When you have been so close and stared death in the face, life itself becomes more precious than ever. Siobhán set about completing all the things she thought would be denied to her for ever.
Siobhán embraced life with new vigour. Not knowing how much time she had been granted, she was determined to make every second count. Over the next five years, under constant monitoring from the Royal Marsden, the cancer did not return. Siobhán was given the all-clear.
She returned to her post at the University of Sussex, where she had worked since 1991, and completed a ten-year research project with fellow academics. This dedicated scholarship produced the final two volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, already the foremost work on writing by and about Irish women.
Then, in 2004, Siobhán was appointed to the position that she had coveted for years, Professor of Irish Studies at her alma mater, Queen’s University, Belfast.
The family gladly moved across the Irish Sea from their home in Shropshire and Siobhán was immensely proud when eleven-year-old Constance was accepted as a pupil at Rathmore Grammar, the school from which she herself had launched a high-profile transatlantic academic career. Oscar, two years younger, was installed in a good, football-playing school and husband Peter closed down his public relations company to begin a degree in film studies at Queen’s.
Happily settled in their Belfast home with a new black Labrador puppy and three cats, they felt life could not have been better. Then, on Christmas Eve 2006, came the devastating news. The cancer had returned.
Peter sounded scared when he phoned us. He waited until the children, excitedly anticipating a visit from Father Christmas, had gone to bed. Not quite asleep, they could be heard in the background loudly debating the question of Father Christmas’s existence. Their voices carried across the corridor from bedroom to bedroom. ‘I’m too old to believe in Father Christmas,’ called Oscar crossly. ‘If you don’t believe in him, he won’t come,’ his big sister Constance warned him.
Peter called up the stairs, ‘I’m on the phone to Nanny and Granddad. If you don’t go to sleep Father Christmas won’t be coming to either of you.’
We all laughed. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘Siobhán hasn’t been too well. She has had some tests. She’s going back to the Royal Marsden next week.’ Siobhán took the phone. ‘Don’t worry,’ she tried to reassure us. ‘It’s early stages. They don’t even know yet if the spots they can see on their X-rays really are cancer or scars from old operations.
‘Merry Christmas – we’ll talk tomorrow.’
As I put the phone down, my husband Derek and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes. We feared the worst. I went to my office and lit one of the candles we had brought back from Lourdes.
‘Dear God,’ I prayed, ‘give us all strength.’
Peter Jameson and Siobhán met in the summer of 1989. At that time Siobhán was living in America and maintaining a transatlantic relationship with long-time boyfriend Gary Eason, the couple having first met as undergraduates at Cambridge University. Gary subsequently joined a graduate training scheme on the Wolverhampton Express & Star. Siobhán was offered a place on the same course but declined.
‘I pictured myself having a glamorous career in London or New York,’ she used to say. ‘Wolverhampton held no attraction for me – though I did enjoy visiting friends in the Shropshire countryside at weekends and for holidays.’
Peter was working as a sub-editor on the Wolverhampton Express & Star’s sister paper, the Shropshire Star. Gary and he became firm friends and drinking buddies.
At Dulwich College, where he had finished his education, Peter had found a degree of fame or notoriety as winner of a mock election. He swept the board in student votes with a creation of his own, the Punky Lazar Independence Party, an offshoot of his rock group, the Punky Lazar Hot Five.
Having gone against his father’s wishes by refusing to wear the school’s signature headgear – a straw boater – Peter brought further disappointment when he left with poor A level results, having previously won a scholarship to Dulwich. He turned his back on the option of university and instead went straight on a journalist training course. So it came about that he was an experienced newspaperman while still in his early twenties, perhaps emulating his father, Derek Jameson, who became editor of four national newspapers.
On one of Siobhán’s early visits to Shropshire, Gary invited Peter for a meal and to meet his girlfriend. Peter fell under Siobhán’s spell. ‘She made a huge impact on me,’ he recalls. ‘She was beautiful, intelligent and funny.’
Sadly Peter’s impact on Siobhán was less favourable. With remarkable candour he reveals the answer she gave when asked her first impressions of him. ‘He was sloppy,’ Siobhán confided. ‘He would come to dinner, drink too much and fall asleep at the table. That happened almost every time he visited us. I was not impressed.’
Obviously Siobhán’s view mellowed with time. Twenty years later, in the foreword to a guide book she wrote on Dublin, she paid homage to ‘my jazz-playing, football-loving, whisky-drinking, star-gazing Jewish husband’.
When she visited Shropshire from London and later from her teaching post at New York’s Columbia University, Siobhán would stay in the small flat Gary rented in the new town of Telford. Friends remember that she brought her own brand of exotica and Celtic magic to the place.
Her dress style was individualistic and evoked a bygone era, casual yet eye-catching. She favoured vintage rather than fashionable and loved clothes with an unexpected twist. One sombre black embroidered coat opened to reveal a shocking-pink silk lining.
Peter admits to being besotted with Siobhán from their first meeting. ‘Although I deliberately engineered being in her company at every opportunity, she was the girlfriend of my best friend so I was not crass enough to make a move. Though I never hid my feelings for her, I disguised a quiet, desperate kind of unrequited love in a public display of flirting, joking and self-deprecation.’
Peter and Siobhán shared a passion for the cinema and when the couple moved to Belfast near the end of Siobhán’s life, Peter fulfilled a long-held ambition. He became a mature student and studied for a degree at the Film School at Queen’s University.
With his romantic cinematographer’s vision Peter offers a perfect picture of his late wife. ‘In my mind’s eye,’ he says, ‘I have this wonderful soft-focus image of Siobhán sitting in the flower-filled summer garden of a cottage in Wales. She was wearing a long, flowing pastel-coloured dress; her dark, wavy hair was tumbling over her shoulders. Lounging back in a wicker chair, she was sipping a mint julep.
‘How could I not be in love with her?’
In time it became clear to Siobhán and Gary and their friends that their relationship was heading for the rocks. Whenever the couple had one of their regular break-ups, Peter would be there with a box of tissues and a shoulder to cry on.
Peter himself was in a long-term relationship in Shropshire with a girl named Jo. They often made up a foursome in outings with Gary and Siobhán. Almost inevitably, both relationships came to an end and when they did Peter had a succession of what Siobhán described as unsuitable and unstable girlfriends. He was inclined to agree with her.
Meanwhile, in America, Siobhán met, dated and received proposals of marriage from several high-flying career academics. Peter sensed that his unrequited love