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Tender memoir of a director who treated her terminal illness like ‘the bleakest of bedroom farces’

By Helen Brown

TELL ME GOOD THINGS by James Runcie

224pp, Bloomsbury, £10.99 (0844 T 871 1514), RRP £12.99, ebook £9.09 ★★★★★

“Terminal illness is a full-time job,” says Grantchester author James Runcie. So when his wife – the celebrated radio-drama director Marilyn Imrie – was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) in 2020, they approached her rapid decline like “some kind of weird and unexpected new production”. In Tell Me Good Things, this tender memoir of “love, death and marriage”, he describes how the five months and 22 days between her diagnosis and death started off feeling like “the bleakest of bedroom farces”, and ended on a night when “there were no more words”.

As the guiding light behind BBC Radio 4 dramas such as John Mortimer’s Rumpole (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) and The Stanley Baxter Playhouse, Imrie believed in preparation, adaptability and holding your nerve. But the cruel attrition of MND left the couple with “no script and no ideas about the casting”. The formerly charismatic Imrie was soon stripped of mobility, speech and enthusiasm.

They met at the BBC in 1983, when Runcie was the 24-year-old son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Imrie was a single mother, 11 years his senior. He sat beside her in a script meeting and was smitten by her milky complexion, gentle voice and scent of hyacinth, jasmine and coriander. She had been married (to actor and director Kenny Ireland) and divorced in the early 1970s, then, in 1978, had a daughter, Rosie, with the BBC journalist Ian Kellagher.

By the time she met Runcie, Imrie had “completely given up on men”. But he lured her into a friendship by offering to babysit the five-year-old Rosie (who promptly tied him to a chair). As their mutual attraction grew, she fretted about the age difference and warned him there was “absolutely no chance of a relationship”. Yet she soon started to send him witty poems and riddles through the BBC memo system. Eventually, she invited him over. “She smiled and made Earl Grey tea in her black velvet dressing gown with nothing underneath, and said, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, come to bed.’”

Runcie’s next challenge was convincing his parents that Imrie was the woman he should wed. “She’s very nice,” said his mother, “but it’ll never last.” Runcie went to see his father at Lambeth Palace (“there are less intimidating places”). The archbishop “looked very dubious”, but when he

realised his son was serious, he offered to do everything he could to support them.

“He couldn’t marry us in church because Marilyn was a divorcée,” he says, “but he could still bless us, and rather than reminding us of Dr Johnson’s dictum that a second marriage is the ‘triumph of hope over experience’, he gave us a leather-bound Bible and wrote in the front in big bold handwriting: ‘LOVE NEVER FAILS’. He even underlined it.”

This was only a few years after the archbishop had married Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Runcie notes that although most people remember his father’s comment on the royal couple as “the stuff fairy tales are made of ”, they forget that he followed this with a warning that “this may be because fairy stories regard marriage as an anti-climax after the romance of courtship. This is not the Christian view. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival but the place where the adventure really begins.”

Runcie and Imrie lived that adventure to the full: they honeymooned in Venice and in 1989 had a daughter, Charlotte Runcie (this newspaper’s radio critic). His description of their marriage reads like a poetic lifestyle supplement, as he recalls beautiful art, meals and music they shared. He conjures Imrie’s colourful allure in a rattle of jewellery, spritzes of perfume and a lingering trail of sweary outbursts that must have raised eyebrows at Lambeth Palace.

Runcie admits that his own Christian faith has been “a bit on and off ”. But when he asked Imrie how she felt about God towards the end, she replied: “Oh, I’m still quite keen on him, in spite of what he’s done to me.” Her funeral was led by a “proper priest” and she was buried at St Monans, on the headland looking out to the Firth of Forth. The carpenter who did their kitchen made her coffin.

Runcie found companionship in bereavement memoirs by Joan Didion and CS Lewis after Imrie’s death. They inspired him to write his way through it. He gives his own spin on the challenges of grief: the admin, the house clearance, the strange, liberating “giddiness” you feel when your worst fears have come to pass.

We all respond to grief differently. I lost my mother around the time Imrie died, and was startled by the passage in which Runcie rages at the people who sent messages asking “How are you?” He didn’t have the energy to answer the question, preferring the messages that just read: “Thinking of you”. I felt the opposite: what use is “thinking of me”, I’d rant, feeling people were too scared to risk hearing the answer to “How are you?” Reading Runcie’s book suggested I could have given the “thinkers” more credit for their kindness.

Although Runcie inevitably pays greatest tribute to Imrie’s glamour and kindness, I connected with her wit and anger. She came alive in her disdain for yellow flowers, her irritation at boring party guests, her fury at not being able to enjoy more years as a grandmother. I closed this book wishing I’d met her – but feeling that I almost had.

Arts & Books

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2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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