JOHN MACLEOD: A song of praise for TV's Sally, who endured horror enough for a lifetime

Daily Mail​

04-06-2025

I recently enjoyed some holiday with my mother in her new Glasgow pad, barely half an hour's walk from where we lived through the Seventies.
And, walking hither and yon, I visited many old haunts. Schools. The Jordanhill woods. Victoria Park and – just in time, as it sadly proved – the Renfrew ferry.
Which often saw me stumping along Anniesland Road. Even the name sets me a little on edge, for I remember my parents' horror back in 1973.
Solemn warnings. Talk of kerb-drill and the Green Cross Code. After an 11 year-old boy with a very famous father, dashing joyously – as boys do – from his school bus, by the Glasgow Academy playing-fields, was struck by a vehicle.
Sigursteinn Magnusson died three days later. His mother Mamie, for ages after, would retreat to her room and howl. Jamming the door shut with her leg, so that her other children should not see.
The other day Sally Magnusson starred on Songs of Praise, the programme she had presented for decades. If being, on this occasion, the guest, she betrayed no unease on being the other side of the microphone.
Against the backdrop of the Campsie Fells – and still adjusting to a new chapter in her life; she quit Reporting Scotland early in April – she reflected on deep things.
'It's a messy sort of affair, my faith,' she told Sean Fletcher. 'It's full of questions…'
Sally Magnusson – journalist, broadcaster, author, campaigner – has been in the public eye since the late Seventies. An ongoing career astonishing, too, for her versatility.
It was my privilege one morning in January 2017 to work with her when Songs of Praise came to Lewis. My job was to talk about the Iolaire disaster, when over 200 men drowned at the mouth of Stornoway harbour, at New Year 1919 on their return from the Great War.
Sally, over breakfast, was delightful – but focussed. She pushed me hard on one detail. I assured her that, yes, it was still Britain's biggest peacetime disaster at sea since the Titanic; but those precise words must be used.
I did not say, even in jest, 'I've started, so I'll finish.' Magnus Magnusson's daughter – she owns the Mastermind chair – gets that a lot, I suspect, and I doubt it was ever funny.
The death of Siggy, five years her junior, would have been horror enough for one lifetime. At 51, Sally Magnusson found herself facing into others. Her father, still alert and vital, was wasting away to cancer – and there was something far wrong with her mother.
Mamie Baird, born in Rutherglen in 1925, was far more than Mrs Magnus Magnusson, mother of five. She was a brilliant writer in her own right - 'one of the finest journalists of her day,' mused the late Jack Webster – and did much of the research for her husband's books.
And, as far as her health went, Mamie did all the right things. Ate healthily, kept trim, went for great long walks, read constantly, learned lifelong. A striking beauty, 'with a smile that could eclipse lighthouses.'
Yet, by the last weeks of her husband's life – Magnus died in January 2007 – she could not safely be left in charge of his medicines. Though still at the fey, giggly stage, Mamie Magnusson had dementia.
Sally and her siblings had a big decision to make. They could consign their mother to some institution – they had ample means – or they could care for her, in her own home and familiar environment, themselves.
They settled unhesitatingly on the latter. And through the years that followed, as children and grandchildren pulled together, Sally had to turn down big career opportunities, fulfil the duties she had and carry, too, her man (Norman Stone is an esteemed TV director) and her five maturing children.
From protracted, sometimes nightmarish years, and in the spirit of beauty for ashes, came perhaps Scotland's best memoir this century, Where Memories Go.
With, even at that time, scant professional support, Sally came to grips with what was happening to her mother. I know of no other book that captures, with such searing honesty, what it is like to care for a frightened, failing parent.
Around 44 million people on the planet live with dementia. Most are in the developed world: after all, we live longer. 7.7 million new cases are diagnosed every year. You can support, you can mitigate, you can carry – but there is no cure.
Dementia is not actually a disease, but a condition, born from a host of pathologies and of which Alzheimer's is just the most infamous.
But they all mean the same thing – changes to the way electrical charges work in the brain, and the activity of our neurotransmitters. And there is nothing you can do to prevent dementia – save, perhaps, choose the right parents.
We're not talking about the sort of 'senior moment' forgetfulness that at times startles us all. (The other day, for the life of me, I could not remember who had played the tenth Doctor Who.)
Dementia, as has been bleakly said, is not forgetting where the key is: it is forgetting what the key is for.
There is not even the comfort that dementia shields the sufferer from reality and self-awareness. Mamie Magnusson knew something was far wrong; my late father, in the last months of his life, was in no doubt that something terrible was happening to him.
Someone with dementia will try desperately to make sense of things from assorted, disparate fragments of memory. Sometimes to hilarious consequence: Mamie once announced to her family that, when she was sixteen, she had worked with Attila the Hun.
But, sometimes, too, in ways that are not the least funny. The godly old matron who becomes foul-mouthed. Frightening personality changes. Aggression, tantrums and venom.
And the desperate isolation of the carer. 'I was hungry for other people's experience,' Sally has recalled. 'It's a tremendously lonely thing to be in the middle of – extraordinarily so when you think that so many people are on the same journey, and yet each one feels so alone.'
To their great surprise, the family found music a mercy. It calmed and cheered their mother. She still knew hundreds of songs by heart. Could harmonise beautifully.
Sally Magnusson has since launched Playlist for Life, after studies in New York demonstrated how much familiar music helps a disintegrating personality.
Like her Mum, devastated by the way her mind was pouring from her cells like water through a sieve.
But there are still the swipes of its claws. 'Don't touch me,' hissed Mamie when Sally tried to embrace her one Christmas. And how dreadfully, exhausted and harried and scared, you can sometimes behave yourself.
'I am aghast at how quickly my temper frays,' Sally would write, 'when nothing I say or do seems to help.'
Mamie Magnusson died on 12 April 2012. Once, near the end, Sally brought up her late brother. Her mother smiled quizzically. Bent forward, determined to be polite. 'Now remind me. Who is Siggy?'
Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes Everything. By Sally Magnusson. John Murray Press. £10.99