My Bonnie: How dementia stole the love of my life. John Suchet

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      Where was I, ace war correspondent, veteran of the Iran Islamic revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in the summer of 1983 as the Middle East burned? In Newport, Rhode Island, covering the America’s Cup—and very exciting it was. America was at risk of losing this most prestigious of all sailing trophies for the first time in over a hundred years. A British team was competing, financed by the entrepreneur Peter de Savary, along with teams from other nations, but everybody knew that the team to beat was the Australians. The rumour was that they had a secret revolutionary keel, kept literally under wraps. Every time the yacht was lifted from the water, protective screens went up first.

      It was, for a reporter, a peach of a story. It had everything—drama, excitement, rivalry. I got close to the British team, so had plenty of material with which to provide reports for News at Ten. I interviewed Alan Bond, the multi-millionaire backer of the Australian team (later to go bankrupt and serve a prison sentence for fraud). I was in exactly the right place at the right time when the American skipper paid an evening visit to the Australian team the night before the final race, having already begun to drown his sorrows at the certainty of defeat the following day. And I was there, with my camera crew, when the Australians finally lifted their yacht from the water with no protective screens, revealing the worst-kept secret in sport, a winged keel.

      And would you believe it, my pieces were running—as I had transmitted them by satellite to London—on News at Ten. No complimentary messages yet, but it was a start.

      Bonnie was with me in Newport, which more than made up for the fact that the only place in the world I really wanted to be was southern Lebanon. I know that sounds a bit bizarre, but from the day I became a reporter all I ever wanted was to be on the biggest story in the world every day. Impossible, of course, but it’s what every general news reporter wants. The America’s Cup may have been a peach of a story, but I would much rather have been in the infinitely more dangerous Middle East, covering something that would have an impact on the history of the region. The realisation of that brought home to me just how close I had come to scuppering the job I still adored. I was a reporter at heart, it was a reporter I wanted to remain, and thanks to the editor’s continuing faith in me, albeit drastically diluted, I still had a chance.

      None of these intense thoughts prevented Bonnie and me from enjoying the large jacuzzi bath in the small apartment we were staying in, and locally caught lobster for dinner.

      It had to end, of course, and I worked in the Washington bureau with a team who knew I was a lame duck correspondent. The remaining months were painful. There were no more big stories on which I could demonstrate my new-found commitment, and I found myself longing for the end of the year.

      It was just as well things were quiet. Bonnie and I were like talking machines. Now that we were together, finally and fully, we just wanted to learn as much about each other as we could. We talked and talked, as we had before, but this time with the warm comfortable feeling that we were together. This wasn’t snatched time into which we needed to pack as much as we could. She told me more about her family, her brothers. She said she would love me to meet her family. I’d love her dad, she said. He had mellowed a lot now, but used to be a bit of a tyrant. She described a Sunday lunch when they were all children, and her youngest brother Jon had disagreed with something their dad had said. He exploded. ‘Don’t you ever question anything I say again!’ I told Bonnie that my dad had taught my brothers and me to question everything. She loved that.

      She filled me in on her background. She had done well in high school, so well that she was invited to apply for entry into one of America’s most prestigious universities, Cornell. She got in, but not in the subject of her first choice. There we found common ground. She had wanted to study the arts, particularly literature, but her dad had thought human ecology was more useful. I had wanted to study modern languages, but the only vacancy was in the social science faculty. We laughed at shared joys and frustrations.

      She told me that when she had first come to the UK to marry and settle, she had got a job with the Flour Advisory Bureau on the strength of her Cornell degree. She travelled the UK, lecturing at Women’s Institutes on how to make bread. She told me it was part of the rules that she always had to wear a little hat and a two-piece suit. Sixties Britain. God, how we laughed.

      That also cleared up a slight mystery. Her American accent had all but disappeared, just small traces remaining in the occasional elongated vowels. Bonnie explained that the Flour Advisory Bureau had told her that in some areas the ladies might find her accent difficult to understand. If she could anglicise it, that would be much appreciated. So she had consciously adopted a more English speaking voice. Ironically, when she went home, her family accused her of snobbishness because she had an English accent.

      One evening we went to an all-Beethoven concert at the Kennedy Center. Later I said to her, ‘Do you know, one day I would really like to write the story of Beethoven’s life.’ ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a wonderful idea.’ I shook my head in disbelief. I still wasn’t used to the utter luxury of being with a woman who would support me in whatever I wanted to do, without qualification. It took my breath away.

      We returned to London from Washington at the end of 1983. My wife and children would be moving back into the house in Henley, so Bonnie and I had nowhere to live. Don’t worry, said my mum, I will fix it, and fix it she did. I couldn’t have got a mortgage on a house, having no money whatsoever for a down payment, but I was able to rent a flat because I had a salary from ITN. Mum secured a small flat for us on the top floor of that large mansion block directly over Baker Street tube station, the same block of flats where I spent the first 10 years of my life. Ah yes, the very same block where I had surreptitiously turned up two-and-a-half years before to pay the clandestine visit to my parents.

      This is hard to believe, and even harder to write. The intimacy has gone, and it is slowly killing me. There, I have said it.

      The task ahead of me was not just daunting, it was well-nigh impossible. Back in London I was persona non grata, a leper, unclean. No one would make eye contact, let alone speak to me. I sat at the reporters’ desk, my head buried in a newspaper. Less than three years before, I had been not just a popular and gregarious reporter, but lauded by my peers for having secured the impossible, the Washington job. I was the toast of the newsroom. My parting gift was a reference to the fact that on my final day in the office before leaving for the States, I had been bought one drink too many by my colleagues—a t-shirt which said ‘John Suchet, Newsh at Ten’.

      A couple of weeks or so after my return, there was a leaving dinner for a senior ITN executive. I arrived, sat down, and realised fairly quickly that the seats on either side of me were being left empty. No one would sit next to me. Finally a fellow reporter sat beside me, but only because she was a late arrival and there were no other places, and she didn’t exchange two words with me throughout the meal. Much later I learned that in the days following she had raised many a smile by saying her career was cursed, she had sat next to John Suchet.

      Shortly after this I was summoned by the managing editor—he who had phoned me ordering me back to London to face the editor—to tie up administrative loose ends from my inglorious tenure in Washington. By now the treatment I was receiving was beginning to stir a certain amount of anger in me. Yes, I had failed, yes, I expected no hero’s return, but this was all going a bit far.

      I sat opposite the managing editor, listening stony-faced as he went through a checklist of issues to do with the house which ITN rented in Washington. Moya and the boys were still over there, and arrangements had to be made to bring them back. The managing editor was a man I had known for more than 10 years, yet the way he was speaking to me, his tone of voice, was that of a headmaster addressing an errant schoolboy. Finally I decided to make a stand. I didn’t lose my temper, but I came out with a sentence I had prepared, carefully honed, and rehearsed in the bathroom СКАЧАТЬ