One day in June 2020 Ruthie Henshall – actor, singer, dancer, star of musical theatre – went to visit her mother, Gloria, at her residential care home in Suffolk. This was the first time Ruthie had seen her mum for three months – not because she didn’t want to go, or through neglect, but because of lockdown. They had done a few Zoom calls, but there was only one iPad to go around the 50 or so residents in the home, it needed to be booked and there had to be a carer free to help, so it only happened every couple of weeks. And anyway, Gloria, who had Alzheimer’s, didn’t get on very well with Zoom. “She thought she was watching us on television,” says Henshall.
“Visit” is perhaps an exaggeration. Henshall and her two sisters weren’t allowed in; they could only go to the window and wave at their mother inside. “She would wave back – she still recognised us. She couldn’t understand why we couldn’t come in, so she cried.”
That first time Henshall was shocked at the state of her mum. “In three months she had lost so much weight. She was in a chair all day; some days they didn’t have the staff to even get her out of bed. She’d lost the ability to chew so they had to thicken her drinks and mush her food. She had stopped walking and she had stopped talking. It just wasn’t Mum.”
She puts Gloria’s decline down to a lack of contact, lack of conversation, lack of love. Of course these were extraordinary times: Covid was ripping through the place, there were no tests, vaccines were a long way off, 13 residents died in the first two months, the fabric of care was being stretched to breaking point. Henshall understood the carers had to try to keep their charges safe. But it wasn’t doing her mum any good. “For someone with dementia, we are their eyes and their ears, their voice, their memories.”
“People were screaming outside windows at carers because they would take residents away to bring someone else’s loved one to the window. I’ve never seen so many people crying outside a building,” says Henshall, and she includes herself. After the waving visits, which she did every day, she was usually in tears too.
This is how it went for months – waving and tears. The home did set up a tent in the garden, for visits, but there was a plastic sheet between the visitors and residents. “We weren’t allowed contact, or within two metres. She would put her arms out for a hug; we would have to keep saying: ‘Sorry, Mum.’”
Even when it started to open up outside – family bubbles of up to six people, testing, then vaccination – Henshall didn’t get to hug her mum. “They battened down the hatches. They’d lost so many residents, had so many empty rooms and money lost, they weren’t letting people in even when everyone inside had been vaccinated. We had been vaccinated, there was PPE, there were tests; they were still keeping them in their rooms 24/7.”
Henshall thinks basic human rights were being denied. “The right to be with another human being, the right to a family life. People in care homes are treated as second-class citizens – they’re old, so people don’t give a shit. But they’re the people who fought for us, who brought us up, who paved the way for us.”
So she started to make a fuss. She talked to other people, such as Jenny Morrison and Diane Mayhew, who set up Rights for Residents in 2020, in response to what they said were the inhumane visiting policies placed on care home residents. Henshall became an ambassador for them. The guidance was changing so often no one knew what it was; different care homes were interpreting it in different ways, “depending on what time it was or how the manager felt. It was a postcode lottery.”
Meanwhile in Downing Street … “That absolute clusterfuck by the government!” Henshall, 56, almost spits. “When I heard about the drinks parties and everything going on there, I remember actually crying. Yes, I’ve done the timeline. While all the parties were going on, while they were snogging in corridors and raising glasses of champagne, I was stood at a window waving at my mum, observing all the fucking rules, like we all did.”
She didn’t get to watch Boris Johnson giving evidence to the privileges committee the other day – she was working (rehearsing for 42nd Street; she’s also just about to be on the telly, in Coronation Street). But she doesn’t for one second buy that he didn’t know the rules – his rules – were being broken. “Bollocks!” she says – typically forthright. What gets her most is that he never said sorry. No one did. She slips into an impersonation of the former PM, being shambolic and posh and evasive. “Erm … parties? Vaccine rollout, vaccine rollout, vaccine rollout …”
Henshall lives not far from Clacton-on-Sea, where she made her debut at the West Cliff theatre 38 years ago, aged 18. Since then, she has been in many West End musicals: She Loves Me (for which she won an Olivier award), Crazy for You, Chicago, Peggy Sue Got Married, Marguerite. She has been on Broadway, and on the telly, as a judge on Dancing on Ice, and on I’m a Celebrity, though not in the jungle because that was also during Covid; instead she went hungry in a cold Welsh castle.
Home now is a cosy, Hansel-and-Gretel thatched cottage that she shares with her daughters, Lily and Dolly, and Winnie the cockapoo. She divorced the girls’ father, actor and singer Tim Howar, in 2010. She wasn’t expecting me today – there was a mix-up over dates, but I was there now, so she let me in and made coffee. “Would you like the cunt mug?” she asks.
Oh. I don’t know, maybe? She shows me a comedy mug given to her by a friend with a message on the side: “We can literally only be friends if you are a bit of a cunt.” It is, she admits, one of her favourite words, especially with “ed” at the end, to mean very drunk. Later she will tell me how the current British monarch once got her c … very drunk. No, really.
Oh go on. Let’s do it now – a bit of comic relief within the tragedy. She was dating his brother at the time. Edward! Phew! They met when he was working at the Really Useful Theatre Company and she was in Cats. One summer Edward took her to Balmoral and they had a cook-out at the lodge on Loch Muick. It all sounds very jolly; Charles gave Ruthie her first ever martini, quickly followed by her second. “The Queen and Margaret started singing hymns and Diana poked me from behind and said: ‘Stop them singing hymns – sing something else.’ And Margaret said: ‘Oh yes, what are you in at the moment?’ I was doing Les Mis so I sang I Dreamed a Dream, after two martinis. I must have changed key at least three times!”
It doesn’t really matter whether interviewers like their subjects, and I’m here to talk to her about something specific, but I’m just going to say it anyway: it was a pleasure to spend a couple of hours with Ruthie Henshall. She was warm, welcoming, full of tangents and funny stories; she made me laugh as well as very nearly cry. I guess that’s what actors do.
How did we even get on to the royal family? Because we were talking about Partygate, the cheese and wine and leaving drinks, while Henshall was waving at her mother through a window. And Elizabeth Windsor was sitting alone in Saint George’s Chapel, mourning her husband, remember?
We’re in the beamy living room now. That’s Gloria on the wall, a black-and-white photo of her own coronation, as Miss Ipswich, circa 1950. Gloria became an English and drama teacher. “She would have loved to have been an actress or dancer herself, but she grew up in the war in a very poor family so that was never going to be an option. When I entered the business it was a thrill for her. I think those opening nights were an absolute joy for her.”
They were close but Gloria wasn’t an easy woman. She drank, she had a fiery relationship with her husband; Henshall thinks she suffered from depression. “When she got dementia, all that fell away. I know lots of people get vile, but she laughed again and got a kick out of life. For me there was a great healing with my mum.” That was taken away again, by Covid, and by care home policy.
Henshall did get in to see her mother again. Properly, not through glass or plastic, but in the flesh. It turned out that government guidance had decided that some care home residents might require additional support from relatives or friends and had established the role of “essential caregiver”, someone who could come and go more freely and more often. Once she discovered that, Henshall was there, banging on the door, waving it at them, saying if they didn’t let her in she was going to campaign louder. They let her in in April 2021, more than a year after the first lockdown.
“When I first put my arms around her, she buried her head in my chest and moaned and cried. We cannot do without human contact.” The carers too were happy – it was lovely to have someone from outside back in the home and to have a bit of help. One told Henshall that the light had come back into Gloria’s eyes. “I would feed her, massage her, hug her, sing to her.” Maybe I Dreamed a Dream – I should have asked. “When they were all out of the room I would take my mask off and kiss her.”
They had five weeks together. It was only after she was allowed into the home that Henshall realised her mum was dying. One day she noticed Gloria’s breathing had changed. She told the staff, who called an ambulance. They said they could take her to hospital but that Henshall wouldn’t be allowed to go with her. Henshall asked if her mother was in pain, and they told her not, so the ambulance left empty. Henshall wasn’t going to let her go again, and Gloria wasn’t going to go alone.
“I think I have a fear of dying alone,” Henshall says. “The thought of it is horrendous. This is why I am flagging this up to people – it could be you, it could be your loved ones.” Henshall has told her own daughters that if necessary she wants them to take her to Dignitas.
Thousands of people did die alone during the pandemic, forcibly separated from their families. Many stopped eating and drinking, or taking medication because that was something they had control over. Without the emotional support that only a close relative or friend offers, many lost the will to live.
In some ways the Henshalls were lucky, though Ruthie wonders what difference it would have made to Gloria’s health and wellbeing, had she been allowed in sooner. She’s not pointing fingers, naming and shaming. She’s certainly not blaming carers, who are underpaid and undervalued. It’s about changing the system. “The chances are, if there’s another strain or another pandemic, the same thing will happen again.”
Actually, it is still happening. Some care homes are still restricting visits. “It beggars belief to me that we are still having this conversation, having to fight for rights of residents three years down the line, three years of people being locked down.” Last year, the care minister, Helen Whately, said she was determined to fix the “misery, despair and anger at being kept away from someone you are desperately worried about” – and yet still it’s not a legal right.
That is what Ruthie Henshall, and the Rights for Residents group, are campaigning for: a new law, so that anyone in a care home or hospital has the right to at least one care supporter – relative or friend – who can give in-person support to them in all circumstances. They’re calling it Gloria’s law, of course.
Gloria didn’t die alone – Ruthie was with her. Not just Ruthie: she did break the rules for once that night, though in the grand scheme of rule-breaking I don’t think anyone is going to get too upset about it. “I snuck my two sisters in. There was a side door – it went straight to the room, there was no danger to anybody else.” They put music on, read to their mother, lay with her, stroked her. “We gave her the exit out of the world we wanted her to have.”
