New chapter begins for Hilary

Sep 18 2005 By Pauline Holt, The Sunday Sun

The first thing I notice as I approach the beautiful house Hilary Maddren shared with late husband Willie is the estate agent's "For Sale" notice on the drive.

It has been half a decade since she kissed her husband for the last time before he died and it is time, she says, for her to move on.

"I'm having a Felicity Kendal moment," she laughs, her engaging blue eyes twinkling mischievously, not unlike Barbara Good's in the Good Life.

"I want to go and grow my own in the country!"

Her ultimate dream would be to own a little tea shop or bed and breakfast in some rustic location.

"I used to keep ducks here but the neighbours moaned about the noise," she smiles.

But Hilary's decision to relocate from her house in Norton, Teesside, coincides with another kind of "moving on".

Since Willie's death she has worked tirelessly for the Willie Maddren Motor Neurone Disease - MND - fund which has raised in excess of £250,000.

Although Willie Maddren is a household name on Teesside, when Hilary first met him she had no idea who he was.

"I was working in the village pub and Willie used to come in with his mates on a Friday night after playing cricket.

"I wasn't a football fan. I didn't know who he was. He'd finished his football career and had a couple of sports shops.

"But of course when I told my father his name, he knew that he was a footballer and wasn't too impressed. I was 23 or 24. He was eight years older than me and had two kids."

Their story appears in Willie's autobiography, Extra Time, a new limited edition of which has just gone on sale with a print run of 2000.

The reprint contains a moving two-chapter postcript penned by Hilary which outlines her feelings since his death.

It also includes tributes to Willie from all four of his children, Lucy and Steven from his first marriage and Laura and David from his marriage to Hilary.

The reprint represents another step in the healing process for Hilary who has decided to call time on her fundraising, at least for the present.

Hilary says she feels she's done her bit and says: "I just feel that I need to move on with my life."

"I am still working as a volunteer and secretary of the Cleveland Motor Neurone Disease Association but there are so many people trying to raise money and everything is a worthy cause."

Hilary deserves a break, although she is probably too selfless to see it that way.

The five years plus of fundraising was preceded by five years of nursing her husband through a cruel degenerative illness that took every last ounce of her physical and mental strength.

But Willie could not have asked for better care.

The first sign something was wrong was an irritating twitch in his hand and arm that refused to go away.

Hilary recalls: "It was a weakness in his fingers.

"He was finding it hard to fasten buttons and hold a pen. The doctors said it was a trapped nerve . . . and it could have been

"That's the trouble with diagnosing MND, there are always a 101 other things it could be and it was a matter of ruling those out first.

"Sometimes it can take years to get a diagnosis but the doctors will try to eliminate everything else first."

Hilary says she took the news worse than Willie. She was only 36 and felt like her life had ended.

In the book she writes: "In stark contrast to Willie's typically forgiving, `Why not me?' approach, I was angry. Many times I did ask, `Why me?' or rather, `Why us?"

Hilary, a trained horticulturalist, owned a successful florist business and Willie had retired.

But she knew she had to stay strong for her husband, even learning how to administer morphine directly into his spine via a tube.

As Willie's illness progressed, he used a wheelchair and needed round- the-clock care. Of course, she is human and relates how she once lost patience after Willie, who was finding eating difficult, turned up his nose at Hilary's semolina pudding.

She ended up throwing it at the ceiling as Willie giggled like a naughty schoolboy.

"How can you get mad with someone that does that?" she asks.

Hilary believes her grief began the day they discovered Willie was terminally ill. She says: "You are losing the person you once knew through disability. And often when someone has been that poorly, their death, albeit traumatic, is in a sense a relief.

"I think I had a year after he died when it didn't sink in. It didn't hit me. We had been so limited for so long in what we could do as a family.

"Suddenly I realised we could now do carefree holidays, jumping in the car at a moment's notice . . . but the reality was we didn't want to do them without him."

Hilary has found happiness again, however, with a man she has known for 20 years, her hairdresser John Robson. Amazingly, he has a football link too, being Sir Bobby Robson's nephew.

Hilary says: "We've been together two and a half years now.

"I will never stop remembering Willie, and it takes a man of great courage to take on a woman whose memories remain so close to her heart.

"But Willie taught me life can be very short and you need to just grasp it with both hands and enjoy."

Extra Time - The Final Chapter, Willie Maddren's official autobiography costs £20 and is available from Waterstones in Middlesbrough or for £22.50, including post and packing, from the Willie Maddren MND Fund, 83 Junction Road, Stockton, TS20 1P. All profits go to the fund.

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No cure for brain disease

Willie Maddren is not the only notable person to have suffered from motor neurone disease, MND.

Actor David Niven and football manager Don Revie also had the condition.

MND is a disorder affecting the motor neurones, the nerves and nerve tracts that originate in the brain, traverse the spinal cord and send impulses through the peripheral nerves to stimulate muscle activity.

If the motor neurones are damaged in some way then the stimulation of the muscles fails and the muscles become weak and thin. Strangely, MND does not involve the muscles which move the eyes.

However, most of the body's muscles can be weakened, including the limb and trunk muscles and those supporting speech, swallowing and breathing.

The average age of onset of MND is 56 years although, rarely, it can develop in people in their 30s or even younger.

There is currently no cure but drugs are being tested to see if degeneration can be reduced or reversed.

For more information visit www.mndassociation.org