'Wild, sweet, brave - but my daughter was doomed by one silly mistake': A mother's searingly honest account of facing the cruellest loss of all

In the fullness of life and beauty: Francesca Luard died in 1994 after contracting the HIV/AIDS virus

We all carry luggage through our lives, burdens we can’t put down. Heaviest of these, for a mother, is losing a child. The death of an infant at birth is hard enough, as I know well from the loss of two newborn boys.
But for it to happen to a daughter in the fullness of youth and beauty — not yet 30, ready to find a love that lasts and have children of her own. That’s not the way it’s meant to be.
For my own sake, and that of my beloved daughter Francesca, who died 18 years ago, I remember the good times: days of sunshine in the Andalucian valley we called home when the children were young and school was reached on donkey-back. And later in France in the snowy uplands of the Languedoc where we shopped for the Sunday pot-au-feu, a winter dish of beef in broth.
The disease that killed Fran in 1994 was then so shocking, so untreatable that a few years before a national campaign had been mounted to explain the risks: HIV/Aids. Plastered on billboards were warnings of the dangers of careless sexual behaviour — aimed, everyone knew though nobody said so, at high-risk groups in the gay community.
For a young woman such as Fran, neither a needle-dependent drug-user, nor promiscuous, nor a casualty of a medical misfortune, such a diagnosis was unthinkable — particularly to me, her mother.
The odds were, the doctors said, she’d contracted it through unprotected sex. Her romantic life had always been what she’d described as ‘low-key’. Indeed, it seemed that in the grip of a love affair, she had made one foolish mistake — and was to pay a terrible price.
Fran had three siblings — her elder brother Casper, and younger sisters Poppy and Honey. My late husband Nicholas and I had had four children within five years — quite a handful.
Second of our children and eldest of our girls, Fran was born blue on a frozen January morning in 1965, strong-willed and battling for life, a near-casualty of being born with the same incompatible blood group, rhesus negative, that clashed with mine and made my babies prone to being stillborn, and which had carried away two of her infant brothers before her.
She was fiercely independent, protective of her younger siblings, thick-as-thieves with her elder brother, quick-witted and capable of anything she set her mind to. She was the first to find friends in any school — and there were plenty. My husband was a travel writer so family life became peripatetic.
When the children were very young we had lived in Andalucia, followed by a year in the Languedoc. Even when we returned to London for schooling, we still spent summers travelling through Europe in a campervan.

 

Like mother, like daughter: Elisabeth pictured with her second child and eldest daughter Francesca in 1970

Fran was as much a companion as daughter. We are — we were — physically alike. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, broad-shouldered, strong in body and mind. Fran swam, danced, loved maths, acquired languages with ease, answered back when challenged — and so do I.
Despite doing a degree in biology at the University of London, she was to follow in her parents’ footsteps by becoming a writer. She moved into a shared flat in Notting Hill and took a job at a music paper, which led to interviews with pop stars and eventually a shopping column in a national newspaper (this one, as it happens).
But as soon as she received her diagnosis in 1991, she announced: ‘Life is far too short for shopping’ and promptly cleared her desk.
The first warning of her disease had been a stubborn bout of TB she’d contracted a year earlier on a walking holiday in Nepal. Despite treatment with antibiotics on two occasions, it kept returning. At this point her doctor suggested a test. Fran had studied HIV as part of her biology degree, but how could she possibly have thought she would contract it?
I accompanied her to the hospital to be told she had two years, maybe four. My mind has erased the memory of it. All I recall is a fervent wish that I could somehow change places with her.

Nicholas’s response was to set off on a six-month walking pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago in northern Spain. He saw it as his penance for having been a bad father. ‘Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted,’ laughed Fran. Black humour had always been our family’s way of coping.
As for her siblings, they had been through many trials together, but none so challenging. They could not have been more protective and supportive. On the night of the diagnosis, Fran had slept at her flat with her sister, Poppy, curled up on the sofa outside her door.
Meanwhile, the news spread around her friends, but she had no need to explain herself to a generation more accepting than mine. And when it came to the carrier of the virus, Fran realised he probably hadn’t known he’d had it, so was no more culpable than she.
But Fran had to make sure the infection wasn’t passed on, so she phoned the man she believed she’d caught it from and broke the terrible news to him.
In those days, remember, HIV was a death sentence. This, Fran knew instinctively, would change and become like diabetes — controllable through drugs, by no means life-threatening. Too late for her.
Those were ignorant times. ‘Don’t be angry, mother,’ Fran would say when one of the medical men had been unusually crass. ‘The poor fellow’s scared out of his wits.’

'The first warning of her disease had been a stubborn bout of TB she’d contracted a year earlier on a walking holiday in Nepal. Despite treatment with antibiotics on two occasions, it kept returning. At this point her doctor suggested a test.'

She was right: the family doctor advised us all to keep our eating instruments separate. Not knowing any better, I painted a little scarlet heart on Fran’s coffee mug and was about to start on the forks and spoons when she gently removed the varnish bottle and painted a red heart on every mug on the rack. ‘If that’s the way you get it, Ma, we’ll all be dead.’
But at the same time, Fran was careful to protect her family from the guilt that can all too easily follow.
She was realistic — honest, too: ‘This is my disease, not yours. Accept that and be glad. Don’t think I’m brave. Don’t think I don’t wish this had happened to anyone else, including you.’
Meantime, she said to me, we had to make plans. Fran needed somewhere to live where she felt safe — her father and I were living on the Island of Mull at the time so this could provide temporary refuge, but not a home.
A one-room flat in Notting Hill no bigger than a railway carriage was just about affordable without a flatmate: ‘I know there’s no risk to anyone else, but others don’t.’
She would also need a regular income — modest, just enough to pay her bills.
Thankfully, my literary agent, a kind man with a successful agency and daughters of his own, agreed to provide it against her mother’s future earnings.
To my delight, Fran went on to choose a new career as an artist, painting in double-quick time a dozen head-and-shoulder portraits of herself, unsmiling and fierce: ‘Concentrating,’ she explained, ‘not frowning.’ 
The portraits earned her a scholarship to one of the few independent London art schools, the Byam Shaw, where I too had briefly trained.
She loved the life — bought the beret, rode the bicycle — but most of all, she enjoyed the anonymity.

Keeping her memory alive: Elisabeth Luard lost her daughter Francesca when she was just 29 years old

Her work was always drawn from life: Saturday crowds in Portobello market, Sunday gatherings outside the Baptist church, vivid sketches of bullfighters. And that was how it was. When she was working, she was happy. When she couldn’t work, it was not for lack of desire.
‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ she’d say. ‘The spirit is willing but the body’s a mess.’ As her condition deteriorated her visits became more frequent and longer. My memory of her is strongest at Brynmerheryn, a house in the foothills of the Cambrians in Wales. I have lived here now for 20 years, taking pleasure in its peace.
The house is by no means grand, but old. Mortality is natural in a place where so many have been born and lived and died. My husband Nicholas’s ashes have been buried here for eight years, giving vigour to an apple tree in the woodland — a fitting resting place for a man who loved the wilderness.
These days, when I wander in search of autumn fungi down the old railway line that crosses the Cors Caron, a seven-mile stretch of marshland visible from my window, I know the exact distance my daughter could walk when she was ill or well.
I remember Fran as the seasons change; in summer when the blueberries are ripe on the slopes of Ystwyth valley, in winter when the ravens flap overhead like wet sheets on a washing line.
But most of all now, when spring is on its way. I cannot mourn my daughter. At least not within her hearing. And there’s no certainty she’s not around to check. ‘The only time I get religious,’ she had written, ‘is when I’m very unhappy. I place myself in God’s hands like a baby, and I feel safe.’
I say ‘had written’ because, unbeknown to us, Fran had been keeping a diary. It was only discovered after her death, when her brother found it in her bedside drawer while clearing her flat.
‘Maybe [writing] this is what I am meant to be doing,’ she began her story. ‘For no better reason than to get it off my chest so I don’t think about it any more. Maybe it will help others.’
Later she added: ‘The strange thing is that [my diagnosis] immediately became part of me. It became part of the tapestry of my life.’ She portrayed me as ageing ten years when I realised what was to come, and of looking at the doctor who delivered the news with hate in my eyes. She chided me for unfairness, but added: ‘The expression remained.’ Fran’s thoughts and feelings appear as the penultimate chapter of my own autobiography-with-recipes, Family Life — Birth, Death And The Whole Damn Thing.
I had set my work aside during Fran’s illness. I had thought I would feel this way for good, but I returned to the book after the end had come.
She was 29 years old when the end happened in a bleak side ward in St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Throughout the last week, her family took turns to keep her company.
As for me, there was not an inch between us in those last hours. ‘Don’t be sad, Mother. Change the subject. Tell me what we’ll have for supper. Read me the recipes.’
And then of her father: ‘Look after Nicholas, take him away for an hour or two, he seems so lost.’ That was true. ‘And then come back.’
Cradled in my arms in her bubble of love and angels, her spirit left her on November 24, 1994. The world outside her little room was busy with World Aids Day, the first of many. Red ribbons were worn, hope for the future — too late for Fran, but the thought would have pleased her.
Until the last, she had forbidden my mourning. ‘Don’t let me catch you wearing widows’ weeds,’ she said. And ‘None of that, Ma!’ when she’d caught a tear in my eye or waver in my voice.
Which is not to say I always obey her wishes. Whenever I travel to the sun, I pack her cotton sunhat with its tattered sprig of cherry-blossom stitched to the brim, and wear it so she, too, can feel the warmth.
On the fourth finger of my left hand, tucked behind the wedding band, I wear a silver ring she loved.
At the time of her death, none of my other children were married or had children. This has changed — a reason for happiness for them and me — and seven beloved grandchildren keep their doting grandmother on her toes. They know they had an aunt and how she would have loved them. 
‘I am unremarkable,’ she had written in her diary. ‘Except for the fact I believe myself to be truly remarkable.’ 
Francesca — daughter, sister, friend — was wild and sweet and generous and brave. And I’m proud that I was — still am — her mother.

• Elisabeth Luard’s three memoirs-with-recipes are published in paperback by Bloomsbury on April 24, 2013.