I went with Kirsty on a long weekend visit to Clymping, near Bognor Regis. We stayed at a hotel near the beach which had been recommended to me. It was a listed building with beautiful old furniture and was also a popular haunt of minor celebrities. Kirsty had fish for dinner, but when it arrived, whole, with its beady eye and its tail still attached, she looked at it with some disgust. I had always had problems trying to get her to eat, so in some desperation I said to her, ‘That looks lovely.’
‘It might be all right,’ she replied, ‘but I think it’s an exaggeration to call it lovely.’
Later that evening she struck up an unlikely friendship with the minor film star (and former beauty queen) Anne Heywood, who was staying there with her husband and little boy. One evening she swept into the dining room in a white fur coat with her poodle on a lead.
‘Hello, Kirsty,’ she said.
‘Hello, Anne,’ Kirsty replied. ‘Look, your dog’s got a flea on its back.’
After a few weeks without a crisis, I began to feel reasonably optimistic about Kirsty’s health, so I decided to throw a party with my friends from the theatre – the first such party since my break-up with Ewan. We all looked forward to it. Meanwhile Kirsty was full of excitement about a forthcoming school fundraising day. There were to be stalls, races for children and adults and, best of all, horse rides! The horses duly arrived and were led into an adjoining field, where the children spent a lot of time stroking and feeding them.
When Kirsty returned from school that Friday afternoon she was unwell. She had a bad night, no appetite and couldn’t keep fluids down. I tried tapping her back gently to ease her breathing, but soon realised that she was too poorly even for that. On the Saturday I rang the doctor’s surgery and was put through to his locum who told me to dress her in two coats and send her out to play. I looked at the small, hunched figure in the bed who couldn’t even sit up properly. Somehow we got through another day – with a little help from Horatio.
By Sunday evening I knew I couldn’t afford to wait much longer for medical help. I rang back again and my new doctor answered. He was unwilling to come out, but when he heard the details he reluctantly agreed to visit and gave Kirsty an injection.
‘Everything will be all right now,’ he assured me. ‘She’ll get a good night’s sleep.’
‘But if she isn’t any better?’, I asked.
‘It will be all right… well, if it isn’t, ring me at the surgery at 9am.’
His visit seemed to have been terribly quick – or was that my imagination? Was I being overly anxious? Everything told me that they were all wrong. And she wasn’t better. Everything was not all right. In fact, she was much worse. The vomiting went on and she began hallucinating. On Monday morning I rang the doctor at his surgery on the stroke of 9am.
‘She’ll have to go to hospital,’ he now said. ‘She’ll be dehydrated by now. Come and get a note to take with you. I’ll call the ambulance.’
‘But I’m alone with her, and she’s hallucinating!’ I managed to reply. ‘I can’t possibly leave her alone in this condition. She’s only a little girl.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to,’ came the answer.
In desperation I rang my neighbour, Margaret Spurring, who, thank God, happened to be in. She was also a registered nurse and she rushed to the surgery where she was told, ‘You can’t disturb the doctor, he has a patient.’
‘If you won’t go in now and get the note,’ she replied, ‘I’ll walk right in myself.’ The shocked receptionist got the note and brought it back.
Over two hours later we were still waiting for the ambulance. I was now at my wits’ end and, clutching at straws, so I rang my previous doctor, my friend Arron Rapoport. He was in his surgery some five miles away.
He gave me the number of the ambulance and I called to hear the driver saying, ‘We’re looking for a very sick child, it’s an emergency call and we can’t find the bloody house! We’ve been looking for two hours.’ I cut in and gave him my correct address. The ambulance arrived at the same time as Arron, who had left his surgery to take Kirsty to hospital himself.
At the hospital, the woman doctor blamed the ambulance men for the delay as they arrived and we were rushed through into a small consulting room. I was left alone with Kirsty for a moment but when she started twitching I shouted for the doctor, who rushed back. I was asked to wait outside while they set up a drip and did whatever else they had to do. I noticed a couple standing some distance away. The woman came up to me and told me how marvellous the hospital was and how sure she was that my child would be all right. I turned away from her – she didn’t know, and I was not ready for platitudes. It was churlish of me: she had meant her words kindly and I soon regretted my behaviour.
Memory plays strange tricks: my conversation with this stranger is the last thing I remember of that awful Monday morning. But Kirsty recovered, of course, and soon returned home. When Mr Norman, our marvellous consultant, heard of our terrible experience, he made special arrangements for me to prevent anything like it happening again. I was given his private number at the clinic and he promised to dispatch an ambulance from the hospital immediately; Kirsty would always be admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital without delay.
Of course, the planned party had to be cancelled, but when one of the guests, Harry H Corbett – the younger star of Steptoe & Son – heard that Kirsty was home, he said he would like to see her. He arrived carrying a small umbrella as a present and told her that he had been ‘fighting off Cowboys and Indians’ as he drove down our unadopted and very bumpy Beech Way. This endeared him to Kirsty.
My neighbour, Dr Richard Spurring, whose wife Margaret had been so helpful, now became our new GP. His family had moved into Beech Way a short time after us and they had three children, who all played with Kirsty. On one occasion she was invited to sleep over at their house. In the morning she was suffering from such severe asthma that I had to take her bicycle over so she could sit on it while I wheeled her back. As we came down our driveway it started to rain and Kirsty said, ‘Mummy, you have no idea what it is like – I wish I was dead.’
I had never before heard her express herself so negatively and I felt the tears welling in my eyes. I promised her that these attacks, painful as they were, would clear up. Dr Spurring recommended a inhaler to be used hourly. At night, when we were both very tired, I could not remember whether she had used it or not and would try and keep her mind occupied with stories or chatting until another hour was up.
Things slowly seemed to improve. Kirsty attended the school for physically handicapped children fairly regularly. Joan asked me to do some choreographic work in the theatre and suggested that we should both work with children in connection with her Fun Palace – an educational project that was to be built on derelict land in Eltham (though this never materialised). I also gave some movement classes at Hamish’s request for him and a few of his friends who were interested and for this we hired a local hall. Hamish was a good mover and enjoyed dancing. Lisa Ullman, Laban’s colleague and godmother with Joan to both my children, also visited.
On one of my birthdays, Hamish gave me a sketchbook and some drawing pencils; Kirsty bought me a pair of Wellington boots and a trowel! I even found time to make a small pond in the garden, line it and put some brickwork around it. It was on the slope so it took me some time to work out the mechanics of the problem – at least until I borrowed a spirit level.
Visiting a neighbour one day in 1968, Kirsty suddenly arrived to call me back. ‘A lady is on the telephone,’ she said, ‘asking for Mrs MacColl.’ The ‘lady’ had telephoned from the hospital: it was urgent. I flew down the drive to my house and picked up the phone.
‘Are you Mrs MacColl? Do you have a son called Hamish? Can you get to the hospital right away?’ She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.
‘Is he badly, badly hurt?’
‘No,