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Copyright 2003 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
The Express
January 9, 2003
STARTING TODAY: THE DAUGHTER OF ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST FAMOUS MODELS
OPENS HER HEART ABOUT HER MUM'S FINAL ILLNESS AND THE LOVE SHE
INSPIRED IN ALL AROUND HER; THE BRAVEST AND MOST WONDERFUL WOMAN I
EVER KNEW O THE TRUE STORY OF MY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER VIVIEN NEVES
BYLINE: CHERYL STONEHOUSE
TODAY, in the town where she was born, a small group of family and
friends will gather to say their last goodbyes to Vivien Neves.
To the world at large, the intimate service in Brighton will
commemorate the model who made British newspaper history by becoming
the first to appear nude in the pages of The Times. To the close-knit
band who loved her and gave her their constant support until she died
four days after Christmas, she will be remembered, in the words of her
daughter Kelly, as "a wonderful, courageous woman".
Vivien was killed by the Multiple Sclerosis that first struck when she
was only 30, just as her extraordinary beauty was at its height.
Pictures of her are everywhere in the little flat where 28-year-old
Kelly lives with her own daughters, Chloe, seven, and four-year-old
Yasmin Vivien, named after her grandmother. Many of the portraits were
taken by Kelly's father, photographer John Kelly, in the early
Seventies when he and Vivien were one of London's golden couples.
Although he and Vivien parted when Kelly was 10 - not, as has since
been suggested, as soon as he discovered that his wife had MS - he has
remained a strong presence in his daughter's life and has been by her
side constantly since Vivien's death.
He sits with Kelly now, grimacing at pictures showing the long hair,
beard and jeans he wore when he married her mother, ready to comfort
her as the images bring bitter-sweet memories of her childhood
flooding back.
Pride of place on the mantlepiece of Kelly's cosy living room goes to
that ground-breaking Times picture of Vivien at the age of 23, her
flawless figure arching upwards as she brushes her hair above her
head, apparently oblivious of the camera.
"They're not your conventional family album pictures and I do feel
incredibly lucky to have the kind of pictures I have of myself and
mum.
She was so good in front of a camera and dad was such a good
photographer that I have these amazing images to look at for ever and
to show my own children as they grow up, " says Kelly.
ALITTLE more than a week after her mother's death, Kelly's grief is
still raw.
Although she spent most of her life watching her mother grow
progressively more frail - Vivien's MS was diagnosed when Kelly was
just three - there was still nothing that could prepare her for the
pain of the final loss.
"I keep thinking, even now, that it was so unfair. She was so
beautiful and she had everything going for her.
Why her? She was such a fighter, so positive and she had kept going
for 25 years. There was still a part of me that believed that, if she
hung on for long enough, there would be a cure."
Only those who have had a relative with a lingering chronic illness
will be able to guess at what Kelly has been through over the past few
years. Yet she has proved herself to be every inch her mother's
daughter - a gutsy, dogged fighter struggling on through more trouble
and sorrow than anyone would wish on their worst enemy.
Five years ago, when her first child was little more than a year old,
she had to cope with the death of Vivien's father William and fight a
lonely legal battle to take control of Vivien's affairs from the man
she was living with.
Three years later, she found herself homeless and coping with a
painful break-up from the father of her children while, at the same
time, trying to shield her mother from the powerlessness she would
certainly have felt had she known just what a difficult time her only
child was having.
"There was so much I couldn't tell her because there would have been
nothing she could do to help and, if there's one thing that makes MS
much worse, it's worry and stress, " says Kelly. "At last, in the
chapel of rest last week, I was able to tell her everything I hadn't
been able to say while she was alive."
So soon after her mother's death she finds it hard to appreciate how
much she achieved in the face of so much hardship and has been
constantly asking herself whether she could have done more.
That makes it doubly cruel that last weekend, exactly one week after
she died, Kelly discovered she was being accused of having abandoned
her stricken 55-year-old mother. More than that, it was being
suggested that someone close to Vivien - possibly even Kelly herself -
had left her to her fate only after frittering away more than GBP
1million of her money.
She is often close to tears as she speaks, hurt and furious that the
spite of the gossips has forced her to defend herself even before her
mother's funeral has taken place.
"As soon as I knew she was in hospital just before Christmas, I was
there in a matter of hours, " she says.
"For some reason, the care agency didn't tell me that she'd been taken
into hospital with pneumonia until two days later and I'm still upset
at having missed those two days when she must have wondered where I
was and why I hadn't come.
"I stayed there, day and night for three days, watching the machines
going, all the bits of hospital stuff she was hooked up to. I had to
get friends to look after my children and I felt awful leaving them
over Christmas.
They're both just at that age when Christmas is something magical and
unbearably exciting and we'd been planning to spend it with my mum.
"I had to ask their father to give them their Christmas Day because I
spent it with mum - I was so worried about leaving her, even for a
minute.
"It has always been really difficult because my grandparents are dead
and I'm an only child, so there have never been any brothers or
sisters to share the worry with, to watch over her in shifts."
SHE ADDS: "I was so exhausted and I had hardly seen my girls over
Christmas. I came home just for a day when the nurses gave her the
first food she'd had in a week and everyone said she was looking a lot
brighter. It began to look as though she might recover, as she had
done several times in the past couple of years.
"I was planning to go back the next morning but at three in the
morning the hospital rang to say that she had died. I'm finding it so
hard to cope with not having been there with her."
That is a sadness shared by people the world over who were unlucky
enough to have failed to reach a dying parent's bedside, as her father
has been trying to convince her in the past few days.
"I had managed, in the week after Vivien's death, to persuade Kelly
that she shouldn't be blaming herself for what couldn't be helped, "
he says.
"Kelly handled what needed to be done for her mum almost
singlehandedly for so many years, even though she had her own problems
to deal with and her own children to bring up.
"No one could have done more than Kelly did in the circumstances and
no one could have done it better. Then these accusations were made and
she was pushed right back to square one.
She was distraught.
"The same things have been said about me. Well, I can swallow that
pill but Kelly shouldn't have to after all she's been through."
If anything, Kelly was the one person to come to her mother's rescue
when she was at her lowest ebb, when her mother's neighbours began
ringing her at her home in London to alert her that something was
wrong.
For 10 years Vivien had shared her Surrey home with David Stredwick,
an unemployed electrician 16 years her junior whom she met when he did
some work on her 16th-century manor house. She and John had bought the
house in the midSeventies when it was a wreck and they had spent much
of their marriage renovating it together, restoring the gatehouse at
the end of the drive and converting its huge garage block into a
ground-level, two-bedroom studio apartment.
In later years, as her MS made her less and less mobile, this turned
out to be the perfect home for Vivien and, thanks to Kelly's efforts,
she was able to remain in it almost to the end, surrounded by her own
furniture and memories.
"Mum and David had five or six years of fun at the beginning of their
relationship, they really did, " says Kelly. "He did look after her
and he did do absolutely everything for her in the beginning.
"During those first few years, they travelled all over the world and
that was wonderful for mum, something she probably wouldn't have been
able to do on her own, and it meant that she really got the most out
of that time when she was still able to move around reasonably well.
"To be honest, I never really got on with David. When I was staying,
there would be arguments and that would cause a problem for my mother.
I thought, 'This is my mother's happiness; I don't know whether this
is her last chance for that kind of happiness and I don't want to do
anything to take it away from her.'" Kelly says she wanted her mother
to be happy so felt it was her job to step back and let her live her
life the way she wanted. By the time she had won her battle to take
back the legal powers her mother had given David to run her affairs,
she discovered that both the gatehouse and the manor house had been
sold some time before for a total of GBP 1.3million, yet the money
seemed to have vanished.
"Everything looked OK to me because the cottage had been sold to the
people who had been renting it, so there was nothing to suggest to me
that anything had changed.
"I still don't know how much mum knew. I could never ask her those
kinds of questions. I just wanted to keep her as calm and happy as
possible rather than risk upsetting her and making her MS worse. So,
to this day, we still have no idea where it all went and, although we
really would like to know, we probably never will now.
"Dad was shocked. When he and mum separated, he left most of the
property with her thinking that it would support her through her
illness and then come to me and my children but it was almost all
gone. I did what I could to trace it but it was impossible to
untangle."
Kelly herself ran into trouble later when, desperate for a home and a
new start for herself and her children after her own relationship
ended, she moved into her mother's remaining property, a seafront flat
in Brighton.
She is philosophical about the fact that she was eventually evicted by
her mother's solicitors because Vivien, unable to speak by then, could
not confirm that she had given Kelly permission to live there.
Although Kelly was paying rent, the solicitors argued that it would
bring in more if let on the open market and that they had a duty to
make sure Vivien was getting the best possible return on all her
assets.
During the last five years of her mother's life, Kelly first tried to
look after her on her own but had to give up after becoming seriously
ill with chicken pox and then lived in a mobile home in her mother's
garden, from where she could keep an eye on the professional carers
Vivien had hired. She could not stay in the house because its second
bedroom had to be available for the carer who was working through the
night.
Then she had to find a cottage to rent half-a-mile up the road when
winter made her caravan too cold for her young daughter and,
ultimately, she had to move to an area where transport was not such a
problem. By now, her second child had been born and, having never
learned to drive, she found getting around with two young children in
the heart of rural Surrey too difficult on public transport. As a
newly single mother, she desperately needed the support of her
Brighton friends.
DESPITE this terrible saga of heartache and setbacks, she carried on
visiting Vivien - sometimes twice a week - making the long journey by
train from Brighton with Yasmin while Chloe was at school.
"There were mum's friends who did their bit too, " she says. "In
particular, there was her neighbour John Ashley, an old friend who got
to know my parents when they were first doing up the house and who
became a kind, kind friend to my family.
"He visited her often, wherever she was, even travelling into
Guildford when she was in hospital, though he's 74 now. He was deeply
hurt by the suggestion that everyone had abandoned mum and that she
had been left to die alone."
She is trying to put the cruelty of others aside and remember only the
mother she knew, the woman who refused to give in to her illness and
who would sometimes hide from callers rather than allow herself to be
seen at less than her best.
"She never wanted to be pitied. She always wanted to look her best and
see the best in everything. She always said that she'd had a great
life and she was certainly never sorry for herself."
In Kelly's kitchen is her inheritance, a huge iron cage topped by a
surly-looking grey parrot. He is Sid, bought almost 30 years ago by
Vivien on Kingston market on a day when she should have been buying
lamb for Sunday dinner.
"He was so aggressive no one would go near him, except Vivien, " says
John, laughing.
"She decided she would sort him out and she did, just like she sorted
everyone and everything in her life out in one way or another."
When Sid arrived, he didn't speak, he just growled. Now he does, says
Kelly. "But he says only one thing after 30 years, " she says,
smiling. "All he says is. 'P*** off '!"
As a legacy to a beleaguered daughter, Vivien Neves could not have
done better.
This is the same Kelly that stole from her mum and was out snorting cocaine and partying while her mum was ill?The Express
January 9, 2003
STARTING TODAY: THE DAUGHTER OF ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST FAMOUS MODELS
OPENS HER HEART ABOUT HER MUM'S FINAL ILLNESS AND THE LOVE SHE
INSPIRED IN ALL AROUND HER; THE BRAVEST AND MOST WONDERFUL WOMAN I
EVER KNEW O THE TRUE STORY OF MY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER VIVIEN NEVES
BYLINE: CHERYL STONEHOUSE
TODAY, in the town where she was born, a small group of family and
friends will gather to say their last goodbyes to Vivien Neves.
To the world at large, the intimate service in Brighton will
commemorate the model who made British newspaper history by becoming
the first to appear nude in the pages of The Times. To the close-knit
band who loved her and gave her their constant support until she died
four days after Christmas, she will be remembered, in the words of her
daughter Kelly, as "a wonderful, courageous woman".
Vivien was killed by the Multiple Sclerosis that first struck when she
was only 30, just as her extraordinary beauty was at its height.
Pictures of her are everywhere in the little flat where 28-year-old
Kelly lives with her own daughters, Chloe, seven, and four-year-old
Yasmin Vivien, named after her grandmother. Many of the portraits were
taken by Kelly's father, photographer John Kelly, in the early
Seventies when he and Vivien were one of London's golden couples.
Although he and Vivien parted when Kelly was 10 - not, as has since
been suggested, as soon as he discovered that his wife had MS - he has
remained a strong presence in his daughter's life and has been by her
side constantly since Vivien's death.
He sits with Kelly now, grimacing at pictures showing the long hair,
beard and jeans he wore when he married her mother, ready to comfort
her as the images bring bitter-sweet memories of her childhood
flooding back.
Pride of place on the mantlepiece of Kelly's cosy living room goes to
that ground-breaking Times picture of Vivien at the age of 23, her
flawless figure arching upwards as she brushes her hair above her
head, apparently oblivious of the camera.
"They're not your conventional family album pictures and I do feel
incredibly lucky to have the kind of pictures I have of myself and
mum.
She was so good in front of a camera and dad was such a good
photographer that I have these amazing images to look at for ever and
to show my own children as they grow up, " says Kelly.
ALITTLE more than a week after her mother's death, Kelly's grief is
still raw.
Although she spent most of her life watching her mother grow
progressively more frail - Vivien's MS was diagnosed when Kelly was
just three - there was still nothing that could prepare her for the
pain of the final loss.
"I keep thinking, even now, that it was so unfair. She was so
beautiful and she had everything going for her.
Why her? She was such a fighter, so positive and she had kept going
for 25 years. There was still a part of me that believed that, if she
hung on for long enough, there would be a cure."
Only those who have had a relative with a lingering chronic illness
will be able to guess at what Kelly has been through over the past few
years. Yet she has proved herself to be every inch her mother's
daughter - a gutsy, dogged fighter struggling on through more trouble
and sorrow than anyone would wish on their worst enemy.
Five years ago, when her first child was little more than a year old,
she had to cope with the death of Vivien's father William and fight a
lonely legal battle to take control of Vivien's affairs from the man
she was living with.
Three years later, she found herself homeless and coping with a
painful break-up from the father of her children while, at the same
time, trying to shield her mother from the powerlessness she would
certainly have felt had she known just what a difficult time her only
child was having.
"There was so much I couldn't tell her because there would have been
nothing she could do to help and, if there's one thing that makes MS
much worse, it's worry and stress, " says Kelly. "At last, in the
chapel of rest last week, I was able to tell her everything I hadn't
been able to say while she was alive."
So soon after her mother's death she finds it hard to appreciate how
much she achieved in the face of so much hardship and has been
constantly asking herself whether she could have done more.
That makes it doubly cruel that last weekend, exactly one week after
she died, Kelly discovered she was being accused of having abandoned
her stricken 55-year-old mother. More than that, it was being
suggested that someone close to Vivien - possibly even Kelly herself -
had left her to her fate only after frittering away more than GBP
1million of her money.
She is often close to tears as she speaks, hurt and furious that the
spite of the gossips has forced her to defend herself even before her
mother's funeral has taken place.
"As soon as I knew she was in hospital just before Christmas, I was
there in a matter of hours, " she says.
"For some reason, the care agency didn't tell me that she'd been taken
into hospital with pneumonia until two days later and I'm still upset
at having missed those two days when she must have wondered where I
was and why I hadn't come.
"I stayed there, day and night for three days, watching the machines
going, all the bits of hospital stuff she was hooked up to. I had to
get friends to look after my children and I felt awful leaving them
over Christmas.
They're both just at that age when Christmas is something magical and
unbearably exciting and we'd been planning to spend it with my mum.
"I had to ask their father to give them their Christmas Day because I
spent it with mum - I was so worried about leaving her, even for a
minute.
"It has always been really difficult because my grandparents are dead
and I'm an only child, so there have never been any brothers or
sisters to share the worry with, to watch over her in shifts."
SHE ADDS: "I was so exhausted and I had hardly seen my girls over
Christmas. I came home just for a day when the nurses gave her the
first food she'd had in a week and everyone said she was looking a lot
brighter. It began to look as though she might recover, as she had
done several times in the past couple of years.
"I was planning to go back the next morning but at three in the
morning the hospital rang to say that she had died. I'm finding it so
hard to cope with not having been there with her."
That is a sadness shared by people the world over who were unlucky
enough to have failed to reach a dying parent's bedside, as her father
has been trying to convince her in the past few days.
"I had managed, in the week after Vivien's death, to persuade Kelly
that she shouldn't be blaming herself for what couldn't be helped, "
he says.
"Kelly handled what needed to be done for her mum almost
singlehandedly for so many years, even though she had her own problems
to deal with and her own children to bring up.
"No one could have done more than Kelly did in the circumstances and
no one could have done it better. Then these accusations were made and
she was pushed right back to square one.
She was distraught.
"The same things have been said about me. Well, I can swallow that
pill but Kelly shouldn't have to after all she's been through."
If anything, Kelly was the one person to come to her mother's rescue
when she was at her lowest ebb, when her mother's neighbours began
ringing her at her home in London to alert her that something was
wrong.
For 10 years Vivien had shared her Surrey home with David Stredwick,
an unemployed electrician 16 years her junior whom she met when he did
some work on her 16th-century manor house. She and John had bought the
house in the midSeventies when it was a wreck and they had spent much
of their marriage renovating it together, restoring the gatehouse at
the end of the drive and converting its huge garage block into a
ground-level, two-bedroom studio apartment.
In later years, as her MS made her less and less mobile, this turned
out to be the perfect home for Vivien and, thanks to Kelly's efforts,
she was able to remain in it almost to the end, surrounded by her own
furniture and memories.
"Mum and David had five or six years of fun at the beginning of their
relationship, they really did, " says Kelly. "He did look after her
and he did do absolutely everything for her in the beginning.
"During those first few years, they travelled all over the world and
that was wonderful for mum, something she probably wouldn't have been
able to do on her own, and it meant that she really got the most out
of that time when she was still able to move around reasonably well.
"To be honest, I never really got on with David. When I was staying,
there would be arguments and that would cause a problem for my mother.
I thought, 'This is my mother's happiness; I don't know whether this
is her last chance for that kind of happiness and I don't want to do
anything to take it away from her.'" Kelly says she wanted her mother
to be happy so felt it was her job to step back and let her live her
life the way she wanted. By the time she had won her battle to take
back the legal powers her mother had given David to run her affairs,
she discovered that both the gatehouse and the manor house had been
sold some time before for a total of GBP 1.3million, yet the money
seemed to have vanished.
"Everything looked OK to me because the cottage had been sold to the
people who had been renting it, so there was nothing to suggest to me
that anything had changed.
"I still don't know how much mum knew. I could never ask her those
kinds of questions. I just wanted to keep her as calm and happy as
possible rather than risk upsetting her and making her MS worse. So,
to this day, we still have no idea where it all went and, although we
really would like to know, we probably never will now.
"Dad was shocked. When he and mum separated, he left most of the
property with her thinking that it would support her through her
illness and then come to me and my children but it was almost all
gone. I did what I could to trace it but it was impossible to
untangle."
Kelly herself ran into trouble later when, desperate for a home and a
new start for herself and her children after her own relationship
ended, she moved into her mother's remaining property, a seafront flat
in Brighton.
She is philosophical about the fact that she was eventually evicted by
her mother's solicitors because Vivien, unable to speak by then, could
not confirm that she had given Kelly permission to live there.
Although Kelly was paying rent, the solicitors argued that it would
bring in more if let on the open market and that they had a duty to
make sure Vivien was getting the best possible return on all her
assets.
During the last five years of her mother's life, Kelly first tried to
look after her on her own but had to give up after becoming seriously
ill with chicken pox and then lived in a mobile home in her mother's
garden, from where she could keep an eye on the professional carers
Vivien had hired. She could not stay in the house because its second
bedroom had to be available for the carer who was working through the
night.
Then she had to find a cottage to rent half-a-mile up the road when
winter made her caravan too cold for her young daughter and,
ultimately, she had to move to an area where transport was not such a
problem. By now, her second child had been born and, having never
learned to drive, she found getting around with two young children in
the heart of rural Surrey too difficult on public transport. As a
newly single mother, she desperately needed the support of her
Brighton friends.
DESPITE this terrible saga of heartache and setbacks, she carried on
visiting Vivien - sometimes twice a week - making the long journey by
train from Brighton with Yasmin while Chloe was at school.
"There were mum's friends who did their bit too, " she says. "In
particular, there was her neighbour John Ashley, an old friend who got
to know my parents when they were first doing up the house and who
became a kind, kind friend to my family.
"He visited her often, wherever she was, even travelling into
Guildford when she was in hospital, though he's 74 now. He was deeply
hurt by the suggestion that everyone had abandoned mum and that she
had been left to die alone."
She is trying to put the cruelty of others aside and remember only the
mother she knew, the woman who refused to give in to her illness and
who would sometimes hide from callers rather than allow herself to be
seen at less than her best.
"She never wanted to be pitied. She always wanted to look her best and
see the best in everything. She always said that she'd had a great
life and she was certainly never sorry for herself."
In Kelly's kitchen is her inheritance, a huge iron cage topped by a
surly-looking grey parrot. He is Sid, bought almost 30 years ago by
Vivien on Kingston market on a day when she should have been buying
lamb for Sunday dinner.
"He was so aggressive no one would go near him, except Vivien, " says
John, laughing.
"She decided she would sort him out and she did, just like she sorted
everyone and everything in her life out in one way or another."
When Sid arrived, he didn't speak, he just growled. Now he does, says
Kelly. "But he says only one thing after 30 years, " she says,
smiling. "All he says is. 'P*** off '!"
As a legacy to a beleaguered daughter, Vivien Neves could not have
done better.