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2013 was a very significant year for all of us. It marked a turning point in the relationship between Jonah’s family and ours. It started off with a call from Jonah asking if one of us could go with him on a trip up to Shropshire. He’d had a call from West Mercia police suggesting that a body that had been found in the woods up there might be connected with a series of murders that he was investigating in Oxfordshire. He had agreed to go up there over the weekend, forgetting that his professional carer wasn’t booked to work beyond Friday afternoon. Margaret was on call that weekend, so he turned to us. I’d retired by then and I think he thought it would do me good to get involved in a bit of police work to stop my mind going to mush! However, I had my hands full that weekend with my Granddaughter, Emily. I’d offered to have her to stay for a few days to give Hannah a break. She was heavily pregnant with Amber at the time and getting very tired and run down.
I can’t remember who suggested it first, but the upshot of that telephone call was that Bernie went off to Shropshire with Jonah and a whole new phase of our life began.
The officer in charge of the Shropshire case was Paul Godwin, who, by coincidence, had worked previously both with Jonah and, more recently, with me, before being transferred to West Mercia. Jonah hadn’t mentioned his name on the phone, so it was a complete surprise to Bernie when she recognised him sitting in the hotel in Oswestry waiting for them. There’s no reason why Jonah should have known that Paul worked with me after he left Jonah’s team – and still less reason why he should have known that he had become rather a favourite with Bernie. Still, it was a bit of a shock for her to see him sitting there. And, as it turned out, it was even more of a shock for poor Paul to see Jonah arriving in a wheelchair. He’d somehow managed not to hear about Jonah having been shot – although it had been on the national, as well as the local, news and had spread through the police grapevine like nobody’s business.
The other thing that Paul found shocking was the idea that Bernie was not only sharing a room with Jonah but seeing to all his most intimate needs. Like many people, he expected me to be upset at the thought of my wife dressing and undressing another man, not to mention washing him and toileting him. It’s funny when you think that nobody ever questioned it being OK for Angie to be working on a male ward with any number of patients, some of who were a great deal younger and more good-looking than Jonah!
This story isn’t about Paul or I might tell you about the way his sergeant – a bright girl by the name of Karen Evans – got hold of the wrong end of the stick and thought that there was something going on between Bernie and Paul. Or I might go on to tell you about how, after a while, Paul and Karen teamed up domestically as well as in the workplace and have recently announced their intention of getting married.*
The important thing from the point of view of Jonah’s relationship with us is that it opened Bernie’s eyes to the idea of a complete change to her career. This was the first time she’d had hands on experience of a live police investigation and she caught the bug and wanted more after it was over. I think that her job at the university had been starting to pall for some time and she’d been toying with the idea of early retirement – originally with a view to spending more time with Lucy, but now with something else in mind altogether. By the time they’d got back from Shropshire, she’d proposed to Jonah that she should become his Personal Assistant, in place of the agency staff that he’d been using up until then.
Jonah jumped at the idea – as well he might. I won’t say anything against the professional carers, because they were very good in many ways and did a splendid job at looking after Jonah physically. However, I could see the change in him after Bernie took over. It made all the difference to Jonah having someone looking after him who was his own intellectual equal. It also made things easier that he knew that Bernie was as committed as he was to getting the job done. Above all, it made a difference knowing that her interest in him was more than simply as a professional carer.
*You can read the full story in CHANGING SCENES OF LIFE. The details of how to get hold of a copy are all in the table on the GOOD READ page of this website.