THERE are ninety-six blood red roses in a window in Fallowfield tonight. If the number resonates with you, in some faint unfathomable way, let me add that in the same room where they are displayed also stood the actor Christopher Eccleston and the screen-writer Jimmy McGovern, amongst many others, some of whose lapels bore badges of the same two numerals. 96. You will know the resonance now. Hillsborough.
The funeral was big. Mourners filled St James Church on Stenner Lane in Didsbury
Why in Fallowfield, a South Manchester suburb? Why now? Because the funeral of the recently and cruelly deceased woman whose credit rolls on and off the screen towards the end of the painful, painstaking and powerful drama documentary that tells the truth about this most wanton, deceitful and murderous day, has taken place, and she was fifty-one. The credit reads “Factual Producer: Katy Jones”. Short, neat, precise and barely able even to hint at her commitment to getting the uncomfortable truth coughed up, no matter how big the mess it makes, and on whose carpet.
Katy Jones, wife of Mike Spencer, mother of Huw age 20 and Sarah age 17, died on Friday 24 April, of a brain aneurism, twenty-six years and nine days after the events that we identify in a single noun: Hillsborough. Katy, because of giant efforts on their behalf, was an invited member of the Hillsborough Families Support Group.
The funeral was big. Mourners filled St James Church on Stenner Lane in Didsbury, a big three-aisled parish church with a broad nave, high altar and well tuned organ. Still not enough room inside, and people spilled across the graveyard. In front of me is Steve Boulton, one-time editor of World in Action who, along with the Guardian, sent hubristic Jonathan Aitkin to jail. World in Action researchers caught the man in a lie.
Across the aisle is Julian Farino, director of last year’s wonderful TV film Marvellous, the true-life story of Neil Baldwin, a man with learning difficulties who became the Kit Man and Mascot at Stoke City FC, thanks, largely, to his own remarkable powers of positivity, and the great generosity of others. How wide the gulf between those two very different football stories. Neil’s glass-half-full spirit is most certainly what is needed here today.
Mike has written Katy’s Eulogy, and has handed it to her uncle to read. He knows he couldn’t get through it himself. So begins biography, testament, endorsements and numerations, of honours and prizes of a life well spent. And spent in fifty-one years. I’m feeling lowly in my pew. I’m feeling that the documentaries and dramas, the programmes for children and for schools, the volume and quality are only achieved by the alpha-good. And I remind myself, I knew the woman, and that’s not how she saw herself. She was less than that. She laughed, took a drink, hit the floor. She loved music. She was real.
St James overlooks the Mersey. I last saw Katy, walking with Mike beside the river, towards the end of last year. This was their cabinet room, the space they regularly made for themselves to discuss the future for their family. I don’t know what plans they made that day, what visions they had, but God knows, it did not include this horrible horrible scenario. Nor the question from the medical registrar, “Had Katy considered organ donation?” And medical teams were scrambled, from Edinburgh and across the country. This fit and healthy woman, poleaxed by her own blood on the morning of 24th April, handed on hope and life to people she can never know. Is anything more selfless?
And a faint pulse of pleasure passes through me, as I recall the workplace where Katy and I, and dozens-upon-dozens of people in this church first met; Granada TV on Quay Street. I say pleasure because it is good to have your family around you, even and especially at a time like this. And I know that workforce was a family, which is why St James is overflowing, and faces are drawn, and embraces are long.
Mike’s brother Kit helped ease the day. It was he who suggested rewriting John Bunyan, or rather, changing the gender of his Pilgrim. So, in the choked yet limpid voice of mourning, we began to sing, “Who would true valour see / Let her come hither….” And that’s when the tears flowed.
To be a journalist can be a fine and noble thing. To be the one who fights for the many. The one who says, stop, this is not right. This is not just. There are ninety-six red roses in a window in Fallowfield. They will fade. “Then fancies fly away / She’ll fear not what men say / She’ll labour night and day / To be a pilgrim.”
Katy Jones 8 August 1963 - 24 April 2015
