Joanna Scanlan was just 14 when she experienced major grief for the first time. Her childhood friend Sarah, to whom she’d been joined at the hip since they were small, was 15 and just on the cusp of womanhood when she was hit by a car and killed. “I had to accept that Sarah wasn’t actually just around the corner or gone to Australia on holiday,” she said. “The shock of that lasted a long time.”
Scanlan, Bafta-winning star of The Thick of It and After Love, is speaking about Sarah’s death publicly for the first time, 50 years on. She is one of 11 actors and poets, also including Alison Steadman, Ophelia Lovibond and Lemn Sissay, who are reading poems in memory of their loved ones to commemorate Celebration Day, an annual moment dedicated to remembering those who have died.
Held each year on the last Monday in May, the movement has gathered momentum since it was conceived in 2022, and is backed by figures such as Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant, and Prue Leith.
Speaking about why Celebration Day is so meaningful, Scanlan said: “Loss lasts a whole lifetime, and it’s really important to find a way to make it a positive memory, rather than just a big gaping wound in your solar plexus that you push away and never deal with.”
For Sarah, Scanlan chose to read Robert Browning’s 1890 poem “Now”. His words express a moment of passion and encapsulate the intensity of feeling that comes with that first rush of love and intimacy in adolescence, which Scanlan feels that Sarah was right on the brink of when she died.
Scanlan was at boarding school in the 1970s when Sarah vanished from her life. “One Saturday night, she and some other girls had gone to a pub, and they were walking back fairly late, and she was hit by a car and killed immediately,” she said. Sarah’s mother had died of cancer a few years earlier, so “she had already experienced tragedy herself, and then she left behind a sister and two stepbrothers, and they had lost their mother, too”.
The following morning, Scanlan’s parents came to see her at school. “I must have been doing my mending or something – in the 1970s, we had to mend our socks and our shirts – and I was called out and told to go to the headmistress’s study, where my parents were standing and they told me that she'd been killed,” Scanlan recalled.
“Sarah had died the night before, and all I can remember is looking at the pink carpet in the room, and thinking how beautiful it was.”
Not only did Scanlan have to cope with enormous grief at such a young age, but she had to do it in an isolating environment, without the support of her parents.
“The public school system was very, you know, stiff upper lip,” she said. “It was pretty un-emotionally literate.”
Scanlan is aware of how bottling up feelings can cause damage further down the line. Her grandmother put a lid on her grief when her husband – Scanlan’s grandfather – died in the Second World War. While she could, and arguably should, have “wailed and wailed and wailed”, she instead drowned her sorrows in 12 bottles of whiskey a week.
At boarding school, Scanlan was encouraged to push her feelings down. “You were supposed to put your emotions in a very small, tidy box,” she said. “They could not spill out. It just was not allowed. I don’t want to go into a big rant about boarding schools, but I really think they’re not a great idea, certainly the version that I went to in those days.”
While Scanlan and her friends would find moments of joy in the recreation room, chatting and listening to Wings and Elton John, if they were suffering underneath, they couldn’t talk about it.
“It must be so hard to even envisage it in our world now, where people talk about feelings all the time,” she said. “It was a world where feelings were not discussed and not seen to be useful. They would be seen to be a hindrance in getting on with it, and getting on with it meant not bothering other people.
“So my parents, even if I had been at home, would never have been saying to me, ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Literally, that question just didn’t exist. It was like, get up, get on with it. Go for a walk, read a book. But do not talk about how you feel.”
She chose Browning’s poem “Now” – in which he writes about the ecstasy of knowing that you are loved in “this tick of our life-time’s one moment” – for her friend because of something that happened just weeks before Sarah’s death.
Scanlan’s family had been staying with Sarah’s family over Christmas, and Scanlan had “done a very bad and naughty thing”: she had read Sarah’s diary.
“I didn’t turn the pages, but it was open,” she said. On the page Scanlan read, Sarah had described “getting off” with a boy at a party.
“It was quite fruity, this description, and it was definitely more than a snog,” recalled Scanlan, who was one year younger and both “scandalised” and “intrigued” by the whole thing.
“So the reason really to choose the poem,” explained Scanlan, “was because that was just the beginning of that time in her life, the beginning of something that then never came to fruition. She was just on the cusp of being a young, energetic, beautiful, charismatic woman. And she was never going to make it to that. And of course, I didn’t know that. None of us knew that over that Christmas.”
She added: “It’s really easy when you get old, certainly as old as I am, but even by the time you get to your mid-thirties, it’s really easy to forget just how absolutely compelling all that hormonal energy of being in your teens is, and how passionately you feel, and how the love and physical desire just completely overtakes you.
“And sometimes a great filmmaker or somebody will capture that, and I think Robert Browning does it with this poem, he reminds you that it’s huge.”
The ‘Poems to Remember’ series is being released exclusively on The Independent for Celebration Day on Monday, 25 May
