Rising to life's challenges

A CONVERSATION with Jan Crocker is an education. I'm barely through the door and she's already discussed a little history and a touch of anatomy.

The start point is her lop-sided smile, which she explains is due to Bell's palsy.

I learn that the condition is caused by a problem with the seventh cranial nerve and is named after Sir Charles Bell, who discovered its function.

"He was a surgeon at the Battle of Waterloo," she adds, not trying to be clever, simply offering an aside that I might find interesting.

This is no eccentric academic I'm speaking to. Jan's interest in the human body is deeply, and painfully, grounded in the practical. Hers has been failing for many years now, and she wants to know how and why.

She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2002 and, despite an extensive operation and more episodes of chemotherapy than she can count, the disease refuses to leave her.

The debilitating side-effects sap her energy, bloat her body and have taken her hair, and she reckons they're probably to blame for triggering the dormant virus which has damaged that facial nerve.

So what do you do when you have a disease that is still killing you despite medical intervention which dominates your life?

In Jan's case, you get on with that life.

She has just graduated from the University of Plymouth with an MA in creative writing, has learned German and is about to have her first book published.

"I found that I could live with cancer," says the 67-year-old.

"I did the MA over two years, part-time, thinking I might not be here that long.

"I wasn't very well on the day of my graduation and I couldn't go up on the stage to collect my certificate, so the vice-chancellor had to come down to hand it to me: but I'm here."

She certainly is, and is planning her future. She is part-way through a second book, an autobiography for her grandson, Samuel, who is now aged six, to read when he's older.

Jan continues as secretary of the Waterfront Writers, a creative writing group with which she has been involved for 10 years, is involved in running Plymouth Foyer, a housing project for young people, and is an active member of St Pancras' Church, Honicknowle.

Despite all that, Jan is anxious to make clear that this is not a 'brave woman battles cancer' story.

For a start, I don't think she'd like to see the label 'brave', which could imply that some patients are cowards.

Also, she doesn't choose to go on about achieving against the odds.

"I never talk like that", she says, "because it isn't like that. I set myself goals and get on with them. Then I think, 'What would I like to do next?'"

And Jan is quick to credit all those who have supported her, from the 'really wonderful' staff at Derriford Hospital – she makes a point of praising the contribution made by everybody, including the tea ladies who lift patients' morale – her supportive tutor at the university and, mostly, her family and friends ("It's they who kept me alive").

For her, the C in Big C stands for Challenge.

That is because she is used to overcoming odds in a life that has rarely been short of challenges.

She has had two careers and a couple of troubled marriages, and her tough times started when she was still a baby in her native Surrey .

Jan was taken ill with Pink disease, so-called because one of the symptoms is discolouration of the hands and feet.

She lost her hair and nails, had severe skin problems and difficulties with speech and co-ordination.

"I was constantly going to and from hospital in London," she says.

"Eventually the cause was identified as mercury poisoning. Mercury used to be quite common in teething powder.

"I was unable to speak or walk until I was two and a half."

Jan caught up and when she left school at 15, trained in shorthand and typing and worked for the retailer John Lewis and then for Rank, the film company.

By the time Jan moved to Plymouth in 1971 she was a single mum with a two-year-old child – she had divorced her first husband – and needed family company and a new direction in life.

She chose the city because her sister Mary, a teacher, was living nearby, and Jan set about following her sibling into the same career.

"Mary was always the clever one and I was always the butterfly brain, flitting from one thing to the next," Jan comments.

"I wanted to go to Marjon but first I had to get the qualifications I'd not got at school, so I went to the College of Further Education and did four O-Levels and an A-Level in a year, and surprised myself by passing them.

"I went on to do a degree in education. I chose teaching because it fitted with having a young child."

She taught at one private school, New Warren in North Hill, and at Coombe Dean and Plymstock before moving into training centres, where she helped young adults with literacy skills.

She gave up teaching 11 years ago because of ill-health; she had a blood cot on a lung.

At about the same time as her lifelong interest in putting pen to paper was being rekindled, on a writing course at Estover Community College and then with the Waterfront Writers in 1998, her personal life and her body were both going through trauma.

On the relationship side, her second marriage ended in divorce in 1984.

She and her partner did get back together years later, but the relationship was always doomed as they were not properly matched or suited, she reckons.

The split left Jan with debts and she was forced to declare herself bankrupt and move home because of mortgage arrears.

She has a marked absence of bitterness, though.

"I knew what he was like and we still got back together", she says, with a wry smile. "More fool me.

"I don't want to bad-mouth him."

There is Christian forgiveness in her attitude, and gratitude to her church 'family' at St Pancras who pulled her through by helping her through the bankruptcy process, assisting with the house move and decorating her new home, a flat in Greenbank.

Forgiveness and understanding extends from an individual who did her wrong to a whole age-group too often demonised by society.

"As a nation, we seem to hate our young people," she says. "They need time and they need things to do", she adds, an argument that Jan has often spelled out in her frequent contributions to The Herald's comment pages in letters and articles.

She even manages a grudging respect for the disease that has dominated her life since 2002.

"Cancer's clever, you know," she begins. "It transforms and it mutates to avoid being killed off.

"They can treat if for years, but in my case it keeps coming back.

"I have five tumours. One under my arm needs surgery and the others are getting smaller. The treatment works, but it's vicious and they come back.

"I know that it's terminal but I don't know how long.

"I've had it now for nearly seven years and I've found that I can live with it."

Jan wasn't always so calm. However, some of her darkest times came before she was diagnosed.

She was ill with abdominal pain and severe bloating, weight loss and fatigue for nearly a year before the true nature of her illness was discovered. One GP was convinced she had nothing more than wind; another insisted her problems were in the mind.

Jan was deeply depressed and contemplated suicide. She stepped back from the brink only because of a chance, innocent remark by her son Ollie.

He was then working with mental health patients and observed that those people who were left behind after a suicide never got over the loss.

In desperation, she by-passed her GP and phoned a clinic. The doctor there, alarmed at Jan's description of her symptoms, told her to get a taxi and come straight to the clinic.

After a quick examination she was immediately admitted to Derriford Hospital. Within four weeks she'd had a CT scan, a kidney test, the first chemotherapy and a biopsy.

A diagnosis of cancer is devastating for many. Jan felt differently.

"There was almost a sense of relief that I had a real illness", she says.

Had the cancer been caught sooner, her chances of a complete recovery would have been greater, but again she shows no anger, not even towards the GP who could have got her into treatment nearly a year earlier had even a basic blood test been carried out.

Jan wrote to the doctor to tell her the correct diagnosis, "but not in any way to make her feel guilty".

It's another little bit of education in the company of Jan Crocker: how to handle a terrible situation that you can't change.

For now, at least, she has something more positive to focus on. She had written regularly since she was a girl and had articles published in national and regional magazines and newspapers.

Her words are even set in stone. Her poem, Primeval Plymouth, is carved in a granite slab on Billacombe Road, part of the Waterfront Walk, the city section of the South West coastal footpath.

With Jan's track record and talent there was a good chance her work would prove an earner for her. Instead, she has paid for the book to be printed herself.

For Jan, time is precious. "I could have sent it off, month after month, year after year, to publishers," she says, "but I don't know how much longer I have."

A strong sense of time is central to the novel, too.

The Forbidden Link moves between two centuries, two locations – Cornwall and London – and two very different lives.

"It's about a woman – a bit of a tart – in the 19th century, who gets murdered," the author explains.

"Her spirit haunts a Catholic priest in the 20th century. What he sees and feels is outside his faith."

Again, she's eager to get in a quick credit, to her sister Mary. "She proof-read the book for me. She must be sick of it!"

Jan has taken her time over the writing – the name of the woman, Tregony Welles, has been with her for 17 years – and she says she enjoyed the extensive research as much as the writing.

Jan spent years getting the period right and reading about the lives of people in the 19th century.

The Victorian period is not her favourite, though. An earlier era, the 14th century, ties in with her favourite book, one which she chooses without hesitation.

"Katherine, by Anya Seton," Jan says. "It's about a woman's relationship with John of Gaunt.

"It's the only book I have read over and over again. I love the 14th century. It had so much: Chaucer, the Plantagenets, the Peasants' Revolt, the Black Prince, a time when kings had absolute power."

The book which has most strongly influenced her is another matter, and rooted firmly in the present: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

"It's all about living in the moment," she explains. "That's something that's very difficult for all of us to do."

It's the final thing that I observe in my hour of education with Jan: that, for her, life is so precious that every moment must be filled, but never so full that it blurs into the next.

Observing is one thing, but understanding quite another. Only those who have experienced how precious life is can truly appreciate how special is each moment within it.

The Forbidden Link is published by Pen Press at £8.99 and available at Waterstone's in Plymouth and online at Amazon, from November 8.

On the day of the launch Jan will be signing copies at Waterstone's, New George Street, from 12pm to 2pm