3 minute read
DOING IT FOR DAVID - a focus on suicide awareness
Author Helen Garlick talks to MC magazine's Jo Henwood about family secrets, campaigning for suicide awareness, and why we all need to talk more openly.
40 years ago, Helen Garlick was about to board a paddle steamer to New Orleans when she received a message from her father that would change her life forever.
She was told that there had been a ‘terrible accident’ and that her brother David was dead.
Only now, after two marriages, three children, two ‘bonus’ daughters (stepdaughters) and a highly successful career in the law does she feel she can talk openly about what really happened.
“David was the golden, blue eyed boy,” says Helen. “He would light up a room. He was funny, clever, great at cricket and fishing, loved looking at the stars and had a passion for motorbikes.”
Helen and David’s father Geoffrey had high hopes for David following in his own successful footsteps.
Geoffrey had passed the 11+ to grammar school in Sheffield where he became head boy. The first in his family to go to university, he won a scholarship to Cambridge and was awarded a half-blue for his hockey prowess.
He was a solicitor, married to Monica and they had the perfect family – a girl followed by a boy.
But David didn’t settle at university. At the time of his death he had dropped out of a course in marine biology for the second time and was helping a family friend as caretaker for his country house in Nottinghamshire.
“He was never cut out to be an academic,” says Helen, the child who actually fulfilled her father’s dream.
With a law degree from Bristol and a qualifying year at the College of Law in London, Helen was in America for a few months before becoming an articled clerk at a City firm.
“My father kept describing the ‘terrible accident’ and talking about ‘if only the cabinet hadn’t been open.’ I thought he must have meant a gun cabinet but it was actually a filing cabinet. Apparently David had forged a shotgun certificate.”
David died of gunshot wounds and the inquest into his death returned a verdict of suicide but Geoffrey appealed.
“My father said he would appeal because it can’t be suicide. He said ‘we can’t have that stain on David’s character’.”
A second inquest returned an open verdict and Helen and her father never discussed the incident again.
“I was very young at the time and if I ever tried to broach the subject I was warned off. Our house was not a place where we would say things like ‘How do you FEEL about that?’
That was my dad’s way. Looking back now I don’t think he could have coped with it any other way.”
Helen’s mother took anti depressants and kept her feelings, and other things, bottled up.
The lack of openness in Helen’s childhood has had a very positive effect on her own career. A divorce lawyer, she has spent most of her working life focusing on talking solutions and mediation and avoiding laying blame with any one party.
She has also recently taken up a role as ambassador for the Zero Suicide Alliance and plans to walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats with her husband and two dogs to raise funds in David’s memory.
“I am on a mission to encourage talking,” she said.
“The ZSA does such a lot of work in encouraging people to talk and support one another.”
When her father died in 2014, Helen promised herself she would tell the true story behind David’s death but it was a further shock when her mother died three years later that prompted her to write a book which has just been published.
But that’s another story.
Helen Garlick
No Place to Lie: Secrets Unlocked, A Promise Kept by Helen Garlick (£9.99) is available at bookshops and online.
