Army widow Christina Schmid came under the spotlight recently when she spoke out about ‘moving on’ after the tragic death of her husband Staff Sergeant Olaf ‘Oz’ Schmid. LAURA MURPHY talks to Ulster born war widow Christine Gemmell, who’s chair of the Army Widows Association, about the lifeline that this organisation is for women - and men - left bereaved
WHEN Christine Gemmell answers the phone to me from her Salisbury home, the first thing she does is apologise for her line being engaged five minutes earlier.
“I’ve taken two calls from widows in the last half hour,” she says in friendly tones, her Northern Ireland accent still very much in evidence, despite the fact that she moved away from her native Co Down over 30 years ago.
As chairman of the Army Widows Association, an independent organisation formed in 2004 to offer “comfort, support and friendship to the widows and widowers of service men and women”, Dromara-born Christine is on hand, virtually night and day, to take calls like these from people who have been bereaved, and are in need of a supportive voice on the other end of the phone, some sympathy and empathy from someone who knows exactly what it is like to lose your life partner in such sudden and tragic circumstances.
Christine Gemmell, sadly, knows all well what it is like to be widowed; her husband Steve - whom she met when she was just 18 - died in 2005, leaving her to raise their son Tom, who had just turned 13. Devastated, shocked and left with an overwhelming sense of loneliness, Christine - a qualified nurse - didn’t know where to turn, and was finally persuaded by a friend to attend a special event known as the Amport Weekend, organised by the Army Widows Association in 2006, which she had tentatively joined.
That one weekend changed her life; she realised there were other people in the same boat, and seven years on, is chairman of the organisation, a role she juggles alongside her job as a staff nurse in the plastic surgery out-patients department at her local hospital in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
“It just gives you a bit of strength and courage, belief that you can cope with life,” says the 52-year-old, trying to convey how it feels for these men and women to know they have each other.
“Because our lot (in life) has been determined for us - for me, in March 2005, that was it.”
Indeed, the ninth of that month was the day that Christine’s world was turned upside down.
Her husband Steve had been in the army for as long as she had known him, since before they met in 1978. He’d travelled to all kinds of war-torn regions, including Northern Ireland, (he was from Thame in Oxfordshire) but it was a massive coronary that cruelly claimed his life one day whilst he was working in Limavady. He was 47 years old.
“I actually met him in hospital,” laughs Christine as she recalls the first moment she saw her future husband, which was when he was laid up in bed with a rugby injury.
“I had gone to visit somebody else in Musgrave Park (Hospital, in Belfast), and I met him there. He was in the Royal Military Police. He was a patient. He said hello and when we went back to visit again a few days later, we got chatting. He asked if I would consider going back to visit him. I thought, ‘Oh well, I’ll go up and visit him’, and we just hit it off.”
However somewhat alarmingly, the next time Christine arrived in the hospital to see Steve, he had been discharged! Thankfully, they had already swapped phone numbers and unbeknownst to her, he had arranged with her sister to collect them both the following weekend and take them to a function.
“She picked me up from the house I was living in in Belfast,” recalls Christine.
“That was the first night I’d seen him out of hospital and that was it!”
Twenty-one-year-old Steve proposed to his girlfriend three months later, and they were married on June 20, 1980, just over 18 months after they met.
“My mum said he was the first person who told me what to do and who I listened,” she smiles.
“It was instant - we clicked and I knew that there was something there. We were based in Lisburn after we were married, and I had to finish my nurse training. At the end of 1981, in November, we moved to Germany.”
The couple also lived in Hong Kong and spent four years in Gibraltar, before returning to the UK in 1997 and settling in Salisbury.
Christine adored army life, and all the moving around that went with it.
“Our son Tom was born in 1992, and until then it was just the two of us, so we were able to take advantage of it. I nursed and played hockey wherever we went and Steve worked and played rugby, and it was lovely. You were very much surrounded by the army, but it just became a way of life.”
When Steve died, he was part of the Federal Investigations Branch, and had just been sent to Limavady in Co Londonderry to work on an investigation.
“It wasn’t a conflict death,” says Christine.
“People assume that when they hear of army widows, it must have been conflict, but of course there are so many of us who have been (affected by) non-conflict deaths.”
Looking back on that fateful day, she reveals: “I didn’t find out until later that day and I had the classic scenario of three people knocking at the door. I still thought they’d turned up for a cup of coffee.
“At that time Northern Ireland was still an operational station, so it was classed as a military death in Northern Ireland. The military police from Londonderry were called and Steve had to go through a proper repatriation.”
Thus because she had to wait for official procedures to be completed, it was a few days later - on what would have been his 48th birthday - that his body arrived home with Christine.
“My life changed forever,” she says, her voice breaking with emotion.
“The hardest thing was telling my son. I literally had about 20 minutes to absorb the news and then go to the school to pick him up.”
She speaks of the closeness of their family, which was a tightly-knit little unit.
“We had waited 12 years for Tom to come along and he was really the star of our lives. We were all very close. Tom was a much longed for and much loved son.
“There were things that just me and Tom used to do together, and then him and Steve used to go off and have overnight fishing trips and silly things like that.
“New Year I find very, very difficult to deal with, as I used to always work night duty on New Year’s Eve. It was more important for us to spend Christmas together and I would work on New Year’s Eve. Steve would always stay at home with Tom and the first phone call onto the burns unit was always the pair of them.”
She continues: “As far as I was concerned, we had mapped out our lives; it was just before our 25th wedding anniversary and we were going to grow old together, sit in our rocking chairs together and hopefully nurse grandchildren and things like that. Because Steve had done Northern Ireland, and sort of been in different areas which were dangerous, it’s not that you get complacent, but you just think there’s nothing else can happen.”
However in a cruel twist of fate, Christine was left a widow in her 40s. And whilst she heard of other woman in the same position - on the news, through friends - actually meeting them was a different story.
Six months after Steve died, she received a letter of condolence from the chair of the Army Widows Association. She decided to join, and received regular news letters, but that was as far as it went. She admits that in a way, she almost “felt apologetic” for taking much to do with the organisation because since her husband wasn’t killed ‘on active service’, she thought perhaps she “might not be on a par with the other widows.”
Then in May 2006, she received an invitation to their annual weekend.
“My friend was down visiting me and said, ‘you’ve got to go.’ After a lot of persuasion, I agreed, and I cried the whole way there, and cried when the first person spoke to me. Suddenly, when people started introducing themselves, and they went round the room and everyone said hello, I thought, ‘I’m not on my own’.
“Suddenly, I was in this group, a great eclectic bunch of ladies from 20 up to 60 - a whole roomful of ladies to whom I didn’t have to explain anything.
“I came away from that weekend and felt, ‘actually, I can do this.’ It wasn’t an instant thing where you felt, ‘I’m alright now.’ It was more,‘ I know I can do this’, and I met two or three women who are still close friends.
“It was a really emotional weekend, and I felt that that was the start of me being able to start to come to terms with things, and that if there was anything I wanted to talk about, there was a whole range of other girls out there to whom I could pick up the phone and say hello, and if they hadn’t ‘been there’, they knew somebody who had. You felt as if you were some new part of a great big support network.”
Living with grief is, Christine says, akin to having to put on a mask in the morning; if it slips in front of family and friends and you get upset, they get upset, and this in turn upsets you.
But on AWA weekends away, she says that “all the barriers come down”, and widows and widowers feel as though their tears can flow freely, and they do so, often out of a sense of relief at seeing one another again.
“There are girls from opposite ends of the country, and of different ages who would never have met each other otherwise,” she adds.
Christine describes the AWA as being “almost like an informal support group”, through which those who have been left bereaved can lean on each other for support at any time.
But perhaps most importantly of all, she says, is the fact that being part of such an organisation “gave us the strength and courage to gather ourselves up, and think, ‘right, it might take a while, but I’ll get there eventually’.”
For more information on the Army Widows Association, visit www.armywidows.org.uk
