Tans took medicine twice a day, morning and evening. It was often my job to make sure it was taken every night. Wherever we were in the world or what time we went to bed, it had to be taken. There was the ciclosporin and the Imuran for anti-rejection of the heart; there were water tablets. Even if we’d had a bunch of drinks, we had to remember; fortunately, after all those years there was a kind of mechanism in her head, so she knew she had to take them. But if she’d had one too many glasses of champagne – really, that was her only vice when it came to drinking – then it became my job: 50mg of this, 25 of that, something else of the other. Actually, it would scare me to death that Tans would miss something – it wouldn’t have killed her, but the whole regimen would have been out of sync and that would have been dangerous.
The ciclosporin was used to mitigate the chance of rejection, but it’s a tough drug, especially as it can lead to a greater chance of cancers (nowadays, anti-cancer drugs are added to the regime). In addition, her immune system was suppressed by the drugs she took, which meant she was more prone to infections. Also, her kidneys were badly affected; she had the gout and there were two bouts of cervical cancer that she had to face. She was so tough about it all, but it was so much for one person to take.
It was the semi-annual and annual trips to Harefield, though, that were the biggest stresses for Tans.
We went together to Harefield for her check-ups; often, they’d coincide with her birthday (and, therefore, Kaley’s), so it could get stressful in early April as the Harefield trip approached. Tans was determined though to be just another patient – yes, she was married to someone famous, but she never made anything of that at Harefield, and neither did I. When she was there, she was Tanya Jones, transplant recipient, not Tanya Jones, wife of Vinnie Jones. In fact, she had hundreds of offers through the years to do modelling or interviews and she turned it all down – she was adamant that nothing she did would appear to be exploiting the fact that Harefield had saved her life; she didn’t want anything to appear as though she was special. Tans was terrified of letting the doctors down. She knew what she’d been given was such a privilege and she would never use my fame, or our fame, to jump in front of one person.
The days at Harefield would start early in the morning. We’d line up with everyone else and wait our turn for Tans to have blood work done, a stress test and an angiogram. The walk to the operating theatre where they did the angiograms was always terrifying to her. In the beginning, it could take a couple of days to get all the tests done, though later Tans could be in and out in a day. Still, she’d get herself all teary and scared on the way to the theatre and she’d make me promise that I’d be outside when she come out, which I was – every time. Tans always used to say to Dr Mitchell, ‘Can I have a little bit more gin and tonic?’ meaning the sedative. It was an incredibly invasive procedure – they’d have to send a little camera up through her groin and into the heart to check it was in good shape – but it was also stressful because we were afraid of what they might find. And Tans always said she could feel the camera going through her, which she found petrifying.
After the angiogram was complete, they’d wheel her into the recovery room and she’d have her little sleep. I’d have her little list of food to get for her because she’d be starving when she woke up. I would wait until she was comfortable, we’d do the kiss throw and catch thing as we always did when I was away somewhere, and then I’d fly up into the town of Harefield to the bakers and get her stuff; she loved little cucumber sandwiches and cakes and crisps. As Tans came too, she saw all that food waiting for her and it was like Christmas morning for her.
Then, we waited. This was the hardest part. ‘What do you think?’ she’d say, over and over. ‘What did Dr Mitchell say?’
I’d say, ‘Oh, he’s so pleased,’ even though I hadn’t spoken to him. Sometimes it would be 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock at night – the hospital became kind of spooky then – and we’d sit there holding hands, waiting for those results.
Eventually we’d troop down to Mitchell’s office, and every time he’d say, ‘Brilliant, Tanya! Heart’s great.’
We lived off that. For weeks and months, we’d live on that because, in a real way, it was Tanya getting her life back all over again. At the start it was twice a year, then once, then every other year, but it was always the same: we’d stress and worry and fret that her heart had something wrong, and then they’d do the day of tests and we’d get the all-clear, and the sense of relief was so profound.
Going to Harefield really put things in perspective. Each time we’d try to avoid looking at the list that was up of recipients who were still alive, because we knew a lot of them. But that list got thinner and thinner as the years went by. One year, Tans asked a nurse about a guy called Tommy Flanagan – he was a lovely bloke she’d gotten to know over her time going back to Harefield. ‘How’s Tommy? Has Tommy been in?’ Tans said.
There was a horrible pause and the nurse looked away. We knew what that meant. Tans used to get kind of angry because it would be all these names and written next to each one was, ‘one year’, ‘two years’, ‘10 years’, ‘15 years’, ‘20 years’, but that list, with her on it, just got thinner and shorter.
There were other stresses at Harefield, too. People quite naturally wanted to talk to us – Tans was quite a famous recipient and I was well-known, too – but we just wanted to get our heads down, get on with it and get out. Tans shunned any limelight.
One day, I left her to go and get the food and when I got back, there was a woman I hadn’t seen before in the room with her. Tans was recovering, still mostly out of it, and I asked the nurses who this woman was. They told me she’d claimed to be family, but certainly no one I’d ever heard of.
Let’s just say that when it became clear it was a journalist pretending to be a friend of Tans, it didn’t end that well for them.
To her dying day, Harefield was everything to Tans. She adored the staff – Dr Mitchell and the nurses. They were like angels to her.
With all the stress of having to go to Harefield regularly, and the bad publicity that I sometimes still got for my on-the-field antics, we needed somewhere much more private than Box Lane, so it was time to move again. This time, we picked a place in Tring, called Cedars.
This was a proper house – the dream house of our lives – 9,000 square feet on six acres. It was Charlie big bananas. You could get into third gear along the driveway, that’s how long it was. We paid a million quid for it, then renovated it to the tune of another million.
We had six bedrooms, including the master suite that was the size of some houses. It was so big you could make a phone call across it. Kaley’s room was vast, too – the best in the house, probably. The kitchen was 62 feet long by 30 feet wide, amazing. The house itself had an odd layout, though – it was sort of separated in the middle by a long walkway, open to the elements. I wanted to join it up properly, to make one structure of the whole thing, so I had huge arched windows built to fill the open spaces in the walkway. I even built a trout lake with a lovely fishing hut on it – a one-bedroom fishing hut! We had beautiful big avenues and lawns.
With my football career over, the movies had kicked in big time, as had other things in the world of entertainment.
In 2001, I somehow landed a gig appearing before the Queen in the seventy-third Royal Variety Performance. I sang and danced my way through ‘Macavity the Mystery Cat’ in a tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Before the show I found myself in a dressing room downstairs with Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson, until someone said, ‘Oh, Elton’s upstairs,’ so I went up to see him instead. There was a ton of red wine there and Elton wasn’t drinking, so I helped myself rather liberally – perhaps that’s why, when I got to meet the Queen, I tipsily said, ‘Is anybody using your Cup Final tickets this year, Ma’am?’ (This was November, so god knows why I thought she’d have her tickets already!).
Everyone told Tans she should meet the Queen too, but as ever
she was just too modest and too supportive of me to care – ‘This is Vin’s night,’ she said. Later, though, we convinced her to meet Her Maj, but instead of the usual ‘Ma’am’ rubbish, Tans just said, ‘Oh, hello!’ to her. We loved Tans for that; that was Tans – no bull, no side, just a real person.
A year later, on 2 November 2002, I was lucky enough to release a record called Respect. I’d always loved music, so this was a thrill for me. I covered a load of great songs – ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’, ‘Dance to the Music’, ‘Dock of the Bay’, ‘High Ho Silver Lining’, ‘Mustang Sally’, ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’, ‘In The Midnight Hour’ – and a whole bunch of others. I even got on Top of the Pops singing Jim Croce’s ‘Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown’, which to my 15-year old daughter was pretty cool – if you look closely at the video of it, you can see her dancing away in the front row – a bit like her mum always being her brother’s biggest supporter.
Tans supported her daughter completely, too.
Even when her health was out of whack, she’d show up at the lacrosse matches and the netball, at the sports day, or the plays, or at the cathedral when Kaley was in the choir. But Kaley was having a tough time at school. We’d sent her to Stowe – I always wanted the best education for my kids (we also sent Aaron to private school) – but the place was filled with kids who cared more about status than anything. They called her Mini Vinnie, which was ridiculous, and the day she accidentally caught someone in the face with a lacrosse stick of course the press had a field day given her connection to me. But it was a party at our new house that really brought it all to a head.
I was away filming Eurotrip and Kaley took the opportunity to invite some school friends over for a low-key party. Tans and her best friend at the time, Denise, were going to be there in the kitchen so nothing could go wrong. Kaley invited maybe 50 people, tops, but everyone in the whole school found out and they showed up. It was Easter break and they’d all travelled in from all over the country; it was ridiculous. They even brought tents with them. One boy proudly made it his business to go to house parties and trash the place – that was his thing, apparently. I wish I’d been there to see him.
The party quickly ran out of control and Kaley locked herself in our bedroom. Meanwhile, the kids discovered my stash of 100 bottles of 1985 Lynch-Bages – Tans caught one of them smashing a bottle open so that he could drink it.
It was a complete nightmare and made worse by the fact that one of the boy’s dads worked for the Daily Mail. One boy had brought weed and he was smoking it in one of the bushes out front, so the Mail said it had been a druggy party, which it wasn’t.
But it was a disaster – one kid even found Aaron’s air rifle and blasted out the window in his room with it. Tans and Denise finally managed to get rid of everyone and called a glazier to fix the window. It was decided that the story would be downplayed for me; problem was, I found out about it via a little piece in the Daily Mail. Tans and Kaley didn’t tell me about the window, though, so imagine my confusion a while later when I told Tans that I’d met a bloke who claimed he’d been at our house fixing a window – he even said that it had been shot out. I just thought the guy was high or something.
That party was the final straw for Kaley – she left Stowe after that and I don’t blame her. And I also don’t blame her and Tans for not telling me about it (though I should have guessed when I saw that our white carpets were no longer white).
They always had such a special bond, those two. There are lots of reasons for their closeness – daughters and mothers and all that for a start. But in their case, there was also the fact of how Kaley came into the world. She understood what her mother had gone through to give birth to her and Tans, in her turn, knew how near she’d been to never seeing Kaley grow up. Consequently, they were closer than anything; you really had to see it to believe it. This continued right up to Tans’ dying day and, in the last year, I could see how Kaley’s love became deeper and deeper, if such a thing was even possible, as she nursed her mother through the final stages of her illness.
I’m so proud of what Kaley did, and of who she is. She’s one of the loveliest people you could wish to meet and she’s been the rock that has held us all together. She’s truly her mother’s daughter, that much is for certain.
13
VIRGIN TO JAPAN
In May 2003, I took a flight to Japan. And everything came crashing down for me this time.
I wish drink wasn’t even a part of this book; now, six years sober and counting, it feels like a different life. But I have to own what I did, and what happened on the Virgin flight to Japan was perhaps my lowest point. There’s no excuse for it.
I had been drinking, as ever, and three hours into the flight I was chatting with some folks from Carlton TV at the bar of the aircraft in first class. I’d had too much; I got lairy at a guy who was trying to calm me down and I slapped him and pushed his head into a window. Then it got even worse: I went off at the guy again.
Eventually I fell asleep, but by the time I woke up in Japan, everything had changed in my life. As I told the press outside the court back in the UK in a statement, ‘I regret the incident deeply and pleaded guilty to both counts. [I] will complete the punishment with grace and thank the court and the Probation Service.’ And I meant it; what I did was boorish and awful.
It was only me who kept fucking it up, being a fucking stupid fucking bloke who wanted to be a fucking main show man, fucking boozing and taking his fucking childhood out on anybody that got in his way. In some ways these were wasted years – wasted years of love, in a sense.
There could have been more time and effort from me. But when I fucked up with the booze it was only Tans I was bothered about – hurting her was what killed me, punished me. Seeing her so desperately upset and what I’d done to her was my punishment.
I never told Tans this, but the night before sentencing, my lawyer for the air rage case told me, ‘If we’d have gone to Crown Court, you’d have got nine months. As it’s just the Magistrate’s, you’ll get three, and you’ll do about six weeks. Bring your wash bag.’ (I did indeed take a bag of toiletries to the court.) I got lucky in the end – I was probably the last person who ever had air rage like that and didn’t go to prison. I got more community service and more fines, but I also suffered in bigger ways.
When the story broke, we hadn’t been in the house in Tring all that long, and financially it was straining us as we’d gone over budget on the renovations. Knowing all that, my manager called Tans and gave her the truth: ‘Tanya, get out. The dream’s over. There’s no repairing this. Sell that fucking house. Straight away. You’ve got to think of you. I’ll look after Vinnie. There isn’t much we can do. All the endorsements are going to end. You’ve got to sell that house and look after you and Kaley.’
It was tough to hear that he’d made that call, but he was right. I did indeed lose all my endorsements, everything. And I rated him highly for caring for Tans and Kaley that day. His name was Peter Burrell. He still looks after Frankie Dettori.
But I only tell this story so that you can know what Tanya Jones said when I got back from Japan.
At the airport on my return I was arrested, then charged. I couldn’t believe that yet again I’d dropped Tans and Kaley into this kind of thing. When would I learn? I was so afraid of how hurt Tans would be; we’d finally gotten our dream house, spent all that money on it, and now this.
When I got out of jail, I drove home to her and Kaley. I was petrified – not for me, but for the hurt I’d caused her, and the fact that we were facing financial ruin.
And do you know what she said to me?
‘I don’t care about the house. I don’t need six acres. Rent it out. Get us a caravan – you, me, and Kaley, in a caravan. I’m fine.’
How do you measure a life like the one Tanya Jones led? I’m trying to here, in these pages, but nothing I say will come close to the full worth of her. She wasn’t a saint, or perfect, or too sweet to be true, or holier than t
hou. Tans was just the embodiment of love, of understanding, of caring for people. She fed Bill the homeless guy and took him to the doctor; she would spend hours listening to my friends open their hearts to her; she forgave all of us for our fuck-ups. If you were in with Tanya Jones, then you were in for life. She never forgot a slight – she was no pushover. But if she loved you, she found a way to forgive you quickly and love you harder than ever before. Perhaps, because of what she went through giving birth to Kaley, she’d seen how life can be taken away and how precious it is, and how we should all make the most of every second. Sure, we fought sometimes, and she had that annoying habit of being able to remember everything from the night before, and from years ago, when perhaps you had had too much to drink and could barely recall anything. She wasn’t about to waste time holding grudges, though.
So, I’d screwed everything on a Virgin flight and now I had to work out what to do. First thing was I rented the Tring house to Walter Swinburn, the jockey. I was afraid it would be way too big for him – he was a jockey, after all – but he had six kids, so he was all set. Then I did a few acting jobs and got a bunch of money together, enough to buy another place up the road on Shootersway, Berkhamstead. It was a great brick house, Georgian, imposing, big pillars outside – really beautiful. That was another dream I ticked off, living on Shootersway – when I was a kid, everyone knew Shootersway. You’d made it if you moved there. And I had, though in odd circumstances.
But already my life was half in the States and half in the UK. America was calling and I was falling for the place.
Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya Page 12
