ditch its father. It was also surely manifestly unjust to require men to pay for the upkeep of their children when, as often as not, they were prevented by the mothers from playing a proper, involved role.

In 1999, I explored all this in detail in a book, The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain And The Neutered Male. (It was published by a think-tank because by now no mainstream publisher would touch me. Because of my views, I had in effect been blacklisted.)

It seemed to Melanie that reducing the duty of a father to a purely financial role debased the much bigger responsibility involved in fatherhood

In it, I argued that the roles of the sexes were being reversed. Women were assuming the roles of both mothers and fathers while masculinity was being progressively written out of the cultural script and men being bullied into turning into quasi-women.

Far from delivering greater freedom for women, however, this agenda was actually harming them along with their children as both family life and values were destroyed.

The response from the Sisterhood was apoplectic.

The writer Julie Burchill implied that I was suffering from sexual frustration. Another columnist, Suzanne Moore, suggested that I should ‘get out more’.

Yet another, Maureen Freely, asked: ‘Has she lost her mind? I’m afraid the answer is no.’ Since I was not clinically insane, in her view, I must therefore be a fanatic.

I was apparently a ‘fundamentalist’ who offered a ‘specious mix of biological determinism, skewed statistics, out-of-context research findings and wild statements’ to express my ‘faith in the heaven that was the ideal Fifties family’.

In the New Statesman, Geraldine Bedell attacked me for my ‘judgmental’ tone and castigated me as a ‘true believer’ whose ‘austere quality is emphasised by her fiercely short haircut and strong defined features’.

Just imagine the feminist outcry if a man had written that!

For all the insults, there was still a grudging acknowledgement that I had a point.

The then Labour MP Denis MacShane thought the fury of the attacks on me masked the fact that ‘an awful lot of what she writes makes sense’.

Not so my female colleagues.

It was around this time that a handwritten note went up on The Guardian’s notice board that I may have been a woman, but I was definitely not a sister.

Adapted from Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain, by Melanie Phillips, published by emBooks and available for purchase for £6.99 at embooks.com