(LEFT) Proud: Both Barry and Diana achieved acclaim in their chosen field, with Barry earning a CBE. They are pictured with daughters Samantha (left) and Emma (right) (MIDDLE)Through good times and bad: 'Diana and I had many a cross word, because we disagreed frequently, and I loved her to death and beyond'. (RIGHT)Here's to you: Barry Norman pictured here with his beloved wife Diana, who died in her sleep two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago I lost my wife and the best friend a man could ever hope for. At 7.30am on the morning of January 27, I was to be collected by car and driven to London for a series of interviews. I got up at seven, dressed and tiptoed past her room on the way downstairs.
Diana and I usually slept apart for no other reason than she claimed my snoring kept her awake. Well, I guess it’s true; I do snore — even I have my imperfections.
She had the bedside light on, her glasses perched on her nose, a novel by Patrick O’Brian (one of her favourite authors) in her hand and she was resting peacefully against the pillows. I saw no reason to disturb her until, 20 minutes later, the driver phoned to say he was waiting outside our house.
I went back upstairs to give her a wake-up kiss and tell her I was leaving. Only this time there was no awakening her. I knew that at once; the cold finality of death is unmistakeable.
In fiction - books, plays, movies - people in such circumstances give anguished cries of: ‘No! Oh, no! Oh, please God, no!’ I never used to believe it but now I know it’s true. That’s exactly what people do.
There was no point in calling an ambulance. Far too late for that. Instead, I called my younger daughter Emma, who lives 100 yards away; we both called Emma’s sister Samantha at her home in London and then I went out to tell the driver I wasn’t going anywhere with him. It was too early to inform our local surgery, so Emma dialled 999 to ask to whom she should report her mother’s death and after that everything became slightly weird. A paramedic arrived, followed by four policemen of increasing rank, who explained apologetically that in cases of sudden death they had to turn out, presumably to make sure no foul play was involved. This — the merest suspicion that I might have murdered her — would have amused Diana enormously. And even through the unbearable grief, it amused me, too.
In pairs, the police went up to her room, no doubt looking for signs of foul play, and then, having satisfied themselves that they hadn’t been greeted by a latter-day Dr Crippen, they all hung around.
The NHS and the cops come in for a lot of flak but these men could not have been more polite, more helpful or more sensitive. The paramedic phoned the surgery; the police phoned the undertaker.
Once his representatives arrived, the whole situation began to resemble the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night At The Opera — more and more people pouring in and the family (me, my daughters and grandsons Bertie, Harry and Charlie) being totally outnumbered by complete strangers.
Thus passed the worst morning of my life. The only word to describe what we, the family, were feeling was desolation. I always thought we’d had a pact, Diana and I, that I would die first, but I should have known she’d have the last word. She usually did, sometimes because I let her, often because she insisted on it.
As for Diana, what can I say? Where can I begin? We first met early in 1957 when we were both working as journalists, I as a gossip writer for the Daily Sketch, she as a reporter for the Daily Herald. (At 20, she had been the youngest reporter in Fleet Street.)
We’d never seen each other before but that week we met three times on assignments — first covering the arrival of the Moscow State Circus (a big deal in those days), then at a society wedding and finally at a press conference for Charlie Chaplin at Shepperton Studios, after which I drove her back to London. We were married a few months later and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was beautiful, witty, highly intelligent, quirky, stubborn and always immense fun to be with. She was a devoted wife, mother and grandmother and she was also — this is not just my opinion — one of the most gifted historical novelists around.
Under her married name, Diana Norman, she wrote 11 meticulously researched, beautifully written novels ranging in period from the 12th to the 18th centuries. They won her critical plaudits, a host of admirers and an international reputation. And then a few years ago, she changed tack and, under the pen name Ariana Franklin, produced a series of 12th-century thrillers, featuring a female pathologist named Adelia Aguilar. The first of these, The Mistress Of The Art Of Death, was on the New York Times best-seller list and won her the Ellis Peters Historical Thriller Award from the Crime Writers' Association. To this, she added the CWA’s Dagger In The Library Award for the body of her work.
She was a better writer than me — and that’s not easy to say when you’ve published 20 books of your own. But it was true, though sometimes she found it difficult to believe that she was any good at all. With every novel there came a time when she would emerge from her study saying: ‘Oh, I can’t do it any more. Whatever little talent I had is gone.’ And we, her family, would carry on with whatever we were doing and say: ‘Ah, shut up. You say that every time and it’s never true.’ And it never was because each book was better than its predecessor.
Thanks to the spurious celebrity that attaches to people who appear often on television, she was largely known for too many years simply as ‘Barry Norman’s wife’. This bothered me a lot, because she deserved far more recognition than that. But it never bothered her. She was genuinely, unselfishly proud of what little I had achieved.
But in recent years the boot has been - gloriously - on the other foot. When I accompanied her to various literary events she was, rightly, the centre of attention, surrounded by ardent fans, and I was merely the bloke she’d brought with her. I couldn’t have been more pleased, nor more proud. People who have been married for more than 50 years, like Diana and I were, are given to making remarks like: ‘We never had a cross word.’ To which I can only ask: What kind of a marriage was that? The only person I could imagine living with for any length of time without a cross word would be someone for whom I felt total indifference. Diana and I had many a cross word, because we disagreed frequently, and I loved her to death and beyond.
A typical quarrel: She, in her early twenties, was learning to drive and a grassy roundabout loomed ahead. Slight panic. ‘What do I do?’ she asked. ‘Just go straight on,’ I said.
So she did. She bumped up onto the roundabout, drove across the middle and bumped down the other side. Screaming brakes, tooting horns, yelling husband and a defiant Diana: ‘Well, you told me to go straight on.’ So it was my fault, but then somehow our rows always were, even the last one that happened less than a week before she died. She came to me with her hands full of bits of metal and plastic.
‘I’m afraid I knocked your electric shaver off the shelf. Perhaps you can put it together.’ Put it together? It was in more pieces than a giant jigsaw puzzle. What’s more I hadn’t had it long and I liked it. More yelling from me, which was just what she was waiting for because now she was on the attack.
‘The thing was perched precariously on the shelf.’
‘No, it wasn’t.&rsquo ;
‘Yes, it was.’
Within five minutes, I was entirely to blame for the fact that she had destroyed my shaver and my wrath was apparently so unreasonable that she phoned our daughter Samantha to announce that she was divorcing me. Samantha passed on the message to her son, Harry: ‘Your grandparents are getting divorced.’ Harry didn’t bother to look up. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said wearily. He’d heard all this stuff before — and Diana cherished his response.
There is, of course, no single recipe for a long and happy marriage, but what worked for us was that we always gave each other space. We both loved good books, plays and movies, but we didn’t necessarily share other interests. Nor did we feel obliged to pretend we did. Diana loved sailing, was indeed a highly qualified sailor, and for some years was part-owner of a 32ft yacht. My idea of sailing is sitting on the deck of an ocean liner with a gin and tonic. So though I visited her yacht and dutifully admired it, I never went to sea with her and the rest of the crew.
My passion is cricket, my idea of bliss is a sunny day at Lord’s. Diana didn’t come with me; she never really grasped cricket no matter how often I explained the Leg Before Wicket laws to her. But that was fine: when the need arose she did her thing and I did mine. Mostly, though, we did everything together and I know I couldn’t have had a better, more loving, more loyal companion through all those years.
Last spring she became gravely ill with a little-known disease called cerebral vasculitis and spent four months in hospital. She was indeed so ill that at one point there was talk of turning off the life support system. But miraculously she recovered and spent the last six months of her life at home, a little frail physically but still feisty, still active, still writing.
I think then she was happier than I have ever known her, with an appreciation of life and the love of her family and friends that perhaps you can only feel if you’ve been as close to death as she was.
But now, suddenly, she is gone. She died of heart failure, the aftermath of her struggle against vasculitis.
I won’t visit her in the Chapel of Rest because she hated such places, just as she hated euphemisms like ‘passed away’. As she often said: ‘If someone’s dead, they’re dead. Saying they’ve passed away doesn’t make it any better and it certainly doesn’t change anything.’
I don’t want to see her carefully laid out in a coffin. I want to remember her as I last saw her, as I have seen her so many times over the years — apparently blissfully and peacefully asleep, hair tousled against a pillow, a book in her hand. Hers was, I’m assured, a swift and painless death and one she might cheerfully have chosen for herself, although ideally I think she would have preferred to finish up typing The End on her latest novel and then collapsing over the keyboard. For her family... well, life goes on. We will cope without her because we have to. But it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be the same again. And I find it impossible to describe the agony in that thought.
Diana and I usually slept apart for no other reason than she claimed my snoring kept her awake. Well, I guess it’s true; I do snore — even I have my imperfections.
She had the bedside light on, her glasses perched on her nose, a novel by Patrick O’Brian (one of her favourite authors) in her hand and she was resting peacefully against the pillows. I saw no reason to disturb her until, 20 minutes later, the driver phoned to say he was waiting outside our house.
I went back upstairs to give her a wake-up kiss and tell her I was leaving. Only this time there was no awakening her. I knew that at once; the cold finality of death is unmistakeable.
In fiction - books, plays, movies - people in such circumstances give anguished cries of: ‘No! Oh, no! Oh, please God, no!’ I never used to believe it but now I know it’s true. That’s exactly what people do.
There was no point in calling an ambulance. Far too late for that. Instead, I called my younger daughter Emma, who lives 100 yards away; we both called Emma’s sister Samantha at her home in London and then I went out to tell the driver I wasn’t going anywhere with him. It was too early to inform our local surgery, so Emma dialled 999 to ask to whom she should report her mother’s death and after that everything became slightly weird. A paramedic arrived, followed by four policemen of increasing rank, who explained apologetically that in cases of sudden death they had to turn out, presumably to make sure no foul play was involved. This — the merest suspicion that I might have murdered her — would have amused Diana enormously. And even through the unbearable grief, it amused me, too.
In pairs, the police went up to her room, no doubt looking for signs of foul play, and then, having satisfied themselves that they hadn’t been greeted by a latter-day Dr Crippen, they all hung around.
The NHS and the cops come in for a lot of flak but these men could not have been more polite, more helpful or more sensitive. The paramedic phoned the surgery; the police phoned the undertaker.
Once his representatives arrived, the whole situation began to resemble the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night At The Opera — more and more people pouring in and the family (me, my daughters and grandsons Bertie, Harry and Charlie) being totally outnumbered by complete strangers.
Thus passed the worst morning of my life. The only word to describe what we, the family, were feeling was desolation. I always thought we’d had a pact, Diana and I, that I would die first, but I should have known she’d have the last word. She usually did, sometimes because I let her, often because she insisted on it.
As for Diana, what can I say? Where can I begin? We first met early in 1957 when we were both working as journalists, I as a gossip writer for the Daily Sketch, she as a reporter for the Daily Herald. (At 20, she had been the youngest reporter in Fleet Street.)
We’d never seen each other before but that week we met three times on assignments — first covering the arrival of the Moscow State Circus (a big deal in those days), then at a society wedding and finally at a press conference for Charlie Chaplin at Shepperton Studios, after which I drove her back to London. We were married a few months later and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was beautiful, witty, highly intelligent, quirky, stubborn and always immense fun to be with. She was a devoted wife, mother and grandmother and she was also — this is not just my opinion — one of the most gifted historical novelists around.
Under her married name, Diana Norman, she wrote 11 meticulously researched, beautifully written novels ranging in period from the 12th to the 18th centuries. They won her critical plaudits, a host of admirers and an international reputation. And then a few years ago, she changed tack and, under the pen name Ariana Franklin, produced a series of 12th-century thrillers, featuring a female pathologist named Adelia Aguilar. The first of these, The Mistress Of The Art Of Death, was on the New York Times best-seller list and won her the Ellis Peters Historical Thriller Award from the Crime Writers' Association. To this, she added the CWA’s Dagger In The Library Award for the body of her work.
She was a better writer than me — and that’s not easy to say when you’ve published 20 books of your own. But it was true, though sometimes she found it difficult to believe that she was any good at all. With every novel there came a time when she would emerge from her study saying: ‘Oh, I can’t do it any more. Whatever little talent I had is gone.’ And we, her family, would carry on with whatever we were doing and say: ‘Ah, shut up. You say that every time and it’s never true.’ And it never was because each book was better than its predecessor.
Thanks to the spurious celebrity that attaches to people who appear often on television, she was largely known for too many years simply as ‘Barry Norman’s wife’. This bothered me a lot, because she deserved far more recognition than that. But it never bothered her. She was genuinely, unselfishly proud of what little I had achieved.
But in recent years the boot has been - gloriously - on the other foot. When I accompanied her to various literary events she was, rightly, the centre of attention, surrounded by ardent fans, and I was merely the bloke she’d brought with her. I couldn’t have been more pleased, nor more proud. People who have been married for more than 50 years, like Diana and I were, are given to making remarks like: ‘We never had a cross word.’ To which I can only ask: What kind of a marriage was that? The only person I could imagine living with for any length of time without a cross word would be someone for whom I felt total indifference. Diana and I had many a cross word, because we disagreed frequently, and I loved her to death and beyond.
A typical quarrel: She, in her early twenties, was learning to drive and a grassy roundabout loomed ahead. Slight panic. ‘What do I do?’ she asked. ‘Just go straight on,’ I said.
So she did. She bumped up onto the roundabout, drove across the middle and bumped down the other side. Screaming brakes, tooting horns, yelling husband and a defiant Diana: ‘Well, you told me to go straight on.’ So it was my fault, but then somehow our rows always were, even the last one that happened less than a week before she died. She came to me with her hands full of bits of metal and plastic.
‘I’m afraid I knocked your electric shaver off the shelf. Perhaps you can put it together.’ Put it together? It was in more pieces than a giant jigsaw puzzle. What’s more I hadn’t had it long and I liked it. More yelling from me, which was just what she was waiting for because now she was on the attack.
‘The thing was perched precariously on the shelf.’
‘No, it wasn’t.&rsquo ;
‘Yes, it was.’
Within five minutes, I was entirely to blame for the fact that she had destroyed my shaver and my wrath was apparently so unreasonable that she phoned our daughter Samantha to announce that she was divorcing me. Samantha passed on the message to her son, Harry: ‘Your grandparents are getting divorced.’ Harry didn’t bother to look up. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said wearily. He’d heard all this stuff before — and Diana cherished his response.
There is, of course, no single recipe for a long and happy marriage, but what worked for us was that we always gave each other space. We both loved good books, plays and movies, but we didn’t necessarily share other interests. Nor did we feel obliged to pretend we did. Diana loved sailing, was indeed a highly qualified sailor, and for some years was part-owner of a 32ft yacht. My idea of sailing is sitting on the deck of an ocean liner with a gin and tonic. So though I visited her yacht and dutifully admired it, I never went to sea with her and the rest of the crew.
My passion is cricket, my idea of bliss is a sunny day at Lord’s. Diana didn’t come with me; she never really grasped cricket no matter how often I explained the Leg Before Wicket laws to her. But that was fine: when the need arose she did her thing and I did mine. Mostly, though, we did everything together and I know I couldn’t have had a better, more loving, more loyal companion through all those years.
Last spring she became gravely ill with a little-known disease called cerebral vasculitis and spent four months in hospital. She was indeed so ill that at one point there was talk of turning off the life support system. But miraculously she recovered and spent the last six months of her life at home, a little frail physically but still feisty, still active, still writing.
I think then she was happier than I have ever known her, with an appreciation of life and the love of her family and friends that perhaps you can only feel if you’ve been as close to death as she was.
But now, suddenly, she is gone. She died of heart failure, the aftermath of her struggle against vasculitis.
I won’t visit her in the Chapel of Rest because she hated such places, just as she hated euphemisms like ‘passed away’. As she often said: ‘If someone’s dead, they’re dead. Saying they’ve passed away doesn’t make it any better and it certainly doesn’t change anything.’
I don’t want to see her carefully laid out in a coffin. I want to remember her as I last saw her, as I have seen her so many times over the years — apparently blissfully and peacefully asleep, hair tousled against a pillow, a book in her hand. Hers was, I’m assured, a swift and painless death and one she might cheerfully have chosen for herself, although ideally I think she would have preferred to finish up typing The End on her latest novel and then collapsing over the keyboard. For her family... well, life goes on. We will cope without her because we have to. But it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be the same again. And I find it impossible to describe the agony in that thought.
Courtesy: Daily Mail