After my husband died, a nurse accidentally let it slip that a woman had been visiting him for several weeks before his de@th — a few days later, she came to my house and said, “So you don’t know what he left you, do you?”
I was six months pregnant. I had a four-year-old. And my husband had been given a terminal diagnosis in the February.
The months after that were the hardest of my life.
We fought it with everything we had, which was not much. Every penny went on treatment. I sold my mother’s rings and then I took a loan against the house.
None of it did anything.
Daf died on the fourteenth of September without ever seeing his son.
We had been together since we were sixteen. He was the whole of it.
And I was suddenly a widow with a four-year-old, a bump and about eleven thousand dollars of debt, and I did not know how a person goes on from that.
When I went to St Brannoc’s for his things, a nurse had packed them properly into a bag and handed it over at the desk.
And there was a jumper on the top. A woman’s jumper. Not mine.
I pulled it out. “Sorry — I think something’s got mixed up. That isn’t my husband’s and it isn’t mine.”
And she frowned slightly and said: “No, that definitely came out of his room. It belonged to the lady who’d been coming in. Wasn’t she a relative of yours?”
I nearly went down on the floor of that corridor.
Because Daf grew up in care. He had nobody. And on my side I would have known.
I asked her how often this woman had come.
“I hadn’t seen her before. But the last few weeks, she was in a lot.”
You can imagine what a woman thinks, in that situation, standing in a corridor with a bag of her husband’s clothes.
But I did not want to decide anything before I knew, so I asked that nurse to help me, and eventually somebody let me look at about ninety seconds of corridor camera.
And there she was. A woman I had never seen in my life.
I took that home and it would not leave me alone for days.
And then one evening somebody knocked.
She was on the step. Thin, worn out, her eyes going.
She held an envelope out and said: “He asked me to give you this only after. Not before.”
My hands were going so badly I could hardly take it, and I asked her what was in it.
And she said, very quietly: “So you don’t know what he left you, do you.”
What was in the envelope.
Four pages in his handwriting and a letter from a firm of solicitors in Ashcott called Lowden & Pike.
And the woman on my step was called Nell Corrigan, and she was fifty-eight, and she had never met my husband before the twenty-ninth of July, 2025.
She was at Fenwick House.
So was he. From 1998 to 2006, between the ages of six and fourteen.
I knew that much. It was the one thing about Daf Orrick that everybody in our life knew and nobody ever asked about.
What I did not know — what he had known since the May and had not told me — was that there is a redress scheme.
Fenwick House closed in 2011. There was an inquiry that reported in 2023 and a scheme set up in the January of 2025 for people who had been in it, and it is run through that firm in Ashcott, and the awards are banded.
Nell Corrigan was in that building from 1979 to 1984. She has spent four years finding people.
That is not her job. Nobody pays her. She has a list that she has built herself out of electoral rolls and old registers and about a thousand messages to people who tell her to go away.
She found my husband on the twenty-ninth of July, 2025, which was seven weeks before he died, through a man he had known at that home who had seen a local piece about a fundraiser my sister had set up for his treatment.
And she drove ninety minutes to a hospital in Caldersyke to tell a dying man of thirty-three that there was a scheme and that he was eligible and that there was a deadline.
What he did in the last four weeks.
He made a statement.
That is the whole of it and it is the thing I have not been able to get past.
The scheme requires an account. Not a form — an account, taken by a solicitor, of what happened to you and when and by whom, with dates where you have them, and it goes through a process afterwards in which it is tested.
He did four sessions. The eleventh and the eighteenth and the twenty-fifth of August and the first of September, all in the afternoon, all in that room, each one between forty minutes and an hour and ten.
He was on a syringe driver by the last one.
Nell came to every single session and sat outside in the corridor, because they will not let you be in the room, and because he had asked her to be there.
That is what the jumper was. She took it off because that corridor was warm and left it over the back of the chair in his room on the first of September and never went back for it.
Four afternoons.
In the last four weeks of my husband’s life — when he was asleep for nineteen hours a day, when I was getting an hour in the morning and forty minutes after Trix went to bed — he spent four of his afternoons describing the worst eight years of his life to a solicitor he had met twice.
And he did not tell me he was doing it.
The nine days between the hospital bag and the knock, which I have had to describe honestly and which do not reflect well on me.
I did not sleep. That part is allowed.
What I did instead was build a case.
I went through his phone, which I had the code for, and found nothing, and decided that meant he had deleted things.
I went through eleven months of our joint account, line by line, at a kitchen table, at two in the morning, at six months pregnant, looking for a hotel or a restaurant or a florist.
I found a transaction in the August for eleven dollars forty at a place in Ashcott and I sat and looked at it for about twenty minutes before I worked out it was a car park.
It was a car park. Nell parked there on the eighteenth and he paid her back for it out of his own account because she would not take the money in cash.
I rang my sister on the fourth night and said the sentence out loud for the first time — I think Daf had somebody — and my sister, who adored him, did not say don’t be ridiculous. She said: “Right. What do you want to do?”
That is the thing nobody tells you. There is no one in the world who will tell you it is impossible. Everybody knows it is possible. That is the entire problem with being a woman holding another woman’s jumper.
Nine days. I built a whole man out of nothing, and then she knocked on my door and handed me four pages in his handwriting.
What was in the letter.
I am not going to reproduce the whole of it and I am not going to reproduce one word of what is in the statement, which is his and which is sealed and which I have chosen not to read and may never read.
What the four pages say, in his handwriting, getting worse down the page, is this.
That he was sorry about the sleeping. That he knew I thought he had gone somewhere and he wanted me to know he had not.
That he had got a thing started that would take about nine months and that Nell would know where it was up to and that I was to let her help me.
That he did not want me to read the statement and that I was not to let anybody tell me I had to.
And that the money — if it came — was for the loan on the house first, and then for the two of them, and that he had asked for the band he thought he would get and not the one he could have argued for, because he did not have the time to argue and because he wanted it settled rather than big.
The award came through in the June of this year.
A hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars.
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