Why Not Me? A Story of Love and Loss by Barbara Want: review

By Helen Brown 600AM GMT thirteen March 2010

Why Not Me? A Story of Love and Loss by Barbara Want

When Nick Clarkes genocide was voiced on Radio 4 in Nov 2006, tributes to The World at Ones long-term presenter poured in from friends, colleagues and politicians. He had been a good broadcaster, they said, well informed, conscientiously just and splendidly charming. Like so most Radio 4 listeners, I sat dumbfounded at my kitchen table, feeling my own small share of pique for the man whose lunchtime talk questions reliably hexed all the smooth, difficult and really English bottle cap and tanned hide qualities of a well bowled cricket ball.

Across London, Clarkes widow Barbara Want was additionally sitting alone. Her kitchen had filled with people, but she says she felt them "looking at me as if I were an animal on the alternative side of a potion shade being subjected to a little vicious and horrible experiment". So she private herself and her utterance clarity of loss to the sitting room and, whilst listening to the promote tributes to his journalistic abilities, realised "how bizarre it was that I, who knew him improved than any of these people, wasnt there to contend what a good father and father he had additionally been".

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She redresses the change in this honest and indignant discourse which, by turns, shines with the light of her love for Clarke, and echoes with the abyss of her loss. The span met whilst they were both operative for Newsnight in the Eighties Want as a writer and Clarke as a reporter. He was tied together with 3 children. She was doubtful to feel so "drawn to a man who was twelve years comparison than me, somewhat overweight, somewhat balding, with the rather troubled see of someone coming center age and the beige trousers and checked jackets that went with it". But she found descending in love with him really easy. He was clever, kind, droll and a superb storyteller. Want is straightforward about the annoy she felt about carrying an event with a tied together man and the service she felt when he left his initial mother to share her close flat. That year he gave her a Victorian pin badge in the figure of a sprig of heather, dotted with seed pearls. "Its propitious heather," he told her, "I feel propitious to have met you."

Their fitness hold for years, as Clarke found gentle stardom on Radio 4 and Wants producing career took her to Panorama. The couples identical tiwn boys Joel and Benedict were innate in 2002 and there followed a integrate of years of "picture-perfect life" nation lodge holidays, strawberry cakes and round games in the garden. Only Clarke was personification less of his dear cricket than usual, hampered by a removing worse suffering in his hip. "In retrospect," he wrote later, "in that happy land where all seems so elementary and obvious, my incapacity to face up to my condition was breathtakingly stupid." The pile in Clarkes hip was diagnosed as an epithelioid sarcoma, a singular and assertive form of tumour. Their fitness had run out.

Wants comment of their onslaught with "The Beast" is interspersed with extracts from Clarkes promote audio journal, "Fighting to be Normal", and with distressing comments from their sons. I am certain it will be liberating for those who have been likewise bereaved to review Wants tender bearing of each tension she felt even those that contrition her. She writes of her annoy with Clarke for removing ill, of her dismay at the thought of pity a bed with him after his leg had been amputated, of her exasperation with people who pronounced the wrong things at the wrong times, of her shame at receiving a sauna mangle towards the finish of Clarkes seizure and her fright of caring for him alone. She lashes out at the builders who never accomplished the lavatory modifications Clarke needed, at the BBC writer who refused to make use of a some-more upbeat finale to his audio diary, promulgation them a content that "a happy finale would be pat", and at the barrister who tries to slice her off whilst traffic with his estate after his death.

She is dauntless sufficient to confess to feeling that her pique for her father seemed, at times, to peck out her love for her boys. She drank. She shouted. She hit. She finished a list of the friends who, she felt, had forlorn her and illusory carrying them killed. Sometimes she is so distressing of peoples disaster to do the right thing that you catch yourself wondering how most she has ever finished for any one else. She does confess to carrying once unsuccessful a crony who asked for help, and to branch that crony down by letter, incompetent to face her. And she is beholden to those, together with Radio 4s Mark Damazer and Eddie Mair, who came up trumps.

Nick Clarke, his widow says, was never the sort of man to think, "Why me?" He would say, "Why not me?" At times, the recklessness of Wants pique has led her to think, "Why not me instead of him?" She tells us she has deliberate suicide. Although the wound of her loss is not nonetheless healing, she says it has right away stopped growing. And when her anguish solicitor tells her there are people who find complacency again, she has the strength to think there competence be hope.

Why Not Me? a Story of Love and Loss

by Barbara Want

266PP, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, �14.99

Buy right away for �12.99 (PLUS �1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Books