Sheila Hancock has written a touching biography and honest description of her marriage to John Thaw, says Gerald Isaaman

The Two of Us, by Sheila Hancock
Bloomsbury, £17.99

King’s Cross was where she grew up, months after being born on the Isle of Wight. Sheila Hancock’s parents took over the spit and sawdust pub called The Carpenter’s Arms where her mum played the piano for her father to sing The Road to Mandalay.
“We lived in the flat above the bars,” Sheila recalls. “It reeked of stale beer and the whole place shook and glasses rattled as trains passed the backyard. Sleep was not easy. I was often still awake when Dad shouted, ‘Time, gentlemen, please’.
“I too entertained the customers. I regularly performed the whole of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, playing all the roles to the captive audience of women hoping for a quiet port and lemon in the ladies’ bar.”
And it was from an even more austere background that her subsequent husband, John Thaw, grew up on a poverty stricken Manchester council estate, his much loved mother deserting the home and John leaving school with just one O Level.
They were both students of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), though the older Sheila left before John arrived.
Here her memoirs paint a graphic picture of a young girl with lovely legs hanging on to her virginity until her first marriage, working in Woolies and as a waitress to keep alive.
John, who had earned a reputation as a mimic in Manchester, was very much a misfit in London, a strange loner with an accent yet one with obvious charisma who found faithful friendship with the actor Tom Courtenay, who introduced him to classical music and digs in Highbury.
Peter Barkworth thought John an impossible student to teach but James Roose-Evans, founder of the Hampstead Theatre, took a softer approach and watched with delight as John made his undeniable mark on the theatre and on TV.
The rest, you could say, is history after Sheila and John met and married following the death of her first husband, eventually climbing the theatrical tree to become stars in their own right, John, of course, destined for fame as Inspector Morse. Yet still they faced disasters together, Sheila from breast cancer, John from alcoholism, and their life together was beaten hard on an anvil of vicious rows and eruptions.
But the story of those years is absorbing and compelling as Sheila, with remarkable rude and raw honesty, makes you understand that fame is not all, especially if, like John, you are shy of success and terrified generally of women, and if, like Sheila, you seek help from hypnotism to overcome stage fright.
Where the double biography works is in Sheila’s brilliant use of her diaries, spraying extracts through the chapters en route to John’s death and a national mourning for a man who became an acting icon for his age.
She tells how she blasted Tony Blair and the Labour government at a meeting at No 10, John protesting that she had lost him a knighthood. She tells how, at the Edward Vii Hospital for Officers, she blasted the doctor who hadn’t bothered to look at John’s notes.
“Then a nurse came in and twittered a lot when she saw John and asked for his autograph. I was incensed,” she writes. “The man is here for a life or death test, you silly mare. He’s not Inspector Morse.”
And such is the pain she still cannot bare to watch old Morse episodes.
In a moving epilogue she adds: “As you get older you cannot help but be melancholy. The turmoil of the world is palpable. But there are still rapturous moments.”
Thinking of her departed partner she recites: “Be still/Close your eyes/Breathe/Listen to my footfall in your heart/I’m not gone but merely walk in you.”
Then she says, finally, with that spirit of life still riding high, “And it sort of worked. Cracked it, kid?”
This is a book filled with passion and love, truth and fulfilment. It will shine brightly with a beckoning light under any Christmas tree.