[alli55]

To the great, but unknown, relief of the citizens of Wallsend, Lissie and Rayna didn’t go photobombing last Sunday. Instead, they went to MFA Bowl in North Shields, with Rosie and Keira. This is a favourite haunt of Lissie and her friends, being a simple 15-minute bus ride away. It has the added attraction that Keira’s older brother works there, so, if it’s not too busy, he ‘arranges’ for them to get extra games for free! It’s a bit run-down and shabby, but that doesn’t really bother them too much, except they try desperately hard to avoid having to use the toilets there!

On Sunday evening, Maddie got a text from Stacie telling her that Gemma and the other daredevils had all been kept at the studios all day again, and that, more importantly, Gemma and the other BMD Northern Singers were going to be on BBC Breakfast the next day. Lissie immediately decided she was going to watch it, until I pointed out that it started at 6am!

“What?!” she said. “I can’t get up that early!”

“And it doesn’t finish till well after you’ve gone to school,” I added.

“I’ll watch it on catch-up!” she declared, which she did after school that afternoon. Frustratingly for her, the bit with Gemma in didn’t appear until just over two-and-a-half hours into the show. She was not impressed!

“How does anyone watch this?” she asked me, at one point. “It’s just the same stuff over and over again!”

“I think the point is, people only have time to watch maybe 15, 20 minutes before they go to work,” I told her, “so everything has to be repeated for the next lot of people watching.”

Eventually she got to the BMD Northern Singers’ appearance, which lasted all of 4 minutes, and focussed mainly on the fact that they were number 1 on the charts. They didn’t even sing this time, the BBC used a clip from the Heads Together concert instead.

“Well that was three hours of my life I won’t get back!” Lissie announced when it was over.

“They’re on The One Show this evening,” Maddie informed her. “Stacie got a text from Gemma at lunchtime to let her know.”

“Can we?” asked Lissie, well aware of her parents’ distinct dislike of the show.

“If you like,” I told her, “but don’t expect your Dad to watch!”

She didn’t expect it; and he didn’t watch. But I did, and Gemma and company came over pretty well; except for one rather crass comment from Matt.

Alex Jones asked the group, “Did you know much about Heads Together before you did the concert?”

To which Eilidh replied, “No, not really, but we googled it and were really impressed with what they did.”

Matt then added, “I’ve knocked a few heads together in my time, but that’s as far as it goes!”

The slight pause before Amol Rajan moved on to the next question, together with the embarrassed look on Alex Jones’ face, told us everything we needed to know about the unsuitability of Matt’s ‘quip’.

On the plus side, Lissie took her tally of TV mentions to three, as Gemma told her story once more; and they did at least get to sing, again choosing to perform ‘Stand By Me’. We heard about 40 seconds of it before it faded out as the closing credits ended.

Lissie-mania had passed, by and large, at school, giving her first-hand experience of how fleeting fame can be. She was quite happy with being last week’s news!

On Tuesday morning, I had an unexpected phone call at work, from Gemma.

“I need to see you about something,” she told me, a little mysteriously.

“Come round this evening,” I told her, “the girls would love to see you!”

“I will come and see them,” she promised, “but it’s you I want to talk to. On your own.”

“I can finish early, and we can meet up somewhere, if that’s any good,” I offered.

We agreed to meet at Richardson Dees Park, where, hopefully, Gemma wouldn’t attract too much attention. She was waiting for me when I got there just after 4:30, and we decided to take a gentle stroll through the woodland walk whilst we talked.

“Basically,” Gemma told me after a while, “I’ve been asked to go on This Morning on Thursday. Just me, not the others. Because they are doing a feature about mental illness, and they want me to tell them about how Mam’s breakdown affected us.”

“Are you going to do it?” I asked her.

“I told them I needed time to think about it,” she replied, “and they said I had to let them know by tonight. Do you think I should do it?”

“Do you want to do it?”

“In a way, yeah,” she said, hesitantly, “but I don’t want to cause you any hassle, so just say if you’d rather I didn’t do it, and I’ll tell them I can’t.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t really think I had the right to tell her not to go on the show if that was what she wanted to do. But, I had turned down the press last week to preserve our privacy, and that would potentially be under threat if Gemma talked to the nation about us.

“It’s your decision, Gemma,” I told her. “It’s not my place to tell you what to do!”

Her shoulders slumped, and she gave me a weak smile. “I know,” she said, “but I don’t know what to do for the best, and I was really hoping you could give me some advice.”

I stopped walking, and put my hands on her arms, turning her to look directly at me. “Go on the show!” I advised. “I get the feeling you want to, really. So, do it! You never know, maybe it’ll help someone facing a similar situation.”

She smiled at me. “Thanks, Emma,” she said, “I knew you’d know what to do! You always have!”

I didn’t tell the girls about Gemma’s latest TV appearance, and asked her not to tell Stacie until afterwards; she promised she wouldn’t. I took the morning off work on Thursday, telling my boss that a ‘family issue’ had cropped up. I wanted to see what Gemma was going to say!

There were three people taking part in the discussion on mental breakdown, part of an ongoing series This Morning have been doing on mental health issues, together with Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, of course. Along with Gemma, there was a young woman who had suffered a mental breakdown herself, and a male psychiatrist, presumably there for his expert opinions. Philip and Holly treated the subject with the sensitivity and seriousness that it merited, and the whole segment of the programme was excellent, I thought. After an initial explanation from the psychiatrist as to what mental breakdown, or nervous breakdown as he referred to it, actually is, Holly gently helped the young woman, Amelia, recall her experience of having a breakdown. She had been suffering from increased levels of stress for some time, and feeling depressed as well; things had come to a head when she had been put on a disciplinary at work, and she had woken up one morning physically unable to get out of bed. No amount of persuasion, coaxing, or reasoning had any effect, and she’d remained in bed for three weeks. It had been so bad that she’d resorted to using a bed pan, because she couldn’t even get out to go to the loo, and the only thing she would eat was tomato soup. Her worried parents had called in their GP and he’d recommended a course of psychoanalysis therapy, but that was useless because she couldn’t get up to go on it! So, eventually, he’d had her admitted to a mental health unit, where she’d undertaken the therapy; she’d remained there for three months.

“It isn’t just the sufferer who is affected;” Philip continued, “their family can have their lives turned upside-down too. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it, Gemma?!”

“Yes!” Gemma answered, nervously.

“And it was worse for you,” Philip informed us, “because you were only a child.”

“Yeah, I was 10,” she said, and paused, looking at Philip for help. He nodded and smiled, encouraging her to continue. “It was my Mam,” she went on. “She’d been getting more and more stressed ever since my Dad died, but she kept at her job and everything to look after me and my little sister. But I could tell it was getting harder for her, because she just never had any energy to do anything, you know. Like, the house would get more and more untidy, and she never went out anywhere apart from to work, and she was always tired and snappy. It just wasn’t really her, it wasn’t the Mam I knew!”

“And what happened when she actually had her breakdown?” asked Holly.

“Me and Stacie, that’s my sister, were at school, waiting for Mam to come and pick us up. Only she never came. The teachers were phoning her but she didn’t pick up. So, they were leaving messages. It got to the stage where they were telling us that they couldn’t wait any longer. So, Stacie asked if it was alright if her best friend’s Mam collected us and took us home. So, the teacher phoned her and she came and picked us up. When we got to our house and we knocked on the door, we couldn’t get an answer. Emma, that’s who took us home, she asked if there was a spare key anywhere, so I showed her where we kept the emergency one. So, anyway, we get in, and Mam’s sitting on the floor in the living room with a bottle of pills next to her. Just sitting there. She doesn’t react at all when she sees us.”

“That must have been so frightening for you!” Holly exclaimed.

“Yeah,” Gemma agreed, “I didn’t know what was happening to her! But, Emma tells us to go upstairs and get a blanket. I think she just wanted us out of the way for a moment! When we come back down, she’s on the phone to the ambulance. They came and took Mam into hospital, and Emma got us to pack our clothes into a couple of suitcases, and she took us home with her.”

“She took you in, didn’t she?!” Philip led her on to the next part of her story.

“Yeah, we stayed with her and her family for, like, six months, while Mam got better. I don’t know what would have happened to us if it hadn’t been for them!” She started to get emotional but tried to carry on. “I don’t think I’d have been able to cope if me and Stacie had been split up!” She stopped, unable to continue, sobbing quietly. Holly put a hand on her knee and told her to take her time. Philip, sensibly, asked the psychiatrist a question, to allow Gemma time to regain control of her emotions.

When, after three or four minutes, we returned to Gemma, she had recovered herself.

“How is your Mum now?” Philip asked her.

“She’s fine!” Gemma told him. “She’s not had any more problems, since she came back out of hospital. Touch wood!”

“And has it affected you and your sister at all, do you think?” enquired Holly.

“Oh, definitely, but in a good way! It’s made us closer. Because we only had each other, the bond between us is much stronger.”

Philip and Holly had a few more questions for Amelia, before getting the psychiatrist, whose name I didn’t catch, to sum up. He gave the viewers tips on how to spot signs of a possible mental breakdown in loved ones, and on what to do if you think someone you know is suffering from one. Then Holly wrapped it up and took us into the advert break.

Watching that left me feeling emotionally drained, both through remembering the events that Gemma described and empathising with her making it all public. But I had to admire her for doing it, and for the manner in which she’d told her story.

When the girls got home I told them it had been on and left it up to them whether they watched. They both did. Maddie remembered it happening; but Lissie was only 3 at the time, so this was something she knew of but hadn’t ever been told the full story. It upset her a little, but only served to increase the esteem in which she held Gemma.

The rest of the week, thankfully, was uneventful.