Uphill battle after Gary’s cruel loss

Gary Verity’s sheep farm in Coverdale looks like it has been taken from the colour pages of a brochure showing the finest views in Yorkshire.

Wrapped snugly between the long whaleback of Penhill to the north and a fell to the south which locals call Dead Man’s Seat, the immaculate old farmhouse is surrounded by green fields where every blade of grass seems to be perfectly arranged and every dry stone wall is neatly aligned.

It’s perhaps not surprising to find that this dream of a Yorkshire landscape belongs to the man who sells the Yorkshire dream to tourists around the globe. Many arrive here with preconceptions wholly shaped by the world of James Herriot and, like them, it was because of Herriot’s books that Gary Verity first discovered Coverdale.

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Running a Dales sheep farm has been the perfect low-stress antidote to the high-octane world of big companies which Leeds-born Gary has inhabited for 25 years. Sorting out the failing property business of the old Bradford & Bingley on a Friday and then winning first prize with one of his ewes at the Wensleydale Show on a Saturday, Gary took it all in his stride.

Now chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire – the modern name for the Yorkshire Tourist Board – his day-job pressure is greater than ever since central government cut off all funding, and he has been forced to scrape together money from those businesses which directly benefit from his organisation’s beating of drums and blowing of trumpets for the beautiful Broad Acres.

It might be too much for some men but there is an steel core to Gary, and when he tells the story of his wife’s illness which led to her death a couple of years ago and left him with a small daughter, Lily, to bring up alone, it’s clear that if he could survive that crisis then he can cope with anything.

His way of dealing with the discovery that Helen Verity had incurable cancer was to buy a pair of running shoes, enter two New York Marathons and raise £450,000 for cancer charities. On April 22, he’s off again – this time running the London Marathon – and hoping to take the total past half a million. On his kitchen door is pinned a list of the training runs he must do between now and then.

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Gary remembers every stage of his wife’s illness with pin-sharp clarity, so much so that he appears to have kept inside his head a daily diary of the cancer’s progressive ravages. It is heartrending enough to be a listener to his story, but the long pauses and the hushed repetition of words like “awful” and “barbaric” begin to give the faintest sense of what it must have been like to live through.

The brutal reality, too, is that for the most part this is the story of his marriage.

“Lily was a honeymoon baby,” he begins, “and while Helen was pregnant she started to complain of a bad back. Her GP told her that it was because she was having a baby and her body was changing shape, and when the condition persisted after she’d given birth to Lily in April 2003 she was now told it was because her body was simply going back to normal.”

After the only family holiday they would ever have without the shadow of serious illness looming over them, she went to see an osteopath, then a chiropractor, and at one stage she was treated for a stomach problem. One night, when Gary got back late from work and they had what had become their usual conversation about her deteriorating health he insisted that she go for a blood test.

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Her doctor rejected the suggestion, however, and Gary – not one for taking no for an answer – rang him up and told him in robust language to come over to Coverdale and take a blood sample as soon as possible.

“He must have driven like the devil, because he was here in 20 minutes,” he says with no note of satisfaction in his voice. “Helen was quite poorly at this point, lying on a sofa, and as he was leaving the doctor said he thought my wife wasn’t very well. I replied that now we were on the same page, we might finally make some progress.”

After another blood test, on the morning of Christmas Eve 2003 the phone rang in the farmhouse and when Gary answered, the doctor told him the results had come back and his wife needed to be hospitalised immediately.

When Gary’s parents later arrived to spend Christmas, they found a note saying Lily had been left with a neighbour and he had taken Helen to James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough.

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“I was told there was a consultant nephrologist waiting to see Helen. I didn’t know what a nephrologist was. I’d never come across anything like that, but I’m a bit of an expert on all that stuff now. Anyway, when we got there I asked him to cut to the chase.

“He said they still didn’t know what was wrong with my wife, but the blood test had shown she had chronic renal failure. She would have died over Christmas if she wasn’t brought in. Still, he said, they had done some scans and found that she had no cancer in her kidneys. I thought, cancer? What are they talking about?”

That was the first time the word had been mentioned. The fact that it was used to give hope was, as Gary says, the one piece of good news.

But after being allowed back to Coverdale – he had insisted she spend her first Christmas with her new baby at home – she returned to hospital and began to go downhill quite rapidly.

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After another series of tests the consultant met them both at Helen’s bedside and said, with a note of encouragement, the good news was she didn’t have leukemia, and now they knew what it was, they could start treating her.

“I could tell from his eye contact that this wasn’t anything like the whole story, so I followed him out of the room. In his office he told me to shut the door and said that Helen’s condition was myeloma, or bone marrow cancer.

“There was no cure, he said, and when I had sufficiently recovered to ask how long she’d got, he said about 18 months.”

Most people would have been resigned to that, but Gary is the kind of character who has to confront a crisis head-on. His business background is in crisis management, going in at chief executive level to turn round the fortunes of failing companies.

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He starting making phone calls to friends in the medical profession and eventually came up with the name of one of the world’s experts on myeloma, Professor Tony Childs. And as luck would have it, he was based at Leeds General Infirmary.

“After a 40 minute phone call, next day Helen was in an ambulance heading for Leeds. I could tell immediately he was a class act, and my wife started to improve a bit. Later that year I got her a bone marrow transplant, every treatment that was going, and when her results looked better one month she asked if she could tell people she was in remission.

“Professor Childs looked at her and said, ‘No, you’ll never be in remission.’ That was the reality of it.”

Helen died on December 16, 2009, almost five years to the day since she had been given 18 months to live, and she died at home.

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“She’d been adamant about that,” Gary says, “but it was a horrendous experience. Her final 10 days were awful, even though she was on the most stringent morphine. Bone pain is the worst possible thing...awful... awful... barbaric.”

Two years on from his bereavement, he rejects the cliché that time is a great healer. It doesn’t get any easier, he shakes his head, and the closest he comes to admitting his loneliness is to say that humans are not designed to be solitary animals.

His immediate focus is on running the London Marathon for Marie Curie Cancer Care, who provided Helen with so much support in her final months. And, of course, he is devoted to the welfare of his daugher Lily, who is approaching her ninth birthday.

He has never considered giving up the farm. “Sheep are a great leveller,” he says. “Sheep don’t care who you’ve met, what you’ve done, what meetings you’ve had. As far as they’re concerned you’re going to feed them, look after them, move them from one field to another. There’s a spiritual peace here.”

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To sponsor Gary Verity’s run in the Virgin London Marathon on Sunday, April 22 on behalf of Marie Curie Cancer Care visit www.justgiving.com/gary-verity

A charity auction to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care is at Tenants Auction Centre, Leyburn, on Saturday, April 14. Tickets are £20, obtainable from [email protected]

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