Last updated at 12:44 AM on 13th December 2008
Our story began in the Sixties. His best friends were Michael Caine and Peter Sellers, Roger Moore and Princess Margaret. We holidayed in the South of France and weekended with the Queen’s photographer cousin, Lord Lichfield.
But it wasn’t Doug Hayward’s glamorous lifestyle that seduced me — I had just spent four years in Hollywood where I had seen a lot of high life. We bonded over an idealistic belief in the classless society.
Doug had proved it was possible for anyone to come from anywhere and make the most of their life. Brought up in a working-class home near Heathrow Airport, he went on to start a world-famous tailoring business. We married in 1970, had a daughter, Polly — and then everything went wrong. Perhaps it was the hectic pace of life, perhaps his obsessive work ethic. Or was it my determination not to be a stay-at-home wife?
Our divorce was bitter. We ended up in the High Court, and our daughter was made a ward of court. Though we continued living opposite each other and neither of us remarried, we barely exchanged a civil word for 25 years.
Then one day in 2004 he smiled at me in the street. ‘Has he buried the hatchet?’ I asked my — our — daughter.
‘Don’t be silly, Mother,’ she said. ‘He is becoming so dotty he thinks you’re someone else.’
Doug was diagnosed with dementiaWithin a couple of months my talented former husband had mysteriously blacked out and was taken to Accident & Emergency. Five specialist hospitals later there was a diagnosis. Doug — who had been so dynamic, so witty, so charming, so gentlemanly — had several sorts of dementia. He was not yet 70.
This ghastly disease is no respecter of persons. It strikes wherever it likes and each family has to deal with it as best they can. Doug had no close relatives other than my daughter, so I decided to support her early on by helping with his care.
But what had been a practical decision at the outset had a completely unexpected outcome. Dementia is often said to rob its victims of all personality. I didn’t find that. In many ways, my ex was still the same old Doug I had admired and fallen in love with.
When I first visited him in hospital, I had no idea what sort of a welcome I would get.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are my former mother-in-law — but none of that matters any more.’ He could not find the right word for our relationship, but he wanted it to continue.
His illness often made him confuse his words, but with a little imagination it was easy to understand what he meant.
‘Can I get you on the “wild one”?’ he would say. He meant the mobile. ‘Where is the Moon?’ That’s what he called the house key because it caught the glint of the streetlight at night.
His vocabulary was quite charming, but there were many aspects of his illness that were not. The problems started as soon as he came back from hospital to the flat where he had lived alone since our divorce.
Already he was failing the MMSE — Mini Mental State Exam — which assesses capability based on the answers to questions such as ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’. Part of it was wilful failure — as a schoolboy Doug hated exams — but it didn’t change the facts.
He tried to light the bedclothes rather than the gas fireLeft to himself, he tried to light the bedclothes rather than the gas fire, and put food straight onto the burners on the kitchen stove without bothering with a pan. He scarcely knew his address any more, and couldn’t work out how to open the front door.
Yet he was determinedly independent and did not want to acknowledge any of this. Only recently he had been driving his car all over the country and as far as he was concerned he was going to continue. That meant we had to confiscate his car keys.
He hated this assault on his personal freedom and lost no opportunity to blame Polly and I. His aggression particularly upset our daughter.
She wanted to remember him as the supremely energetic father he had been, the life and soul of the party, the man who always had an amusing tale to tell, who knew the words to all the early Broadway and Hollywood songs by heart. To her, it seemed as if all the attractive parts of his personality had been excised, leaving him on a constant collision course with anyone who wanted to help him.
He couldn’t even take care of the new dog that had replaced his beloved Burt, a Jack Russell of some repute, who’d had his own Doug Hayward tailored jacket and obituary in the national press.
Doug felt he'd lost all quality of lifeBurt had been the runt of the litter, content even as a puppy to sit at home because he was allergic to trees and grass, thus perfect for an ailing owner. Jack, the newcomer, was an enormous, bounding thing who never sat still. He had to be rehoused and Doug concluded that was the end to any remaining quality of life.
He was so depressed that we did not have the heart to tell him he was never going to get better. He must have suspected it himself, so perhaps there was no point.
Some doctors, as well as most friends, seemed to take the view that he would be better off dead, but I couldn’t agree.
I tried to cheer him up by telling him doctors would one day discover a cure for Alzheimer’s and that I wanted him to be around to benefit when the breakthrough was made. We genuinely hoped it would come in time. But what was to happen to Doug in the meantime?
The choice was stark: he went into care or we funded 24-hour carers to look after him in the flat he loved, above the Mayfair tailoring business he’d created. He begged my daughter never to send him away, and so we decided he should live at home as long as possible — and, ironically, because of his frugal upbringing, we managed this.
In his heyday, Doug dined out on stories of his penny-pinching, which in his witty way he made seem utterly charming — an inevitable consequence of his working-class background.
We went as far as California for help - but found nothingIt meant he had saved what he earned for just such a rainy day, and my daughter, who had power of attorney, was determined to use his money for his benefit. His one extravagance had been top-of-the-range health insurance, so he could have the best medical advice the instant he needed it.
Not that anyone had the faintest idea what was the best way forward. Doug went as far as California and Barbados to try to find a cure while he was still able, but he found nothing.
Fortunately, we knew a brilliant Catholic geriatrician who shared my view that where there’s life there’s hope. Dr Keet’s answer to every problem was: ‘Keep your nerve and play it by ear.’
He was willing to come out at all hours, at a moment’s notice, to switch Doug’s medication and mastermind a cocktail of calming drugs alongside health supplements, including acknowledged brain food such as royal jelly and fish oil.
Doug was given Aricept, about the only drug that improves the memory of Alzheimer’s patients. The NHS refuses to provide it until a patient reaches the later stages of the disease. What a tragedy it is that they do not make the drugs we used routinely available to all dementia patients.
The NHS may do many good things, but it is difficult to understand why the diseases of the old are so underfunded when every drunk or drug addict who ends up in A&E on a Friday night is guaranteed sympathetic treatment.
Unlike drink and drugs, old age is not a lifestyle choice. Certainly, no one would choose to end their days as vulnerable as a newborn child — incapable of comprehension, of articulating their basic needs or controlling their bodily functions.
Doug couldn't tell us the problem, but he was terrifiedSo how do you find a reliable companion for someone in this state? At the start, we tried to save agency commission by answering adverts ourselves, only to find that private individuals are entitled to little information about prospective employees because of data protection.
In the end, we turned to a leading agency, on the basis they would never let us down. It was expensive, and although they found us several very good carers, there were some who were unsuitable — including one who seemed to be ill-treating my ex.
Doug couldn’t tell us what was wrong, but was plainly terrified of the man. Eventually, we found two wonderfully loyal carers who had worked for families we knew. We were fortunate, too, that Doug’s many friends were so helpful. They invited him to watch football on TV, especially when his team, Chelsea, was playing. They joined him at his gym, run by Annabel’s owner, Mark Birley.
Most lunch-times they took him to one of the many restaurants near his Mayfair shop. Doug usually rose to the occasion when he was in company, though his attention span was shortening.
He didn’t say much on those outings, but ate his favourite pasta and could even have a glass of wine. He liked to drop into his shop, too, and his eye for a well-cut jacket and his uncanny intuition were as sharp as ever.
Sometimes I took him to the cinema. We saw his friend Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby together. Doug, an avid movie fan, was still able to follow the most obscure plot and deliver an opinionated verdict.
We might as well still have been marriedSometimes we took him out in the car. He would sit next to me convinced he knew the way, ordering me to ‘Turn right, turn left’ and accusing me of being completely useless. We might as well still have been married.
Sometimes I took him for a walk in the park. Usually he loathed exercise, but once he struck out further and further only to bolt for home without warning, heading for the traffic. Doug, who had been a skilled footballer in his day, was still a strong runner. I only just managed to catch up and distract him in time. But our boldest idea was to take Doug, who loved the sun, back to the South of France where he and I had spent one of our first holidays together on Peter Sellers’ yacht.
Two years ago, my daughter found a house for rent near Nice where all Doug’s actor friends had holiday homes. We asked him whether he wanted to go — you did not tell my former husband what to do, even though he was ill. He said ‘Yes’ without hesitation, adding rather forlornly: ‘Do you think I can?’
That made us doubly keen — and determined nothing should go wrong. We planned the outing with military precision, invited a rota of my daughter’s friends to keep an eye out for him, and booked his doctor and the carer on our flight, just in case.
We reckoned without the August 2006 terrorist alert and all the added airline security procedures. In those first weeks you were not even allowed to take a lipstick on board, still less any liquid.
Doug, shaking with nerves, but still his old, proud self, refused to use a wheelchair, and stood in a queued for security for two hours without even being allowed a drink. When we finally got on the plane, he was in a foul mood. He hated the airline food, hated his seat, hated me for sitting next to him.
The holiday was a spectacular success
Then there was the first of many magical moments. We were just about to cross the coast of France at Antibes. Ahead lay the Mediterranean bathed in August sun. ‘Look out of the window,’ I said.
He looked grumpily down and then turned to me with a look of sheer childlike delight on his face: ‘I know where we are,’ he said. ‘He goes right out there and turns left and then he lands in Nice.’ He meant the pilot, and Doug was right.
The holiday was a spectacular success. He loved the bedroom my daughter had chosen for him because it was exactly like his room at home. He loved the garden, and for the first time in his life took an interest in flowers — which he asked to have planted in the garden of his English country house. We took him to lunch parties at the
beach and to all the old haunts.
Of course, there were nerve-racking moments. There was the time, five minutes after we arrived at the house, when he locked himself in the loo and we couldn’t get him out for an hour and a half.
There were the many times he tried to dive into the shallow end of the swimming pool and hated us for stopping him. Then there was the day he finally walked down the steps into the water with my daughter, launched himself into the pool and swam two lengths. Everyone burst into tears. We had never thought we would see him do that again.
When we returned to Britain, we planted the flowers he wanted in the garden of his country home near Henley, but Doug never saw them. He gave up spending weekends there because he saw frightening hallucinations lurking in the shadows.
Brought together by his illness
There was no use trying to dispute these visions — they were real people to him, and so we talked to them, as he did. On one occasion, our carer even laid the dinner table for the three make-believe women who seemed to keep him constant company.
Brought together by his illness, we spent the last four Christmases as a family for the first time since the Seventies. In the old days we used to spend them with Joan Collins.
At our first reunion, the cast list was the carer, the doctor, Polly and 12 firemen from the local fire station. They were there to cope with a fridge that had exploded after Doug — who had lost his sense of smell — failed to notice it had been leaking highly flammable ammonia.
And for the first time ever, I had managed to persuade Doug to come to the supermarket with me. He had never been a New Man. If there was no one to make a cup of tea for him, he threatened to leave home. In the old days, he had always overseen the festivities, on the principle that I would never get it right, and so he gladly rifled the supermarket shelves of poinsettias and mince pies, and was in a great mood.
We kept up the outings almost to the end. He sat in a seat of honour when Michael Parkinson was taping one of his last shows featuring Michael Caine and Tony Bennett. ‘None of us would know each other without Doug,’ Parky said. ‘He introduced us and we are all wearing his suits.’
I don’t think Doug cried, but I did. By then, he could rarely find the right words, despite knowing exactly what he wanted to say. Sometimes he even talked about his business. ‘Oh, I can’t say it,’ he would flounder in despair. Then I would voice what I thought were his sentiments. When I got it wrong, he was ferocious, but when I got it right, his relief was obvious.
Coming to terms with his disease
It even seemed to me that he came to terms with his disease after he bonded with a Nigerian part-time carer who told him: ‘We say in our village you must love every stage of life because even old age and illness has its compensations.’ You never know where help is going to come from.
This time last year, my daughter got married and Doug was in church with all the other guests. Then, on New Year’s Eve, which would have been our 38th wedding anniversary, I asked him out to a champagne dinner. Doug only ever did what he wanted, so when he accepted enthusiastically, it showed how far our relationship had come. In February, he started failing and finally had to go into care.
We decorated his room exactly like the one at home, and then I went away for a short Easter break confident he did not know anyone any more and had no idea of his whereabouts. Wrong. When I came back he was sitting in his chair with a tartan rug from his shop over his knees. ‘Where have you been, then?’ he said. It wasn’t so much an accusation as an acknowledgement.
He died three weeks later. But I could not have anticipated what happened next. ‘You take his ashes, Mum,’ my daughter said. ‘He’d like that.’
I put them on the piano he gave me in the old days. Then our musical tastes had differed wildly — he liked Thirties ballads, I liked Janis Joplin. This time I played him Rodgers and Hart’s 1935 love song with its wonderful refrain: ‘I know it’s over and yet... it’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget.’
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