Monday, 24 September 2007

Many of you will remember my dear friend, Christine Andrews, aka Lucy, Countess of Bedford (because of her strong resemblance – IMHO - to that lady’s portrait on the cover of Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Albion’.)
Christine’s three year battle with cancer came to an end yesterday (Sunday, 23rd September) shortly before 4:00AM Californian time. I believe the end was relatively quick as the last email I had from her which she sent herself (dated 16th September) said that that at that point the cancer had not spread to her vital organs, and she was discussing taking part in a clinical trial. Her husband, Peter, emailed me on Wednesday to say she had been taken into hospital. The main problem she had over the last few months was that the cancer was in her lymph nodes, causing pain and swelling across her chest and a build up of fluid which rendered her right arm useless. Typically, she had voice recognition software installed on her computer so that she could continue to send emails, amid frequent acerbic comments about its spelling and interpretation of her English accent.
I first met Chris in January 1986, when we were both English ex-pat wives living in Dallas. I was pregnant with my first child, and her eldest had just had his first birthday. A few weeks later, she told me she suspected she was pregnant again, and her daughter was born exactly three months after my son. I always felt it was a special bond between us. Neither of us was ever very happy in Dallas, and she and Peter returned to the UK late in 1987. When we came home, in spring 1989, she was around to help me adjust to another big change in my life.
I have been trying to work out how much of our 20+ years of friendship was spent in the same country – I think it was about 3 years altogether – first in the States and then here before they were on the move again to Geneva. If it hadn’t been for cyberspace, I don’t suppose our friendship would have lasted the way it did. Chris was a great letter writer, but during those first few years my contributions were largely confined to birthdays and Christmas. However, once we started swapping emails, we stayed in regular contact, even daily at times. We saw each other through some rocky times, always emotionally close though physically distant.
The last time I saw her was on Baltimore railway station in the summer of 2004, when she saw me off to Boston for a conference. I have a photo over my desk taken of the two of us in Anapolis during that trip. We were expecting to meet again in a few days, when I would fly back to Baltimore to catch my flight home. However, in the meantime her Mum passed away in England, and a few hours before I landed she had caught a plane to Manchester for the funeral. She was planning to come over two years ago, and we would have met up then, but the cancer took a turn for the worse and the trip was cancelled. My daughter thinks I should go for the funeral, but when I think about what Chris would have wanted, I can hear her saying: ‘Why the bloody hell didn’t you come and see me while I was still alive?’
Chris didn’t quite make it to the half-century – she would have been 50 on 12th March next year.
Please pass this news on to anybody you think would want to know.