Vicky Fox
My first memory of meeting Gill was soon after I started going out with Richard, 30 years ago. I have a fuzzy memory of Gill and Simone being very welcoming and friendly and gently quizzing me, perhaps checking that I was good enough for their former house mate!
We were in each other’s lives from then on, becoming good friends, dancing at each other’s weddings, dancing at our 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays, at our childrens’ bar and bat mitzvah’s and enjoying the more usual stuff too, going for walks and spending time together at the weekends.
Family and friends were always at the centre of Gill’s life. She always talked with love about her family - parents, brothers, sisters-in-law , nephews and nieces. I feel as though I know them all through our many conversations.
Gill's warmth and kindness, her curiosity about others’ lives, her ability to stay in touch with friends from every decade of her life meant she had a huge circle of friends. She was not the sort of person who tried or wanted to be the centre of attention but people gravitated to her. I used to ask her how she managed to stay in close touch with so many people - she would just laugh and I think that’s because it came so naturally to her.
Caring, kind, thoughtful, funny and creative. Those are the words that come to mind when I think about Gill. It’s fair to say that she was a bit of a worrier too. And that she and Andy often got lost on their way back to Manchester when visiting family but that just shows that as well as being truly amazing, Gill was reassuringly human too!
Throughout Andy’s illness and then his death, Gill showed a remarkable quiet strength. She grieved, she cared for Zak and Mia and found ways to rebuild her life. I really admired Gill’s grace and strength as she learnt to live with this untimely loss. She, as always, played down her strengths when we spoke about how she was coping and instead talked about how much family and friends supported her.
We walked and we talked. Gill always took a keen interest in my boys' lives, celebrating their successes, being kindly supportive when things were hard. She really cared and I felt cherished by her and I hope she felt the same in return. We moved jobs at the same time in autumn 2020 and became “new job” buddies, swapping stories, and encouraging each other as we got used to our new roles.
Bookclub was a big part of our friendship circle. I was the last person to join bookclub almost 27 years ago and it took around 20 years to stop being called the new girl! On the book front, Gill always had something interesting and original to say about the books. She was modest in her views but held her ground too. Of course, bookclub has always been about so much more than the books. I think we came to appreciate it most during the pandemic when we met virtually, and I realised that really we are a club of women who love and care for each other, who share in each other’s lives at least every 6 weeks and often in between too. I don’t think any of us in bookclub can imagine it without our beloved Gill. Somehow we will try to find a way to keep her with us.
I wish that I wasn’t writing about Gill in the past tense. It feels impossible to imagine that I won’t ever again hear Gilly laugh when we chat, that we won’t have our regular WhatsApp messages checking in on each other and sharing silly stories. That our walk and talks are at an end. Along with Gill’s family and enormous circle of friends, I will miss her deeply. She will be in my heart forever.
