There are an estimated 417,000 people in the UK suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and double that number suffering from other forms of dementia.
There are an estimated 417,000 people in the UK suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and double that number suffering from other forms of dementia. Potentially there are a large number of readers for John Suchet’s touchingly honest account of his wife’s slide into dementia, but — and here is the irony — it will not be the victims themselves of these diseases who will perhaps find comfort or insight from his book but the million or more carers who look after them.
John Suchet is a famous television journalist and former newscaster for ITV. He is the brother of the actor David Suchet and author of several works on Beethoven. While still married, and with young children to look after, he fell in love with Bonnie, a strikingly beautiful woman who lived near him in Henley, who was also married and also had a family of her own. It was love at first sight. A powerful and irrepressible physical attraction drew them together. There were difficulties and divorces that both had to go through before they could be together, but despite some financial hardship, and a blip in his career as a television journalist, they were finally able to marry in 1985 and build a life together in a flat in London and a farmhouse in Gascony.
For a time all went well. Both had good, challenging jobs. Both enjoyed travelling and visiting their French idyll. To those who knew them then they must have seemed the perfect couple. He, strong and virile, with a good speaking voice like his brother’s, a natural broadcaster. She, slim and beautiful, with a wide smile, good nature and that grace which seems to be one of the defining characteristics of women born on the East Coast of America.
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