RIP Jane

 

 I just got word that my friend from college, Jane Hatfield, has died.  This was expected: she was told in January that she had two or three months left, and apparently she has had a couple of moments in the past month or two when her family thought she had gone, so it's a testament to her that she lasted this long.  We'd more or less lost touch but then I heard a couple of years ago through mutual friends that she'd been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I reached out.  Then I had a conference in Ireland so I made sure that I was able to visit her in London (as documented here).  She was recovering from her first batch of chemo and was just growing back her hair.  Later that year she married her partner, Gali, with whom she has a son (Saul) and a daughter (Alma).  

 

But the cancer recurred - she tried chemo again, but then got the diagnosis this year.

Jane and I met when we were part of a group of eight (I think - it's been a long time) starting PPE at St. Anne's College, Oxford in October 1986. We gravitated to each other, I think, because we both felt a bit like frauds.  I was only doing PPE because I'd been planning to apply to do English, but got 5/10 on a paper in English the week before the deadline, so hastily changed it to something I couldn't be expected to know about (because nobody did Politics, Economics, and certainly not Philosophy for A-Level).  And as a Maths-phobe, Jane was particularly wary of the Economics portion - in fact, both of us failed our Economics prelims (the exams at the end of the first year that you have to pass or you won't be allowed to stay for the remaining two years).  Somehow we both squeaked through on the second attempt, but we sort of went our separate ways after that - she went to live in an all-female house on the other side of Oxford, while I stayed in college accommodation (scared of going massively into debt), and as she was focusing on Politics and I on Philosophy, I don't think we took any of the same classes, or sat in the same tutorials any more.  Our paths certainly crossed - at Anti-Apartheid meetings, at parties at "The Hippy House" she lived in, much closer, in year three, and when I borrowed her Amstrad because my applications to American graduate school had to be typed and I didn't have a word processor (I plugged the printer in when it was turned on and it fried it (design flaw!) so I had to quickly pay to get it fixed, but Jane was very nice about it.)

What to say about Jane?  She somehow managed to be a cross between an Earth Mother and Dorothy Parker.  She had a very warm aura that drew people to her, but she could say the nastiest things, usually followed by a little giggle to let you know that she knew how shitty what she just said was, but that she enjoyed saying it anyway.  But because she was so committed to the forces of good in the world, she could get away with it.  She was CEO of a Breast Cancer non-profit (and got to meet David Cameron when he was Prime Minister!  And was so committed to the goals of the organization that she forced herself to be nice to him!) when she had to stop working.  (And that's just the tip of the iceberg - much more detailed in this nice obituary from a colleague of hers, and also Gali's obituary of Jane in the Guardian.)  She talked as if she was the laziest person in the world but was in fact incredibly hard-working and laser-focused.  I wish I'd stayed in touch more, really, but our lives diverged after that first year of shared anxiety and imposter syndrome.  It's desperately sad that she leaves two young children, but it's wonderful that she found someone with whom she could finally settled down and have children, and I know Gali will never regret for a moment that Jane was her life-partner.  

Here are some pictures that uploaded in a stupid order, and that are hard to re-organize, so I'll just try to place them with comments underneath.

First some scans of photos I had.  The top two above are taken the day somebody finished all their finals.  Our circle made a pact that everyone had to gather for each one's last exam, and meet them on the way out of the building (lots of people did this - it was packed) laden down with alcohol, and occasionally flowers.  The first one above and the first two below are my last day - it was glorious.  I don't know about the middle one above, but I think those are Jane's ankles on the left (and she probably took the top one, which features Anabel and Philip Noden, who had a knack of getting in every picture).  The bottom one above is Ben, Philip N (see?) and Jane at Glastonbury 1989.  Scorchingly hot, it was, although it got chilly at night, so Philip and I both bought cheap acrylic sweaters at a vendor - I believe he is modeling his there.

Jane can be seen above right crossing the road after meeting me after my finals (and probably giving me that Guinness), smoking on a punt in the central one, and enjoying the bracing air of Filey on a Philosophy Retreat (don't ask) in the last one.  Now for some photos I didn't take from back then, shared just before the 2019 visit:

Jane and her two Philips - Shaw (now working for the NIH) and Philip N (again!).

Jane with Ben again, being Political somewhere, as was her wont.

Flashforward to the late 20-teens, and I think this is before her diagnosis, being Political again.

First chemo, before I saw her in 2019:

Then, my visit in June of 2019.  Here's me with Philip, 30 years on from Glastonbury:

All PPE-ers, Jane, Philip (who was actually the year after us, but would've been in our year if he hadn't deferred to work in a bank), Anabel (now a lawyer and consequently much more assertive than back in the old days) and yours truly.  You can see Jane's hair just growing back.

Getting off the Thames tour boat:

Lunch:

At Philip and Emma's (no, not the Emma that he was with at Oxford, the Emma who was with my friend Mark - please try to keep up) - who live just round the corner from Jane and Gali's house.

And here are some shots from the wedding:

 

What a lovely family. Fuck cancer, as Jane said repeatedly.