Life Changing Jane Garvey
What happens when your ordinary life takes an extraordinary turn – a single moment that changes everything forever… nothing ever is quite the same?
I’m a big fan of presenter Jane Garvey for her natural warmth and relaxed style. She’s not afraid to get to the nitty gritty and ask for the difficult detail.
Life Changing is a series of conversations with people for whom everything changed in just a moment.
The first episode – you can catch it on BBC Sounds – is with a young doctor Grace Spence Green who was out shopping in London in 2018 when a man jumped from a high storey of a shopping centre and landed directly on her.
He left her paralysed – in that moment, her life changed utterly.
But she’s a woman who has no time for anger or bitterness, “If I had any anger directed at this man, I would just feel bitterness,” she tells Garvey.
I listened to Harriet Ware-Austin, a human rights adviser, who spent her childhood in Ethiopia.
It was a wild and beautiful and wonderful time as she describes it.
The locals called her “the little girl on the big white horse” – she endured two hours of home schooling from her mother every day then galloped off.
Her two elder sisters, Caroline and Jane, were at boarding school in England. After a beautiful holiday in Ethiopia, the family went to the airport to watch them return to England on the plane. Harriet stood with her parents in the airport’s viewing lounge and, with countless other families whose children were on board, watched as the plane took off, then crashed.
It was a pivotal point in her family’s life – the description of how the tragedy unfolded before their eyes, how her mother held her hand and, at that moment, thought that how she behaved would shape her small daughter’s life forever.
Jane was killed instantly. Caroline survived the crash but was badly burned and died afterwards.
It was, she said, as if there were two separate childhoods – bookended by the air crash and the loss of her sisters.
We heard the last light and funny messages – “Don’t forget to look after the guineas (pigs)” - recorded by the sisters before they headed off for the airport.
And afterwards, Harriet felt a sense that she needed to try and be the best she could – that she shouldn’t add to her parents’ pain and grief.
But she learned to live with it and not allow it to define her.
This is an inspirational series suited to Garvey’s style and the connection she forms with her interviewees – her compassion.
You can listen back to all the episodes – including the story of Tony O’Reilly who stole 1.75 million euro to feed a gambling habit – on BBC Sounds.
