Caroline Wyatt: Voice of Hope

Originally published in The Tablet Interview 17 October 2019

Science has answers for many things today, but still nothing to explain the randomness of suffering. When it strikes apparently without mercy, it leads many back to religion – if not for a watertight explanation, then at least for a way of framing the profound questions posed. As the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt, diagnosed in 2015 with multiple sclerosis, knows all too well. “You do find yourself on occasion thinking, Why me?” she admits. “But then, the next second, you ask, why not me? I’ve found no easy answer, but I do pray about it.”

Those who follow the BBC’s schedules may have noticed of late that we are seeing less on screen of the intrepid 52-year-old Wyatt who, after stints as the corporation’s person-on-the-ground in Berlin, Moscow and Paris, became its first ever female defence correspondent in 2007, regularly reporting on the main evening news bulletins amid the bombs and bullets of Baghdad, Basra, Kosovo and Kabul, before in 2014 she took over the religious affairs brief. But we are certainly hearing more of her on air, and her distinctive husky voice: twice a week presenting Radio 4’s PM, plus fronting the World Service’s The World This Week and even on occasion filling in for the doyenne of them all, Kate Adie, on From Our Own Correspondent.

“On radio, no one can see that my walking is getting a lot worse,” Wyatt explains, sitting opposite me on the sofa in her airy central London flat, “whereas when I was still doing television, it was becoming incredibly obvious.” Not to this viewer, I have to say, and I am well trained in spotting the signs, having grown up with a mother who had MS.

Almost from the time that she joined the BBC fresh out of university, in 1991, Wyatt realises now that she had been suffering symptoms of MS, but it is a notoriously hard one to pin down. The permanent tiredness was the worst, she remembers, as if she had been out partying all night when in reality she’d be tucked up in bed at 10 p.m. So when a scan finally confirmed MS, there was a part of her that had to tell her bosses, she says, in case they had been thinking for years she was some sort of hypochondriac.

“And they have behaved phenomenally well,” she adds. “Chronic illness like MS profoundly changes the way you see your life, how you live, and the way people see you, including at work. And I know from others that you get written off, and not surprisingly. If you say, ‘I’ve got a chronic illness and here are all the things I can’t do’, they aren’t listening quite so closely when you then say, ‘Here are all the things I can do’. Expectations of you get lowered.”

Not in her case, though. In that sense, she knows she has been lucky. And, she suggests, in other ways too, including her Catholicism. “The Catholic Church is entirely responsible for my existence,” she announces. Quite a statement, but it reveals a poignant tale.

Her birth mother, Irena, growing up in a Polish immigrant family in New South Wales in Australia in the mid 1960s, was just 16 and unmarried when she discovered she was pregnant. Wyatt was born in a Catholic mother and baby home in Sydney, and adopted – along with two older boys – by a British diplomat and his Swiss wife, both of them Catholic. “So Hallelujah,” she says, her voice conveying that it is not a sentiment you often hear nowadays, “for Catholic mother and baby homes!”

In between university and joining the BBC she went back to Australia to find her birth mother. It was a first test of her journalistic mettle since she had none of the clues that she needed (at that time the paperwork was still kept under lock and key), but by a succession of strokes of luck – there is that word again – she managed to track Irena down. It was a joyous reunion. And then, through Irena, she met her natural father, Alan, who had been just 18 when she was born (and had offered to marry Irena, but she had been too angry with him even to speak about it).

Remarkably, there was a happy ending for all concerned. Wyatt now had two sets of parents who loved her, and her reappearance brought Irena and Alan back together after almost 20 years of estrangement. They did eventually get married.

It sounds like there is a memoir she should be writing. “One day,” she replies, slightly wistfully. “It was wonderful, but Irena died at 49 and Alan at 57. I don’t have great genes.”

Hers was a happy childhood, spent following her adoptive father from one diplomatic posting to the next – which may have given her a taste for the foreign correspondent’s life. Her schooling, though, was much more firmly rooted – as a boarder at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Woldingham, in Surrey. It was, she recalls, both “posh” and “old-fashioned – we were only allowed to wash our hair once a week which was just not enough when you’re a teenager”. And while it may have made her and her classmates rebellious – they referred to the place as “Wolditz”, after the German prisoner-of-war camp – “its legacy in my life is that I find religion fascinating [attested by the books on the shelves behind where she sits], which I know a lot of my contemporaries don’t. It has shaped so much of my life, who I am, what I am, what I am interested in.”

There have been, she confesses, periods in her life when faith has receded. “Reporting in Afghanistan, in Helmand [where British troops were based from 2006 to 2014 in Nato’s fight with the Taliban], I saw a lot of young men being blown up and maimed and injured. By the end of my seven years in the defence job, I felt so bleak about the world.”

She had seen at first hand so much suffering, so much death. “It felt as if every phone call from work for a year or two was about someone dying. Could I go and talk to his mum, they said. And ask her what? How upset she was by the death of her only son, aged 18, two days before Christmas? It somehow seeps into your soul. For some of those people I met at that time, faith was a comfort in their grief and suffering, but for me back then it didn’t help. In the worst places, when the worst things were happening, I had the most questions. Would a merciful God actually allow this? Why are people dying like this?”

And then, as if by some invisible hand of fate, she switched to reporting religion back in the UK. To tempt a BBC “name” into the role, she was given an enhanced brief “to broaden it and get it on air as a normal thing that was part of lots of people’s lives. And that made it probably the most difficult job I’ve ever done, which surprised me.”

Going into churches to do her job, she recollects, soon also had her going back into them when she wasn’t working. Which was where she was at when her MS was diagnosed. So has her faith continued to be rekindled?

She thinks for a while before answering. It is as if she is struggling between the positive answer a whole part of her wants to give, and something more nuanced and honest. There is an admirable down-to-earth honesty about Caroline Wyatt, and the latter wins out.

“The struggle with increasing disability probably has taught me things about being decent to other people, and being much more understanding of why it is that old people fumble with their purses and take forever to get their change out. Maybe there is something in disability, too, that gives you a greater appreciation of things that are more spiritual, that are less to do with achievement and worldly success. No amount of money is going to cure me.” She pauses again, caught out by her own words. “Probably. Maybe in 10 years time we’ll see.”

In a diary she kept in the aftermath of her diagnosis, subsequently published in a national newspaper, she referred to a BBC colleague and friend, of a similar age, who also got MS. Her colleague eventually decided to end her own life with the help of the Dignitas clinic in Zurich.

“Everyone’s choice is their choice,” Wyatt reflects now. “She had made that choice and I entirely understood why, because she found MS had taken away so much of what she wanted to do that she couldn’t live the life she wanted to. I feel differently at this stage, but I don’t know how I will feel in 15 or 20 years.”

The Church is, of course, vehemently opposed to any form of assisted suicide. “It’s not a no-no for me per se,” she says. “I’d hate to feel that was my only option. And what you leave behind is so difficult for the people you leave behind. I had a boyfriend years ago whose father killed himself, and as a family they just did not get over that.”

My own mother was regularly urged to go to Lourdes in search of a cure for her MS. The most recent officially approved miracle there was of a French man who had MS. Is Wyatt curious? “A friend did suggest it, but I’m not one for crowds. She brought me back some Lourdes water instead.”

She did, however, make an extraordinary journey of her own, in 2016, to Mexico in search of a medical miracle. “After diagnosis,” she explains, “I had very quickly got to the bit when my symptoms were about to drop off a cliff. I was lying in bed with double or even triple vision and in a really bad way.” She had heard positive feedback on the effect of haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in reversing the onset of symptoms in MS, but when she tried to get on a trial in this country she was told she wasn’t eligible, probably because of her age.

Quietly determined, she took the radical step of going to Mexico, where the treatment was available, but only after she had raised the money to pay for it herself. MS is caused by the body’s immune system turning in on itself and destroying the coating on the nerves that conducts messages from the brain to the limbs. In HSCT, first the patient’s own stem cells are gathered (not those from embryos – “an ethical minefield”, she says) and then their faulty immune system is destroyed by chemotherapy. The harvested stem cells are then reintroduced, prompting a new and hopefully functioning immune system to develop.

“I had hugely high hopes and felt fabulous for the few months after the treatment had been completed – as if the MS had gone completely. Then, gradually, it came back. It will be three years this coming January and I’m back to where I was before, but slightly worse [though her vision remains OK].”

She is philosophical. “Like all medicines there is a good time to do it, and I was too late. It is bloody awful disease, but I keep up with what the amazing researchers out there are going to come up with next.”

In other words, she lives in hope. And in the meantime? As well as making her presence felt on BBC Radio, she practises yoga and meditation. And she makes a point of going in to light candles whenever she passes a church – “for Irena, Alan and my adoptive mother, Annemarie. I always say a prayer for all the people I love, whose love keeps me alive.”