cancer — Rachel Hammersley's Blog

A photograph from Team Gurney’s first August Bank Holiday walk in 2015. Image Rachel Hammersley.

At the end of this month my family and I will undertake our 10th annual August Bank Holiday walk. We will hike the Hadrian's Wall Path from Bowness-on-Solway to Wallsend (in fact we plan to continue on to the sea at Tynemouth). When we began this ritual in 2015 my children were 9 and 6. That year we walked part of the Hadrian's Wall route (from Housesteads to Newburn) over three days. When I think back I marvel at my bravery - or recklessness - in embarking on such an adventure. Though we were not walking the entire route, we did some pretty long days and, as the only member of the party over the age of 10, the navigation and motivation were entirely down to me. Yet it was far from my biggest challenge that year.

Just over a year earlier in May 2014 my husband, John Gurney, was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer. He died before the year was out, cutting his life short, making me a widow and single-parent at the age of 40, and leaving my two young children without their wonderful Dad.

A photograph of my late husband John Gurney from 2014. Image Rachel Hammersley.

The impetus for the walk was twofold. In the first place, John and I had always enjoyed walking and had tried to instil the same love in our children. Embarking on a Bank Holiday walk, then, felt like a way of maintaining a sliver of continuity when so much of our lives had been turned upside down. In planning the walk, I recalled a trip John and I had made several years earlier to Linhope Spout in Northumberland. I was carrying our one-year-old son in a baby backpack and as we reached the waterfall we saw a family with slightly older children skipping along ahead of their parents. We exchanged hopes that one day that would be us with our son - and perhaps a little sibling - running ahead of us, and pledged that we would keep going for walks and would try to make the experience of doing so fun for our children. It did not occur to me at that time that it would be one parent, rather than two, walking behind.

A photograph from 2017 when we walked part of the route on the beach bare foot. Image Rachel Hammersley.

Secondly, the walk addressed a deep need I felt to do something positive in response to our loss, and to ensure that my children were defined by their achievements rather than by the absence of their Dad. Delivering a cheque for £850 (raised through sponsorship for the walk) to the Oncology Day Unit at North Tyneside Hospital, where John had been treated, certainly felt like the kind of positive achievement I had been hoping for.

The money we have raised over the years for cancer-related charities has certainly been important, but alongside this we gained far more from our walks than I could ever have imagined back in 2015. In the years that followed we traversed two reservoirs (Rutland and Kielder) and walked (in three stages) from our front door north to Scotland - an achievement about which we all boast - and (in two stages) from our front door south to Scarborough. We have got lost (on more occasions than I care to remember), walked along a precipice with an alarming drop to our left, encountered fields of bulls, and faced personal demons on numerous occasions, but we have always kept on walking.

The unexpected finds are the best. We spotted this painted stone in the village of Drummore in Galloway in 2020 and felt as though it was left there for us. Image Rachel Hammersley.

Walking, I have discovered, is both a metaphor for - and an excellent means of coping with - grief. Walking means moving at human pace through the landscape. You cannot move any faster than your body will allow, but if you just keep putting one foot in front of another (without thinking too much about what is ahead) you can cover considerable distances. Grief too is a human process, which operates at its own pace and cannot be rushed. Sometimes it feels impossibly hard, but if you just keep inching forward you do make progress. Walking also forces me to slow down from the frenetic pace of my normal life, and to take in and appreciate what is around me in the present. That too is crucial when dealing with grief.

Team Gurney's August Bank Holiday Walks

2015 Hadrian's Wall Housteads to Newburn

2016 Rutland Water

2017 North Shields to Dunstanburgh Castle

2018 Dunstanburgh to Berwick

2019 Berwick to Eyemouth, Fenham to Lindisfarne, College Valley

2020 Rhins of Galloway Coastal Path

2021 Kielder Water

2022 North Shields to Teeside

2023 Redcar to Scarborough

2024 Hadrian's Wall Bowness on Solway to Tynemouth

Our shoes after a day walking Rutland Water in 2016.

Our Bank Holiday walks also served to remind me that despite being thrust kicking and screaming into single-parenthood, I was not alone. The success of the walks has always relied on a small band of loyal family and friends who not only made them possible, but also supported me and my children in so many ways all year round. Central among Team Gurney's support team have been my parents who have driven us to starting points and collected us from end points on multiple occasions. They have been our cheerleaders, our most generous donors, and have listened patiently when - fuelled on adrenalin - we told, and retold, the stories of our exploits. Our first walk also could not have been completed without the kindness and support of my then colleagues and friends Keith and Claire who volunteered to put us up for two nights en route. This not only involved providing us with comfortable beds and delicious meals, but also collecting us from our end point in the evening and dropping us back the next day, and - on our second day - walking over an hour to meet us bringing water and tons of moral support when my poor navigation skills had resulted in a rather long detour. The following year it was my Aunty Cathy and Uncle Stewart who offered to provide bed, breakfast, and evening meal for our walk around Rutland Water. They also walked with us on our final day. On later walks we have been joined by my new partner (now husband) who, as an honorary member of Team Gurney, has completed several walks alongside us.

Bereavement and grief can be a very lonely process. The back-up teams for our walks are representative of how fortunate we have been in the support we have received from family and friends over the last ten years (including John's wider family with whom we have remained close). Without all those people who have stood shoulder to shoulder with us we would have struggled much more than we have.

Walking part of the Yorkshire coast in 2023. Image Rachel Hammersley.

Finally, walking annually has been a means of charting our progress. This came home to me very strongly last year when we were walking part of the Yorkshire coast between Staithes and Whitby. At the far end of Runswick Bay we had to climb up a small waterfall and I was struggling a bit. My daughter turned and instinctively held out her hand to help me up. In that moment I realised that the tables had turned. It was no longer me leading the way, navigating, and motivating the children. I had become the slow one at the back needing inspirational talk and a hand to guide and support me.

Much may have changed since Team Gurney set off on the first walk ten years ago, but there is also much that remains constant - not least my, perhaps reckless, desire for a challenge. This year the Bank Holiday walk is not the only big event in Team Gurney's summer diary. We are doing what we are calling the 'Geordie Double'. Less than two weeks after completing our Hadrian's Wall Walk we will be running the Great North Run (my daughter as a junior and my son and I in the half marathon). I have a feeling that on both the walk and the run I will be relying heavily on the other members of Team Gurney to keep me going.

[This year we are raising money for Maggie's. It is an amazing organisation for people living with cancer and their families, which did so much to support me in those early months after John had died. If you want to sponsor us you can do so at Just Giving: https://www.justgiving.com/page/team-gurneys-geordie-double-2024?utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=page%2Fteam-gurneys-geordie-double-2024&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share]

Harrington blue plaque. Photograph by John Gurney.

In my memory, 25 July 2013 has taken on a special, magical quality. It was a great day in its own right, but its place in my memory is particularly treasured because it can never now be repeated. I was staying with my husband, John Gurney, and our two young children at my parents’ house. It was the beginning of the long summer holiday, the weather was good, and my parents had agreed to look after the children in order to give John and I a rare day alone together. The original idea had been just to go out for lunch, but John (like me an historian) had other plans. He had realised that James Harrington, a seventeenth-century political thinker central to my research, had links to several Northamptonshire villages near to where my parents lived. John had started to get interested in Harrington himself and so we decided to go on a pilgrimage to look at some of the houses, churches and plaques relating to Harrington and his family, before lunching in a pub. This may not sound like everyone’s idea of a treat, but for John and me it was perfect. It gave us the opportunity to escape the constant demands of life with young children for a few hours and to rekindle the foundations on which our relationship was built: our mutual interest in seventeenth-century history; our passion for talking about and sharing our ideas; and our love of visiting historical places (as well as our enjoyment of large pub lunches). There was also the sense that this might be the first of many such days. With our youngest child due to start primary school the following September, the possibility of spending a bit more time on our own together was starting to open up.

Harrington's house at Milton Malsor, Northants. Photograph by John Gurney.

Little did I know at that point that far from being the first summer of the rest of our lives, 2013 would be my penultimate summer with my wonderful husband, and the last one before our lives would be torn apart by John’s cancer diagnosis. John died just fifteen months later on 8 December 2014. Nothing prepares you for a tragedy of this nature. Before John’s diagnosis I was always amazed by the ability of others in dire circumstances to cope and carry on. All too suddenly I found myself on the other side of the mirror and, of course, I too coped and found others amazed by my resilience. Yet to me it didn’t feel like coping. That implied a conscious choice. Whereas with two children and a job that I couldn’t give up (even if I had wanted to) the only option was to get out of bed each morning and continue. In a funny way I think the urge to carry on actually provided me with the means to do so. There were, however, other lifelines that I instinctively reached out for in those early months. One that proved particularly important to me was my, at times unhealthy, obsession with grief literature. I devoured Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (by far the cream of this niche genre) in one evening’s sitting. I also read a whole host of material of a more varied quality: memoirs, fiction, blogs, newspaper articles - anything I could get my hands on. The authors of these works helped me to feel less alone. They reminded me that my situation is actually more ‘normal’ than it sometimes feels out there in the real world. These works also aroused within me an insatiable desire to deal with my own grief in a creative way. I had no illusions about writing a blockbuster memoir. Julian Barnes was a great novelist long before his wife died. It wasn’t this experience that made him one. Following this logic, the obvious outlet for my creative yearning was to write something historical. I had been an historian before I had met John and my status as an historian was not (outwardly at least) affected by his death. It was one of the few constants in my identity at a time when everything else seemed to have been turned upside down and I was having to come to terms with new labels that I had not chosen for myself. Moreover, John had left me a kind of signpost for the direction that this work might take.

Upton Church, Northants. Photograph by John Gurney.

Both before and after our magical day in Northamptonshire, John had been making notes on Harrington. Using the research skills he had honed first as a DPhil student at Sussex University and later at the Historical Manuscripts Commission, he had tracked down all kinds of information about Harrington’s family connections, his activities during the Civil War, his friends and associates. By the time he died, John had produced hundreds of pages of hand-written notes and references detailing this research. We had talked a bit about his findings both on our day out and afterwards. We had vague ideas of writing a book together, with John researching and writing the sections on Harrington’s life and me contributing chapters on his ideas. When it became clear that the treatment wasn’t working, and that John had very little time for any more historical writing, we talked more about this project. In one of many poignant conversations that we had in John’s last weeks, he mentioned these notes, told me where they were, and made clear that they were mine to do what I wanted with after he was gone. They were an odd parting gift in many respects, but they were very much in keeping with our relationship. Those notes provided me with a lasting link to my husband’s talents and passions. In working through them I was, paradoxically, both drawn closer to him and also given the means to continue my journey as an historian alone. They acted as a bridge between our old life and my new one, and as a bridge they protected me from the yawning chasm below which might otherwise have swallowed me up.

While I knew where the notes were, and while I knew that I wanted to work through them, I did not feel strong enough to do so until about six months after John had died. Even then it was, to begin with, an extremely painful experience. I had not realised before just how evocative of personality handwriting can be. To begin with just reading the notes made me cry. Quite quickly, though, it became comforting, a way of feeling close to John while continuing with my work. Of course at times it was also a deeply frustrating experience. John’s handwriting was not easily legible at the best of times, and when he was scribbling down references on scraps of paper to remind himself of what he had found, it could become almost completely indecipherable. What made it worse was the abbreviations. John evidently had a whole catalogue of acronyms in his head that he regularly used, particularly for the titles of key sources. Some I worked out relatively quickly, but others, including A&O for Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum flummoxed me for some time. On numerous occasions I sat and wept because I could not simply run downstairs to John’s study to ask him what a seemingly random series of letters meant. On the other hand when I finally worked out the meaning of a particular short-hand term, I felt a small rush of triumph as the cypher suddenly disclosed a whole raft of new information to follow up.

Plaque commemorating James Harrington in Upton Church, Northants. Photograph by John Gurney.

As I slowly worked through John’s notes I began to realise that they could act as a bridge in another way too. They provided me with a whole new way of seeing Harrington: one that challenges the conventional republican reading of him and reveals previously hidden aspects of his life and thought for investigation. This new vision of Harrington has also led me to new formats and modes of communication, not least as a reflection of Harrington’s own playful and experimental attitude towards genre and form. This blog is just one facet of my exploration of this new territory. I will use it to present elements of my new interpretation of Harrington (though this will be developed in full in the book on which I am currently working). It will also be a vehicle for reflecting on the range of sources that I’m using in my research: what can be gained from them; and some of the quirky information I’ve found in them. Finally, it will allow me to log this journey that John set up for me, but which I must travel alone.