ANNABEL FREYBERG 1961-2013
Inside the dining hall of Christ Church College, Oxford: Annabel Freyberg won a scholarship to the ancient institution.
Annabel Freyberg was a gifted and original writer who was arts editor at The Evening Standard before becoming interiors editor of the Telegraph Magazine. She died just 18 months after her nine-year-old daughter, Blossom, lost her own battle with cancer.
The granddaughter of General Lord Freyberg, VC, the postwar governor-general of New Zealand and one of the most highly decorated soldiers in the British Army, Annabel Freyberg combined huge moral courage and considerable intellectual gifts with a cheerful bohemianism and an enormous gift for friendship.
As well as being a much-loved editor, as a writer for the Telegraph Magazine, Freyberg turned her hand to everything from interior design, country houses, the arts and travel pieces to cookery columns and restaurant reviews - but it was the articles she wrote about her daughter's illness that were the most heartfelt and moving.
It never occurred to Freyberg that anything was wrong with her four-year old daughter Blossom when she began complaining of a tummy-ache, but a few weeks later she was diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer with a high rate of recurrence. As she later recalled: “Having a child diagnosed with a deadly cancer is shattering. But when doctors take you into the small windowless rooms - where bad news always seems to be broken - and spell out the gruesome potential side effects of the treatment, then the horror of what is to be inflicted on your beloved infant's otherwise perfect body becomes almost unbearable.”
But, she recalled, the fact that Blossom died in 2012, and not in 2007 when first diagnosed, was due to the care she received at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital: “The five years when she grew from being a sweet toddler with an over-fondness for pink and Disney characters into an independent action girl, forever and cheerfully on the go - dancing, biking, riding, playing with friends, taking her rabbits for a walk, rearranging her Sylvanians, cooking, drawing and coming up with fantastical stories - were incredibly precious and I will be forever in GOSH's debt for them.”
During that time she wrote articles about Blossom's enjoyment of digging and churning up “creamy mud” with her brother Otto, their love of Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree books and their visit to Disneyland Paris as part of a trip for children with life-threatening and chronic diseases organised by the Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers.
While she kept a “reasonably cheery” stance in her children's presence, Freyberg confessed that “out of their sight I was desperate and hysterical”. What sustained her above all was her daughter's bravery. “Blossom was high-spirited throughout, even when the going was tough, and through constant extra hospitalisations ... It made the whole thing more bearable.”
During Blossom's illness and after her death in May 2012 Freyberg campaigned to raise money for Kiss It Better, a national appeal launched by Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity to raise money to fund research into the causes and treatment of childhood cancer.
Freyberg was diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma just days after delivering a moving eulogy to Blossom in St Mary Abbott's Church, Kensington.
Annabel Pauline Jekyll Freyberg was born on August 16, 1961, while her father, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, was on service abroad and her mother was living at Windsor Castle, where her father-in-law was then serving as Deputy Constable. The castle gates had to be opened in the middle of the night so that Annabel could be born in hospital.
She was raised at Munstead House, in Surrey, which had been built for her great-grandfather Sir Herbert Jekyll and his sister, Gertrude Jekyll, who had honed her garden design skills in its grounds. After education at Heathfield and at Marlborough, Annabel won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, to read English (despite turning up to the interview in a dressing gown and transparent plastic sandals).
There she played Gertrude to Hugh Grant's Hamlet in a production which transferred to the Edinburgh Festival. Tall, exuberant and beautiful, she was known for her colourful and exotic bandannas and flowing dresses and for her lavish “themed” tea parties at which she entertained a wide circle of friends. After graduation, she went on to study at Kingston School of Art, paying her way through her course by working as a waitress at the Chelsea Arts Club.
In the 1980s Freyberg worked briefly for the Centre for Policy Studies and for The Catholic Herald, before being taken on as a writer by Min Hogg at the magazine The World of Interiors. After a stint working on the obituaries staff of The Independent, Freyberg was headhunted by Max Hastings, then editor of The Evening Standard, to be the paper's arts editor.
In 2002 a new editor, Veronica Wadley, replaced her with Norman Lebrecht. When Lebrecht rang the paper's star contributor, Brian Sewell, to invite him out for lunch, Sewell, who considered Freyberg the best arts editor he had worked with, declined. He then devoted his next column to a defence of the f-word, during which he mentioned “f---” 11 times.
The Standard's loss was The Daily Telegraph's gain and Freyberg went on writing for the paper after her own diagnosis. Earlier this year she described fulfilling a long-held wish when, with her husband, the writer Andrew Barrow, and their 12-year-old son Otto, she retraced the steps of her grandfather, who, as commander of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force, had liberated Venice in April 1945. After travelling to Venice by train, they stayed at the Danieli.
While working for the Telegraph Magazine Freyberg continued to write for The World of Interiors and to take leading roles in amateur theatre productions. In 1999 she published a book, Ceramics for the Home.
In an article to be published in the Telegraph Magazine, Freyberg wrote movingly about her efforts to remain positive in adversity. “I am not afraid of dying - though there have been times when minor symptoms have made me so restless I have longed for oblivion,” she wrote. “But I am nervous as to how it will happen.”
She is survived by Barrow, whom she married in 2000, and their son.
Telegraph, London
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