After raising a family and surviving leukaemia, Timothy Spall threw caution to the wind and took a barge round the coast of Britain with his wife, Shane. Nick Duerden asks them about their late-blossoming spirit of adventureFifteen years ago,as the actor Timothy Spall lay in a hospital bed dying from acute myeloid leukaemia, Shane, his wife, would sit beside him, writing, in pursuit of a catharsis that wouldn't come. On her laptop, she would rail about certain nurses on the ward, her occasional over-reliance on gin and the illness that was trying to claim the life of her husband.
Tim's recovery was torturously slow. Shane never read those words after they were written, while Tim, then 39, banned himself from discussing his illness in the public domain. "I deliberately kept schtum about the whole nitty-gritty of it," he says now. "I didn't want to talk about it until I knew I was in the clear, but I also didn't want to be one of those actors who endlessly flag up their travails. I didn't want to become known for it, in other words."
Instead, he wanted any attention that came his way to be about the work, not his private life. "But then we made a programme about what we do in our private life," he says, laughing, referring to The Voyages of the Princess Matilda on BBC4. "So I suppose the embargo was lifted."
Shane has written a book to accompany the series. It's essentially a travelogue charting the adventures of a husband and wife as they pilot a barge round the British coast, "Oh, we had no idea about the power of the sea, the perpetual sense of jeopardy," Tim says. Shane adds, "We've had some stressful times on the boat, very stressful." Tim agrees: "Last year was an epic journey, north-east Scotland all the way down the east coast, and we ended up like that [holds his hand up at a steep angle].
There are rocks all over, you face being wrecked – the boat is up and down and all over the place. Seriously, it's a life or death situation."
The book also dips, fleetingly, into memoir. Shane reprints many of her late-night hospital writings here, painfully revisiting the time of Tim's illness. "Tim hadn't read them before," Shane begins. Her husband interjects: "It was difficult, obviously it was. It made me realise what not just Shane, but my children, my whole family, had to go through. Reading it was like reliving all the guilt of it." Guilt? He nods. "I was ill – they were suffering."
In May 1996, the actor was riding high after his most successful film to date: Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies. The cast were flown out to the Cannes film festival, but Tim remained behind, the exhaustion he had felt of late now suddenly suggestive of something serious. He was admitted to hospital for tests, which revealed leukaemia and a bleak prognosis: a 60/40 chance of survival.
"He was supposed to have a total of five courses of chemotherapy," says Shane, "but his immune system was shot. It had degenerated so much that the chemo itself was killing him." "In the end," Tim adds, "I only had two [courses]." He shakes his head. "Awful, dreadful. What I remember most strongly was that Shane was always with me, right by my side, morning and night.
And always she was tapping on her laptop. At the time, I found it quite comforting. But whenever she does it now, I'm immediately back with my illness. It's an uncomfortably evocative sound. It reminds me that I almost died."
"If you had," she says, reaching for his hand, "I'd have been miserable."
Read more:http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/25/timothy-spall-shane-barge-book?newsfeed=true
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