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 | You and Yours - Transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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| TX: 29.11.05 - Writer AA Gill recalls his father PRESENTER: PETER WHITE |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE This month saw the publication of the memoirs of Michael Gill, one of the greatest documentary film makers of the 20th Century, who died during October. He was the pioneer of the authored documentary and during his lifetime directed and produced over 150 films, among them Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation and Alistair Cooke's America. He was in the middle of working on his memoirs when in the year 2000 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Well his son, the writer and critic AA Gill, joins me now. Adrian Gill, you write in the foreword to your father's memoirs that this book is his way of committing his memories to the lifeboats. What did you mean by that? GILL Well when daddy said he was going to write his memoirs we all thought he was going to write about television and the things that he was famous for and the people he'd worked with. And when he started writing about his childhood, before the war, it all seemed a bit odd and I realise now that actually this was where he was more and more beginning to live, I mean he was regressing into his - the memories of his childhood were foremost and particularly of the war were really uppermost. And I think in a way he wanted to us to have them and know about them. WHITE So did this also mean that he had some presentiment perhaps of what was happening before the formal diagnosis? GILL I don't know, I mean one of the things about dementia is that it's an illness where everybody pretends that it's something else, I mean nobody comes out and says you know actually perhaps I think I've got dementia or nobody says you know maybe you should go to the doctor because you're getting sort of Alzheimery this morning. It isn't like having a pain ... WHITE Do families collude? GILL We all collude and we all colluded. I, for some time, in using those euphemistic words that families use - bit eccentric, bit under the weather, bit tired, bit too much to drink - I mean all of those things to explain what was really the rubbing out of his memory. First in small ways - in words - and then huge chunks. WHITE As a man who valued words so highly and worked with his mind so much was it particularly difficult for the family and to him to accept what was happening? GILL I suppose the thing that I felt for him most - I mean all of it - you feel all of it for him and for all of us but the thing I felt for him most about it was the loss of reading and he was somebody who had - who all his life had been devoted to books and he gave - he passed that on to me. And so books was one of the things that we had in common and he missed reading, I know, enormously. WHITE I suppose what I mean is it's sometimes said for example that if somebody loses their sight, obviously it's terribly sad for anyone but if they were a painter that makes it worse, I wonder if his having a very strong intellectual life made it worse for you? GILL Yes I suppose - I see what you're getting at. The clever person's mind is worth more than a dim person's mind. I don't believe that at all. I mean I think that's like saying we care more about people being evacuated from stately homes than from miners' cottages. I think that for anybody to lose their mind is terrible and however much you live in it and however well appointed it is on the inside it's still where you live, it's still your home. And it's still the place that your children and your family and your friends go to, to see you, I mean that's the terrible thing. WHITE How did you react and to what extent did you know what to expect? GILL Well I'd had - actually daddy's mother, my grandmother, had had dementia and for much longer than him and lived for a really depressing - the last few years of her life were incredibly depressing. And daddy and I used to go and visit her in Cheltenham and it was one of the things that he and I did together, in fact it was one of the quite nice things that he and I did - once a month we'd go down and see this sad old lady who had no idea who we were. But then we'd go to second hand bookshops or go out to lunch and it was a thing we did together. So I sort of knew with a dread what was coming. WHITE So in that sense without wanting to be kind of unduly and artificially positive about it you're saying that perhaps it can draw people together in the sense of helping each other to deal with it. GILL Yes, I think it's important - there is nothing positive about this illness, I mean there is nothing good to be said about it. One of the ways that I think you get through it and I wouldn't speak for anyone else's family but the way we did it was it's like getting to know a different part of somebody that you've never seen before. It's a bit like knowing a new person. And I just had to think that the last couple of years of my relationship with daddy was finding out things about him and having - and being with a person that I hadn't really known before. And that was nice and it was comforting. WHITE Do you think there is a reluctance in this country to confront the issues of dementia head on, both socially and in terms of care needs? GILL Oh hugely and one of the things that makes me angry is that the health system depends on people not confronting it, it depends on families continuing to look after what they think of as dotty or eccentric members of the family, so that they don't then put more stress and more strain on the health infrastructure. And I think everybody colludes in this not being what it is and it's desperate and it's desperately sad particularly for first person carers, for husbands and wives and sometimes for children, who - I mean and themselves often quite old, who don't want to make a fuss and simply don't want to have to face the fact that the person that they've loved for so long is disappearing before their eyes. WHITE Adrian Gill, thank you much. A very personal experience of dementia. And now we'd like to hear from you. Have you recently perhaps been diagnosed, if so how is it currently affecting your life? Or if you're caring for someone in the later stages, how are you and your family coping? On Call You and Yours at half past twelve we're taking your calls on any of the various topics relating to the subject we've looked at over the past month - from early onset to the availability of drugs to challenging behaviour. You can call us now on 08700 100 444, calls cost around 8 pence per minute or you can e-mail us via the website at bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours. Adrian Gill, thank you again. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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