The widow of the late radio DJ Johnnie Walker reveals the strain of caring for him during his illness and shares their happier times together.
Tiggy Walker has a prized photograph that, she says, captures everything there is to know about her husband of 22 years, DJ Johnnie Walker.
Photographed a few weeks before his death, at a time when he was largely bedridden, Johnnie is in his dressing gown, his wheelchair parked in the doorway of their home.
“Flat cap on, fag in hand, and a coffee with Jameson whiskey in it,” says Tiggy. She adds with an arched brow, “It was taken at 10 o’clock in the morning”.
Laughing, while simultaneously shaking her head – something, you get the sense, probably happened a lot during the couple’s 23 years together – Tiggy, 64, states, “He was old-school rock and roll”.
And there’s no disputing that. Johnnie, whose mid-Atlantic, dulcet tones were a mainstay of the BBC airwaves for more than 50 years, was fined £2,000 in 1999 after admitting to possessing cocaine following a “sting” by the so-called “Fake Sheikh” – investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood.
In recounting the ups and downs of their life, Tiggy pulls no punches in her “warts and all” memoir Both Sides Now, in which she recounts how she met her future husband when he was fresh out of rehab following the sting.
Born Peter Waters Dingley, in Solihull, Johnnie was 79 when he died on New Year’s Eve 2024 after years of ill health from the lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). He’d been diagnosed aged 74 and was told he had two to five years left to live.
Throughout his illness, his BBC radio shows Sounds of the 70s and The Rock Show kept him going. He carried on DJ-ing right up until two months before his death, presenting his last show on 27 October, despite needing an oxygen machine to get through it.
His loss is still raw when we speak, and the tears are never far away for Tiggy. She talks about her husband in the present tense and feels she has only just started grieving, having finished writing the book, which kept her feeling close to him.
The book explores the soul-sapping exhaustion of her years as Johnnie’s carer. In it, Tiggy recalls asking him, six months before his death, if he was “ever actually going to die”, and saying to him, “What are you holding on for?”
She says the questions may seem “cruel” but were born of a fear he might outlive her, so shattered was she by her caring duties.
“When someone has a terminal diagnosis, you know death is coming but you don’t know when,” she says.
“People say, ‘Oh, it’s an absolute privilege to care for somebody,’ and I find that a bit saintly. It’s part of loving. It’s part of marriage, part of the contract that you take on. But it is very tough.
“You have to do an awful lot [for your loved one]: dress them, wash them, bathe them, bring them all their meals, deal with commodes, clean, And there’s so much laundry.
”And all the time, you’re experiencing pre-emptive grief. It’s an exhausting emotional rollercoaster.”
Both Sides Now: Laughter, Grief and Everything in Between with Johnnie Walker, by Tiggy Walker (HarperCollins, RRP: £20.00)
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