A memory about Wesley by his brother, Larry
this is an excerpt from an interview with Larry Lamb about the last days of his brother's, Wesley's life and battle with cancer:
"Over the past three years, Lamb, now 73, has lost his mother, his brother, a close friend and, just last week, his old mucker Barbara Windsor, to whom he was on-screen husband in EastEnders.
A single man these days, Lamb started lockdown in Herefordshire but, aware that his age makes him in a higher risk category for Covid, decided to decamp to his second home in Normandy, where has lived alone ever since.
“The great thing about being on my own has been thinking, ‘Well, just appreciate it, appreciate every day, don’t worry about being on your own, there’s always someone you can speak to on the phone’,” he says. “I’m still worried about Covid. I’m not interested in getting that. It’s a lot easier to deal with, locked away on your own. You become particularly wary, when you’re vulnerable. I’m very lucky.”
Just over a year ago, Lamb was in a hospice in Newcastle, where his younger brother, Wesley, was in the final throes of “a long, long run with cancer, first in the throat, then in the tongue”. A nurse from Macmillan Cancer Support, who was helping Wesley, had contacted Lamb and suggested it would be a good idea if he came to be by his brother’s side.
“So that’s what I did, I stayed with him for the last seven days of his life. I slept there, in a little bed in the corner, fed him. We laughed, and sorted out the history of our lives together. The problem was he’d had all the workings of his voice taken out, so he couldn’t speak any more,” Lamb recalls.
The pair were close as children, but grew up in a volatile home – “like living in a war zone” – as their parents argued. When the marriage ended, they spent the rest of their childhood being raised by their grandmother, only rarely seeing their mother. Later on, as the brothers grew older and their careers took off – Lamb’s included many years working abroad in the oil industry before becoming an actor – they drifted apart.
“Him dying sort of drew us back together,” says Lamb. In those final days, living together in the hospice, “we were just like two little boys, laughing, making faces we’d made since we were kids, cuddling each other like monkeys. At a certain point he looked up at me and made a sort of kissing sign, pointing at his mouth. So I gave him a kiss on his lips, and gradually off he went. I’m sure it was good to have me there to help.”
Macmillan Cancer Support is one of four charities being supported as part of this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal, and Lamb, a long-time backer, now knows first hand just how important Macmillan’s nurses are to cancer sufferers and their families.
“What it boils down to is that they are able to observe all of this from a professional position where, while they can be moved by what’s going on, it’s what they do, they specialise in,” he explains. “And it certainly made it easier for me to deal with death, watching it happen, and understanding what it must be like to go through that yourself. It’s very reassuring to have them there.”
A year on, Lamb is grateful he could be there at all, unlike so many families who have lost loved ones in hospices and care homes during the pandemic. “I can’t imagine going through that alone, and it must have been just excruciating not being able to go and help,” he says.
Kathy Pinna 
