Book of the Week
A Life Reimagined
By Jill Halfpenny (Macmillan £22, 320pp)
A cold January morning in 2017. Actress Jill Halfpenny is woken by the sounds of her partner, Matt, getting ready to go to the gym.
Bleary-eyed, she stumbles out of bed and goes to the loo, where she pees on an ovulation test stick because they are trying for a baby – a brother for Jill’s son, Harvey.
Jill Halfpenny, one of our most familiar faces from TV and a West End star, is known for her happy, outgoing demeanour
She kisses Matt goodbye and goes back to bed, only to be woken 45 minutes later by a loud knock at the door... and sees 17 missed calls on her phone.
Matt Janes, 43 years old, in the prime of life, has had a heart attack at the gym.
Jill rushes to be with him. He is in a bad way but his eyes register her presence. She accompanies him as he is blue-lighted to hospital but, tragically, the next day, Matt loses his fight for life.
Jill, one of our most familiar faces from TV and a West End star, known for her happy, outgoing demeanour, is plunged into a nightmare of grief, all the while coping as a single mother.
Even harder to bear is that Matt’s death is an almost uncanny echo of the tragedy that befell Jill’s family 38 years earlier. Her father, Colin Halfpenny, also died of a heart attack, during a local league football match in their home town, Gateshead.
Colin was even younger than Matt, just 36, leaving a wife and three daughters. Jill, the youngest, was four years old.
This was in the 1970s when grief was rarely spoken about and trauma an unknown concept. None of the children attended the funeral, after which Jill’s father was rarely mentioned. There was only one picture of him in the house, in her mother’s bedroom.
Some weeks later, Jill started school, with no counselling or special consideration.
Then, just two years later, Jill’s mother married her late husband’s brother, Derek Halfpenny. He proved to be a good and loving stepfather to the heartbroken family but they all still found it impossible to articulate their shared grief. Unsurprisingly, Jill was an anxious child until dance and acting lessons gave her confidence. She landed a part in the Newcastle-based teen soap Byker Grove, and from there graduated to roles in Coronation Street and EastEnders.
In 2004, she took part in Strictly Come Dancing and was crowned the winner, receiving a perfect score of 40 for her jive in the final.
She then landed the iconic role of Roxie Hart in Chicago in the West End, jump-starting a career in musical theatre.
Jill's father Colin suffered a shock heart attack when she was young
But behind the glamour and success, something wasn’t right. In her 20s, Jill struggled with alcohol addiction.
Her 2007 marriage to actor Craig Conway, the father of Harvey, was short-lived. Even an Olivier Award in 2011 for Best Supporting Role in a Musical, for Legally Blonde, could not fill the emptiness she felt inside.
It’s a period she now describes as trying to outrun buried grief – little realising, she writes, that: ‘It will wait patiently for you until you are ready to pay attention to it. And until then it will reveal itself as anger, depression, addiction to busyness and will show up all the time in your inter-personal relationships.’
Even so, it looked like everything was starting to come right with her relationship with Matt, only for it to be cruelly snatched away – just like when her own father had died.
The way we deal with grief has transformed in recent years and Jill was no longer a helpless child.
She set out on a voyage of discovery, documenting the treatments she tried and the insights she gained in a book that is part memoir and part self-help manual. She goes on a retreat, practises yoga and meditation, finds a Buddhist massage therapist and, more simply, gains comfort in writing long letters to Matt.
As someone who has also suffered multiple bereavements, I recognise the value in many of the treatments she tries, and particularly in the emphasis on the support of family and friends.
There are many useful tips and ideas, especially the gift of a cosy blanket sent in the aftermath of Matt’s death. Now, if someone she knows is bereaved, she in turn sends them a blanket to wrap themselves in when they feel low. It’s a beautiful gesture and one to copy.
Playing Kate opposite Steve McFadden as Phil Mitchell in EastEnders in 2003
Above all, Jill advocates giving it time – and keeping talking. Even with the openness we now take for granted, talking through the pain isn’t always easy on others.
At first, Jill’s family struggled with her method of coping. And then something remarkable happened which shed new light on the family’s silence all those years before.
Her parents had had another child, three years before Jill was born. After a labour that lasted seven hours, the baby, a boy, was stillborn.
As was usual at the time, his tiny body was whisked away immediately, his mother not even given the chance to hold him, to be buried in an unmarked grave. Then, just a few years later, Jill’s mother had suffered the loss of her young husband. No wonder she found it hard to talk about it.
Jill and her family tracked down the grave and held a ceremony to honour him, allowing her mother properly to mourn her son after 44 years. As Jill writes: ‘…there among all the other tiny babies who didn’t make it, we planted his nameplate and cried as we remembered our little brother.’
Jill moved back to the North-East to be near her family and began writing her memoir, the story, she says, ‘… of how I was finally able to accept myself by facing up to my grief and allowing myself to die a little,’ – which meant accepting Matt’s death.
She had secured the publishing deal before the surprising and heartwarming last chapter wrote itself when she met her new partner, Ian.
She was cautious at first, fearful of more loss, but then came to a realisation. ‘My experience of losing Dad and Matt means I can either live in dread that this new love will be taken away from me,’ she writes. ‘Or I can cherish the time we do have together, knowing that life is precious. I choose the latter.’
