Please note – the following text is taken from the speech I gave at my sister Dora’s funeral on 31st May 2025. It is rather long so, unless you were close to Dora, please don’t feel obliged to read it! But today – a year after her death – I feel inclined to post it more-or-less unaltered here along with a few old photos…
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What can I say in a few short pages about someone who has been a part of my life for every one of my fifty years?
As children we were always close but, being four years my senior, she often seemed to be in a different phase of life and I looked up to her. When I was 9 or 10, I’d go up to her room in the attic and she’d be playing The Smiths or The Cure and it was a strange world to me… exciting, cool and intriguing. I don’t remember her saying, ‘get out of my room’ though I guess I must have been an annoying younger brother at least some of the time. She played me The Queen is Dead, and The Head on the Door long before I learned to love those records for myself. She always had sketchbooks on the go full of amazing pictures. In those days it was often drawings of horses – an early fascination (she went horse-riding too with her friend and our neighbour, Tansy). Her drawings were incredibly realistic with muscles and immaculate shading – it was always amazing to me that she had such an eye and such skill – a skill she retained all her life.
Dora always had strong opinions and a propensity for extremes. Where I’ve normally been moderate and mild, she was fiery and passionate. I remember she had a ‘kill list’ of famous people she felt were real ‘wrong-uns’ which she updated continually. Significantly the only two names I remember being on that list were Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. At the time I probably thought, what on earth is wrong with those TV legends?! Given the lefty upbringing we had, I’m pretty sure Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan appeared on her list too, but I can’t recall anyone else.
In spite of the age-gap there were times when we both got into the same thing. When they started showing re-runs of the amazing ‘60s show The Prisoner at a certain time every week, we’d settle down to watch them together with huge excitement. Same with The Magic Roundabout, in a knowing-it-was-trippy kind of a way. More importantly from that time and throughout our lives, we had each other to talk to about our parents. You can complain about your mum and dad to anyone who’ll listen, but there’s nothing as cathartic as moaning about them with a sibling! Conversations with Dora sometimes acted like a release valve for me, and I’m pretty sure she felt the same way.
Dora was precociously intelligent and a voracious reader from an early age. Mum and I still talk about the family road-trip through the Alps and the Dolomites where Dora was so engrossed in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, that she scarcely looked out of the window. I never developed any skill in art, but I did pick up a love of literature from Dora, and while for many years I was stuck in an endless loop of first Asterix, then Narnia, then Tolkien books, as a later teenager I also became immersed in the world of the authors she’d been reading; Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, the Brontes. Her favourite book, Wuthering Heights, she could – and would – quote at length… “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!”… she’d begin! In the last few weeks of her life I read quite a lot of Wuthering Heights to her at the hospital,and then at the hospice.
When I did English A-level I remember being at a loss what to write my dissertation about. She said, ‘why don’t you write about the use of gothic imagery in Dickens’? And for some reason, I did exactly that! Almost as if I had no mind of my own! Anyway, I got an A, as had she, and she also got a First from UEA where she studied English Literature.
As children, we were taken off to the theatre frequently by our parents. I vaguely remember lots of (to me) fairly incomprehensible plays – Alan Ayckborn, Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel. I never learned to love the theatre: in fact, one of my strongest memories from these visits was Dad explaining how the concrete walls of the National Theatre were cast with wood so they had this wood-grain texture. I can feel my nine-year-old hands running down those walls now, fascinated! But Dora was obviously watching more closely what was happening on the stage, and did pick up the love of theatre. It made perfect sense when she later embarked on a career as a theatre designer, as it combined her incredible artistic ability and her fierce literary intelligence. She was brilliant at it, and her quick and insightful understanding of stories and her ability to translate those into striking sets and costumes must have made her a real joy to work with.
Going back in time again, Dora looked out for me at significant moments. When I started at our – huge! terrifying! – secondary school, Crown Woods, I didn’t really fit in for the first year and a half. Dora and her lovely friends, Jess and Isabel, let me hang out with them on a grass slope near the tennis courts every lunch time, before I finally made some friends of my own.
I visited her once or twice while she was at UEA and stayed in her shared house in Norwich. For some reason, I was wearing odd shoes – one green Converse and one leather boot with a metal pointy toe. I clearly must have been insufferably pretentious but she treated me like I was cool, which was lovely. Perhaps she was pretentious too – or maybe she was just very forgiving! Though on reflection I would probably not put forgiving as one of her principal qualities, but of me I think she often was. In fact, throughout our lives – despite differences in our outlook – I think we always had a respect and love for the way we each saw the world.
At UEA, the music had changed and now she was into Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds. I remember going to a Norwich Tesco with her and picking up some crazy bargains… She was trying to live on £1 a day at the time! She was always so good at finding cheap and free things, and living on next to nothing. Both she and Steve shared the ability to make something out of nothing, or as I said in my wedding song about her – weaving straw into gold.
But occasionally it could be galling. When Mary and I got married, we had a wedding list at John Lewis and one of my best friends, Fergus, bought us one of the most generous gifts – a fancy Dualit steel toaster. We were so proud of it and it occupied pride of place in our kitchen when we first moved to Brockley. But on one of their first visits to our house, we walked around the block with Dora and Steve, and they pulled out of a skip on our road the exact same fancy steel Dualit toaster but this one had four slices (ours was just the two slice model). One replacement fuse later, it was working perfectly – their toaster for many years. We still have ours, which has served us well (thank you Fergus!), but whenever I look at it I think about Dora and her four slice toaster from the skip!
With Steve, Dora really found her soulmate and life-partner. We have always been pretty open with each other about important things, and I think it’s significant that, in their 33 years together, Dora never expressed any doubts about their relationship. They were inseparable and genuine partners in every aspect of their lives. In their first crazy flat underneath Age Exchange in Blackheath, and later in Sandy Hill Road, they were always effortlessly Bohemian, artistic and adventurous. To the outside world they often appeared very hippy and relaxed, but I think there was a conflict within both of them, and Dora especially… I am a self-confessed neurotic, insecure, restless person; Dora in her life with Steve I think tried to shake off quite a lot of those family traits and tried to be that laid-back person she was so often mistaken for; but I have always thought that a restlessness and a driving energy lived inside her too, and was a contributing factor to her unique animation and life-force.
Dora and Steve travelled the world together, they created countless artworks together (as well as separately), and they raised two wonderful children – Rhoda and Amos – together, who Dora loved with all her heart. She was so proud of them, and devoted so much time and attention to them. And while I won’t get over the loss of Dora, I do feel very grateful to have those three people in my life now, in her absence.
When all our children were small, get-togethers – at one of our houses, at their field in Plaxtol, in Suffolk or Blackheath – were fun but often anarchic affairs, full of the bustle of life and activity. But in the last couple of years, Mary and I had a glimpse of a new kind of relationship with Dora and Steve… going out for a few meals and walks without children. I felt we were beginning a new and calmer chapter in our relationship. Selfishly, I feel cheated that this chapter was cut short so prematurely.
Anyone who’s been to their house, as most of you have, will see what a ridiculous over-saturation of artistic skill and creative flair has taken place within their home in the last couple of decades. Rarely have four people been so hell-bent on artistic endeavour in all its guises – not a wall, not a nook, not even a banister is left untouched by their collective creative spirit. While Mary and I like to paint rooms white and agonise about where to place one picture, the Schweitzer-Wilsons house is a smorgasbord of coloured walls, paintings and box pictures jostling for attention with fake trees, kooky instruments and crazy lighting. Every room is a work of art in itself. As I said to her shortly before she died, the family she has raised and the home she has built together with Steve, are an incredible testament to their love of each other as kindred spirits.
The second-to-last day I spent with Dora before she got ill, at the end of July last year, was typical and amazing – my daughter Viola had decided to paint her bedroom in our loft with multiple wacky colours. Dora and Steve said they’d come over for one day to help paint it with her. We went down to Whites to choose and buy the paints, and I remember at 2pm we’d had lunch but hadn’t started painting and I thought to myself, “Well this is going to take three days isn’t it?” But 5 or 6 hours later the room was transformed, three different colours, and very beautiful. Dora even arranged for an actor to come over to our house in the middle of the painting job to be measured for a costume for her upcoming show. She was a whirling dervish of creativity!
Just a few days later, and the last time I was with Dora before her diagnosis and illness, was significant as it was the day we both became German citizens. This had followed not months but years of glacial paperwork, which had been instigated and led by Dora (although I must give mention to our cousin Angela who had blazed a trail for the whole family in this citizenship claim process). After sharing a coffee and a croissant, we went into the German embassy to get our certificates and came away very excited to have E.U. citizenship again, not just after Brexit, but after a long fascination with dad’s family’s 20th century history. I knew – and we had talked a little about it – that Dora had been uncharacteristically depressed for a few months by that point, but that morning we were both very happy, and it felt like a new beginning.
But the next time I saw her, at the end of the summer, she was clearly ill and a few days later it became apparent why. She had an aggressive, fast-growing and incurable brain tumour known as a Glioblastoma. In the days and weeks that followed, I called many doctors, did countless internet searches… but the typical reaction from every doctor who knew about the condition summed it up. They would invariably just say, “I’m so sorry”.
Losing my dad, Alex, four years ago was painful and incredibly sad, but it did at least feel like the natural order of things. The news that we were going to lose Dora was unexpected and heartbreaking. Since we were given her terminal diagnosis last September there’s been some time to come to terms with it up to a point, but it’s not enough… not nearly. I’ll always be grateful for the extra 8 months we got with Dora, thanks to the emergency brain surgery at Kings, but the truth was, while a lot of the person I loved was still there (the warmth, the humour, the cheeky glint in the eye), a lot was already lost. The incisive intelligence, the manual dexterity, the executive powers, the sharp-witted analysis… Before her illness, I knew nobody better equipped to research the various treatments for an untreatable disease. The cruel irony was that after her illness, those far less competent had to take over – myself, my mum, Steve. We all did our best, and I think we did well, but sadly her cancer was an unstoppable force.
I always thought I’d be able to chat to Dora when I was old. I thought she’d always be there to talk about mum and dad – the only person in the world to know them like I do. I thought that long into the future, we’d be together going through all the memorabilia and photos in the attic of 15 Camden Row… and who better to sift through, declutter and organise several lifetimes of memories? Where I am wavering and sentimental, Dora was efficient, brisk, decisive. Not always right, it has to be said, but usually right!
Steve and Dora were soulmates, and I can’t comprehend how hard he’ll find it to live without her, but Dora and I were complementary in a different way. I haven’t even begun getting used to not having her around and I know that next week, next year and for all the years I have left, I am going to miss her like crazy. But Dora had so much life and energy and a huge number of friends. I know she’ll live on in spirit, not only through her children Rhoda and Amos, but in the hearts and memories of everyone who knew her and loved her.
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For anyone interested in seeing some of Dora’s work as a theatre set designer, her website is still available here.
