My first attempt at interviewing the internationally famous Irish charity worker, children’s rights campaigner and writer, Christina Noble, was an unmitigated disaster. Worse still, it happened – or rather didn’t happen – in front of a live audience.

Paul Duane, award-winning director of such films as Barbaric Genius, Natan and Very Extremely Dangerous, is one of the producers of a new documentary about Noble called In a House That Ceased To Be. Directed by Irish filmmaker Ciarín Scott, and shot over five years in Ireland, England, Vietnam, Mongolia, Dubai and America, the film documents Noble’s charity work in Asia. It also examines her struggle to forgive the State which separated her from her brother and two sisters at a young age, the religious orders that systematically abused them all in just about every way imaginable, and her attempts to bring her shattered family back together.
I had seen a rough cut of the documentary last year at a private screening in Letterfrack, just a mile or so down the road from the ruins of the industrial school where Noble’s young brother, Sean, had been physically, sexually and psychologically abused. When he attempted to drown himself in the Atlantic at the age of seven, he was forced to stand for hours in his wet clothes as punishment. Christina, meanwhile, was told by the priests that he was dead; in fact all of the siblings were led to believe that their brothers and sisters were dead.
At times it’s an extremely difficult film to watch. I remember coming out of the screening room in a kind of shell-shocked daze, and suddenly seeing windswept Connemara in a totally different light, trying to imagine just how terrifying those desolate fields, hills and beaches must have seemed to a vulnerable, young, brutalised, Dublin child.
Paul had asked me to supply a quote for the film’s website. I duly obliged: “A brutally raw reminder that Ireland was once run by devils. This powerful film left me in tears of rage.” I wasn’t lying.
Now that the film has finally gone on general release, Paul asked would I be willing to do a public interview with Christina and Ciarín following a screening in Galway’s Eye Cinema? Figuring it’d form the basis of a Hot Press piece, I happily agreed.
I was in a taxi on the way to the cinema when I got a call from Ciarín. She explained that Christina was exhausted from the publicity trail and apprehensive about the interview. Her two sisters, Kathy Hurlow and Philomena Swanson, had been back in Ireland, staying in her Lucan home. In the film, bitterly reluctant to return to the country that had so badly failed them, they’d reunited in Texas – and so this was the first time the sisters had been together on Irish soil in more than fifty years. No wonder Christina was feeling emotionally drained.
I’d seen them being interviewed by Brendan O’Connor on The Saturday Night Show the previous weekend, and it was impossible to miss the extent of the damage that had been inflicted on them. Several times, Christina told her siblings, “I love you.” Watching the interactions between them had made me, at least, feel decidedly uneasy.
Now, at the other end of the phone, Ciarín was asking if I’d concentrate on Christina’s charity work and steer clear of questions about her traumatic background or family situation. My heart sank. This meant dumping most of the questions I’d prepared, but I reluctantly agreed. As things transpired, it simply didn’t matter.
We’d arranged to meet in The g Hotel, which is just beside the Eye Cinema. It was my first time seeing Christina in the flesh. A short, well furnished blonde, wearing a silver jacket and big pink scarf, she looked amazing for a 70-year-old. One glimpse into her eyes, though, and you could sense the hurt inside. She was accompanied by a middle-aged assistant named Jean, a fellow Dubliner who was wearing a large ‘Christina Noble Foundation’ badge on her lapel.
At first, watching Christina in action, I was wondering what on earth Ciarín had been on about. Far from being exhausted, she was bursting with energy, talking nonstop, laughing out loud, and repeatedly high-fiving myself and Australian photographer Boyd Challenger. Boyd has travelled extensively in Vietnam, where Christina initially started her charity work in 1989, and they reminisced about the country and their shared fear of its massive cockroaches. “I love animals,” she told him, “but I can’t fuckin’ stand them fellas.”
The g is Galway’s only five-star hotel, and she was reluctant to be photographed indoors. “I don’t want people thinking that I’m hanging around in these posh places,” she said, in a strong Dublin working class accent. We went out onto the front balcony for the photographs, and then stayed out there to smoke (although she never touches alcohol, Christina was once memorably described as the “drinking, chain-smoking, swearing Mother Teresa”). There was a wedding party in the hotel ballroom and it wasn’t long before she was leading a large group of the guests in a rousing rendition of her signature tune, ‘The Fields of Athenry’.
“Jesus, she’s gas craic altogether, isn’t she?” one of the bridesmaids commented. I agreed. The interview was obviously going to be a hoot.

The screening done, it was time to go into the Eye for the public interview. A long table had been set up just below the screen, with chairs and mics for the three of us.
I plonked my digital recorder down in front of Christina. “What the hell is that?” she asked. “It’s for recording the interview,” I explained. She shot me a glare. “I don’t want this going out on the fuckin’ internet!” Apparently she hadn’t been told that the plan was to run the interview in Hot Press. Slightly thrown, I left it running anyway.
I opened by welcoming Christina to Galway, but ventured that, given her traumatic experiences in its industrial schools, it probably wasn’t her favourite county in Ireland.
Her response was surprisingly aggressive. “Galway didn’t do that! Why wouldn’t I love Galway? I love Galway! I love the Galway people and I love Connemara. Mummy came from Roscommon – well, she came from Carrick-on-Shannon, and my grandfather was Wexford, and me granny was from Tullamore, so they were kind of country people, farmers and stuff like that. So I’ve no problems with this beautiful part of Ireland or any part of Ireland. I do feel that it’s right to…”
She pushed her chair back and stood up, suddenly morphing from loveable granny into orator mode. Her Dublin accent dissolved into a far more refined and distinctive timbre as she held the mic to her lips. “Look, I’ve got to be honest with you… history must never repeat itself, OK? When it comes to the children, when it comes to the poor, when it comes to the vulnerable.”
What can a poor boy do? Wearing my MC hat, I invited her to sit down. “Tough, Olaf!” she snapped, shooting me a glare. “That’s what I do!”
She continued to speak. “To deny history, to deny all this, does nothing for the youth of today because the younger generations must understand what happened in the past and they must never be put through anything like that. No child in the world should ever have to suffer the horrific injustices that so many people have suffered and continue to suffer across our globe.”
She took a dramatic deep breath. “I’m not happy with the laws in Ireland at the moment for children. I just read in the paper this morning that sexual abuse for children takes two years to be dealt with. For little tiny kids, six-year-olds, seven, eight-year-olds, two years? That trauma that those children have suffered… what are they supposed to do with that for two years? And for the rest of their lives? It’s too late, two years. One day is too late...”
Conscious that we were there to discuss the film, I attempted to get things back on track. Several times. To absolutely no avail. “Look, Olaf, you’re not a journalist now,” she told me. “OK?”
No, it wasn’t OK. In fact if I was feeling sensitive, I’d have thought she was being extremely rude. At one stage she paused, and I tried to bring Ciarín into the conversation. “Ciarín, you directed the film. Did you imagine at the beginning that it would take you five years to make?”
Ciarín began to answer, but Christina snatched the mic from her. “This is bigger than all of it, OK?” she said. “Bigger than all of it! And there’s no point in me coming here to answer questions. I have to tell the people exactly what’s happening. And let me tell you exactly what’s happening in our world. I’m sorry, Ciarín. I have to speak it because if I don’t I will carry it back with me across the globe and I’ll ask myself, (low voice) ‘Where was your courage, Christina? Where was your courage?’ So I’m going to tell you. It’s up to you whether you believe it or disbelieve it, but He knows upstairs and there are many who know but don’t have the courage to
say it…”
She spoke for the next forty minutes or so with all the fervor of a TV evangelist, seeming on the verge of tears on several occasions, and positively trembling with rage when she spoke about the hidden scandal of China harvesting the body parts (kidneys and livers, mostly) of abducted Mongolian and Vietnamese children. At no stage was the film mentioned. I attempted to ask questions during her occasional pauses, but eventually realised that there was no point. My interviewee was a runaway train, and there was absolutely no stopping it. A handful of audience members walked out, but most of them stayed.
Eventually the cinema manager signaled to me that it was time to wrap up. This I was more than happy to do. It ended on a light note, with Christina singing ‘Athenry’ again. A number of people filmed it on their mobiles. If you find it somewhere on YouTube, I’m the guy sitting next to her with a dark scowl on my face, stubbornly refusing to join in the chorus.
Truth be told, I was incredibly pissed off. If I’d known that Christina was going to do a solo run, I’d have happily introduced her and let her off. Instead, she had rudely and unnecessarily made a complete muppet out of me.
Ciarín was hugely apologetic afterwards. I wanted to leave, but she convinced me to go back to the hotel for a drink. It was something she’d come to regret.
I was on my second drink when Christina joined us. She vaguely apologised for her behaviour onstage, but not in a way that endeared her to me. She also expressed concern about the fact that I had a recording of her speech. What she had said about the theft of body parts could endanger her work in Vietnam and Mongolia.
“Christina, it was a public event!” I said. “Half the bloody audience was filming it.” “Yeah, but they won’t be putting it up on the internet,” she replied.
I’m not quite sure how it kicked off but suddenly Christina decided to have a go at Ciarín. “When you came to me five years ago and said you wanted to make a documentary, you told me it would be about my charity work,” she hissed, pointing a finger. “But then you realised that the story about me family was a better angle and so you went
with that…”
Best not to repeat the impassioned rant that followed, but, suffice to say, by the time Christina stormed out of the room with an emotionally screamed “FUCK YOU!”, the entire room was listening. It was all deeply unpleasant.
Lesser women would have burst into tears and fled to the nearest bathroom, but Ciarín was impressively sanguine. Indeed, she almost made excuses for Christina’s tantrum. “Olaf, I told you that she was upset beforehand,” she said, calmly. “She’s had a tough few weeks. Something like this was bound to happen. But I’ve been filming her on and off for five years now. I’m well used to her. And I was totally clear with her from the very beginning about the kind of film I wanted to make. She’s just uncomfortable being the centre of attention.”
Soon afterwards, I made my excuses and left. What a night. Totally FUBAR.

The following evening I was on the phone with Hot Press editor, Niall Stokes, explaining why the interview was a write-off. For a start, I had absolutely zero quotes about In A House That Ceased To Be. Niall argued that it would be worth writing about the experience anyway, but I had my doubts.
When I hung up, I saw that I’d missed a call from a number I didn’t recognise. When I called back, it was Christina. “Hi Olaf. Ciarín gave me your number…”
There was a pause.
“Look,” she said, “you probably didn’t get what you needed last night. Honestly, I’m not usually like that. How about we go for lunch tomorrow?”
I was actually scheduled to interview Canadian record producer Daniel Lanois at te time, but lunch with Christina had to take precedence. I arranged to meet her at The Connacht Hotel at 12.30pm.
She called again the following morning shortly after 8am. “Look, I’m giving a talk to the kids at the Dominican College on Taylor’s Hill at 11 o’clock. Do you want to come along to that?”
I was there when she and Jean pulled up at the school gates. As soon as I hopped into the back of the car, she said, “Look, sorry about the other night. I don’t usually lose my temper like that. Maybe once every ten years, I do something like that.”
“That’s alright, Christina,” I said. “We all have our foibles.” She put her hand back for a high five from the passenger seat, and I duly obliged. Peace.
As it happens, my four sisters all attended Taylor’s Hill, but the school has been seriously redesigned since their time. We accidentally wound up knocking on the door of the convent. While we waited, Christina quizzed me a little about my own life. She wondered why I live in Galway when I write for Hot Press. I explained that I travel to Dublin regularly. “I’ve got a nice little house in Lucan,” she said. “You can stay there whenever you want. I’ll give you the key. You can use the car as well, if you want.” Maybe she was trying to make amends, but I genuinely suspect that she simply has a naturally generous nature.
Eventually, an elderly nun came out and explained that the new entrance to the school is down the road. “Thanks very much, Sister,” Christina said. “Sorry to have disturbed ye.” As we walked back to the car, she nudged me in the ribs. “You might think that I’ve gorra problem with nuns and priests after all the shite that happened. But I don’t. One of me best fuckin’ friends is a priest – Father Gerry.” I noted that her Dublin accent had returned with a vengeance.
There were party balloons and a big hand-painted sign saying, ‘Taylor’s Hill Welcomes Christina Noble’ over the entrance to the school. A friendly welcoming committee of three young students, their female teacher and the school headmaster stood by the door.
From the moment we stepped inside , Christina was a revelation. It was as though some internal switch had been flicked. She was excited, enthusiastic and completely OTT in the best possible way. The kids were clearly delighted to see her. “Call me ‘Mama Tina’,” she told them. “That’s what my little tidges in Vietnam and Mongolia call me. I love the little tidges.”
A digital screen in the corridor announced her talk. It was situated just above a statue of the Virgin Mary. Christina made a big show of kissing the enamel forehead, saying, “I love Our Lady. Love her! She’s the reason I’m here today. And I love all of you. You’re all beautiful – each and every one
of you.”
We were escorted to the staffroom, where one of the teachers – who had dog-eared copies of Christina’s two memoirs, Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina – gushingly told her, “You’re my hero.”
“This is Olaf,” Christina said. “He’s a great journalist. He’s a humanitarian journalist. And he’s a really good person. A very kind person. You can tell it when you look into his eyes.” She turned and gave me a meaningful glance. “He doesn’t ever write bad things.”
Gulp!
Twenty minutes and one instant coffee later, she was addressing about 150 female students in Rosary Hall. I tried to record it, but Jean stepped over and disapprovingly shook her head. I wish she hadn’t because, truly, this was the flipside of yesterday’s combustible Christina Noble.
She was absolutely brilliant, speaking from the heart for over an hour without the aid of any notes. It kicked off with her explaining about her impoverished childhood in the Dublin slums, where the clothes “would practically walk off you with the fleas.” She told of how her alcoholic father – a punchdrunk former boxer – would sell everything for more booze. Following the tragic death of her mother, she assumed responsibility for her younger siblings, scavenging cabbage leaves from the street markets to feed them. When she took them to the hospital for a check-up, they were immediately taken into state care. From that point on they were separated, and plunged into a hellish version of Catholic misery and perversion.
Honestly, she was really amazing. It was a young audience, so she refrained from swearing and skipped over most of the grisly details. Instead of telling them about her suffering in the industrial schools, gang rape as a homeless teen runaway in Dublin, lousy marriage to an abusive husband in England, and so on, she simply said, “I have suffered every kind of abuse you can imagine.” Listening to her, it was easy to forgive her outburst in The g Hotel. This was a woman who really has been to hell and back.
She told them, also, about the visionary dream that led her to travel to Vietnam in 1989 and establish the Christina Noble Foundation – a charity that has to date helped over a million children escape the poverty trap.
Her message, or messages, were delivered loud and clear. Avoid drugs and alcohol; don’t be lured by fame or celebrity; be kind to people; don’t worry what others think of you. She was particularly damning of Kim Kardashian. “Yeah, missus, you sold all of your dresses for charity,” she sneered. “And then you made millions and gave the charity 10%. You fuc…you mean aul thing, ye.”
This was Christina as performance artist. The speech went all around the houses. She had them in stitches laughing as she mimed smoking a spliff (“You think this is cool…yeah, maaaaan”). Watching from the back of the hall, I had absolutely no doubt that she was planting some seriously important seeds in the fertile minds of this young and impressionable audience. It ended, as ever, with a rendition of ‘The Fields of Athenry’. Two of the girls also sang for her, and their performances were genuinely stunning. When she thanked them afterwards with hugs and kisses, they both burst into tears.
All of the kids – and their teachers – wanted selfies. Christina hugged and kissed almost everyone. “I love you,” she kept repeating. “I love each and every one of you.” She had been presented with a big bouquet of flowers, which she almost immediately handed to a Nigerian girl. “Here you go, baba! You’re absolutely beautiful. I love you. I really do.”
Eventually we got out of Rosary Hall. Bustling merrily through the school corridors, Christina stopped intermittently and loudly sang, “They tried to make me go to rehab and I said…” She’d swivel her hips and waggle her finger and the kids would all sing back, “No, no, no!” It was hilarious.
When we eventually made it to the car, one of the teachers told her, “Thank you so much for that, Christina. They loved you. That’s been the highlight of my year. Actually, it’s probably been the highlight of my entire teaching career!”
“I love you,” Christina replied, giving her a bear hug. “And I loved all of them little tidges. Please god, we’ll meet again.”

We retreated to the Ardilaun Hotel. While Christina went to the bathroom, I spoke with Jean. She runs her own computing business, which pays the bills, and otherwise volunteers for the Christina Noble Foundation. She regularly travels to Vietnam and Mongolia with Christina, where they oversee the building of houses, creches and hospitals. They also help impoverished families start up their own businesses in order to become self-sufficient. The only reason they’re not there right now is because Christina’s doctor ordered her to get some rest in Ireland. She suffers from a number of serious medical complaints.
The charity requires about two million a year, which is peanuts compared to other charities. “But you should see what we do with it,” Christina said, arriving back. She takes a working wage, but there’s no pension plan. As for governments, “They don’t give us a single dime.” They recalled a recent nasty encounter with the Mongolian mafia, which very nearly ended in a kidnapping. Christina isn’t very popular with the local criminals. The pedophiles aren’t too fond of her either. “I can smell a pedophile within a few minutes, she says, “and I’m never wrong”.
Eventually, I took out my digital recorder. “Christina, let’s do the interview now,” I said. She gave me a puzzled look. “But do you not have all you need by now?” “No, I don’t,” I insisted. “I need some direct quotes.”
She suggested doing it outside so we could smoke. Fine by me. Jean waited at the table and we went out the front door and found a quiet bench.
She proved to be quite a mercurial interviewee. Many of my questions went ignored or unanswered. Those she did choose to answer often took a lot longer than they should have. Every time she mentioned a song, she sang it to me. It was hard to tell if she was doing it deliberately or if she’s just a natural rambler. Then again, she is 70 years of age.
I began by asking her if she speaks in many schools. “I speak in schools all over the world,” she explained. “America, the children in Harlem, the Harlem schools, the Bronx. Australia, New Zealand, Tazmania, Britain, Ireland, Hong Kong, Vietnam as you know, Mongolia, and other countries. I can’t remember them all offhand.”
Presumably she has no fear of flying. “I don’t like flying, Olaf. I do it, and I have to say, I know it’s a strange old thing, I get all positive. I say I have to be positive. I have been in one, I’m not going to talk about it, it wasn’t good, I’m just going to tell you that. You can’t explain it, because something kicks into your body, I suppose. But no, I don’t like airplanes. And I’ve gone on little rocky things, dangerous little things. Once I was coming from Siberia and, by Jesus, I saw the smoke coming up and all that. I forgot about that. It was very dodgy. We should have gotten into Moscow at half-eight, but we got in at half past three or four in the morning.”
In A House That Ceased To Be isn’t the only Christina Noble film to have been made recently. Last year saw the release of a Stephen Bradley directed biopic called Noble, starring Deirdre O’Kane in the title role. “Watching the films being made… even though I’m not in them as an actor or something like that, it was interesting. I would’ve been very involved in a lot of stuff.”
The Noble premiere was a great night. “Oh, they had a ball that night, did you hear about that? Said they’d never seen anything like it. It was massive, I mean huge. All my doctors went and they all had a fantastic night. I mean it was packed to capacity. There were actors and singers and everything, but they had a ball. And I brought some of the girls, like Theresa and all the kids whose lives are a bit difficult, because I wanted them to experience it. Everyone still talks about it and says, ‘We never had a night like it!’”
What did she think of the film itself?
“The film was brilliant,” she enthused. “Well, in comparison to my life, it’s a very nice film. What’s in it is real, you know? But a film takes an hour and a half or something. I don’t know how long it was, but compared to my life, for me looking at it – other people cried and everything, but for me it was just very nice. Of course there’s parts that are a bit sad, but I think Stephen Bradley did a brilliant job, from that a life that had, as he said, there’s about twenty movies in it. It’s won quite a few awards, and I think it’s going for more in America now.”
The documentary was a very different proposition altogether. “That was very tough because, you’ve got to remember, it took five years. I mean Stephen had to do a lot of research, but it’s different. I think the other one was very hard, because the crew had to see things that maybe they’ve never seen before. I’m so protective about children, and so protective about staff and everything, and I was still cautious of any kind of exploitation or anything like that.
“The only thing I insisted on is that what you see is what you get, and there’s not going to be any setups, and no telling them to stand there or do that. I said, ‘You can fuck off if you think that you can set anything up, it’s not gonna happen!’ Because a filmmaker wouldn’t need to set anything up. You see the reality of everything, and they did, God help them, and it was hard for them, there’s no question about that.”
Is it not just as hard for her to witness suffering first-hand? She paused and took a long drag of her cigarette.
“Yeah, it’s hard. But I’m used to them, you see, you’ve got to remember that. I’m used to them. I mean, that’s a bit of a stupid thing to say: one never gets used to the suffering and destruction of human life. But you see what is beautiful is the difference that has been made, and that’s the hope that continues. If you lose hope, you’ve lost it all, there’s no point in going on. And you’d get the moments of a sense of hopelessness, a sense of: how much more can my body take, my mind take?”
The threat of despair is counter-balanced, however, by the good things. “The positive side is just amazing,” she reflected. “There’d be something wrong with you if you wanted to go into struggle and pain all the time. No, we have magic, we have magic. The children say, ‘Mama Tina makes magic real!’ That’s what the kids say. I think that answers everything.”
Christina has three kids of her own, and is a grandmother of five. How did the family feel when she took off to Vietnam in 1989?
“Well, they were raised by then,” she explained. “There’s no way I would have left them when they were young. I had a tough time when I was married as well – in England. But no. They always knew that was the dream, you know, and they said, ‘You can go, mum, if you want to go’. I told them I might leave for a little while, and another little while, but they insisted it was okay. But even before that I was helping people. In Birmingham I helped the homeless a lot, and not just giving them the food, helping them properly. Some girls might get into trouble by the bad people, to make them bad girls – not bad girls, but do bad things – and I would help them out of the situations they were in.”
Talk turned to the subject of forgiveness. “Oh, I forgive,” she said of her industrial school abusers. “Oh my god, I forgive. I forgive. I couldn’t live any other way. How could you live if you don’t forgive? You can’t. You’d destroy yourself. It would eat your body up. I wouldn’t be alive.”
It is powerfully evident in the documentary, however, that she’s still angry about the cruel treatment meted out to her young brother. “It was horrible to see a beautiful person, who couldn’t hurt a fly, suffer so much, by so many in that place,” she told me. “Fucking bastards they were, and I have no problem saying that, the dirty bastards. That’s what they were. And all the kids who died, they’ve only got, some of them got names now, because an American guy spent a fortune in trying to find out who they were. But they still have graves with no fucking names, and all little kids as young as seven-years-old. They fucking beat the shit out of the kids as well as the sexual abuse and everything that went on.”
She repeated that she forgives them, as if to convince herself…
“Yeah, I forgive them,” she said. “But I won’t forget it. If you forget it, you’re denying. You’re in denial, that’s what I think.”
Does she still go to mass?
“Not a lot. But I do go to mass sometimes. I like to go to mass. I’ll go to the church when there’s very few people around because I can contemplate better and be more involved with my feelings. I do love Our Lord, by the way. I do understand other religions as well, that they have their God, their prophets and everything, and a higher power up there, but that’s part of my culture and I was brought up with that. That’s the only one I really know about. But I wouldn’t dismiss other people, their gods or anything like that. I’ve worked with Arab people and Muslims: I’ve worked with all kinds of people. I don’t give a shit what anyone is, as long as they’re good.”
Christina’s charity work has been widely recognised internationally and in 2003, she was given an OBE. “Have I met the Queen? Yeah,” she recalled. “She was very nice and I met Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He’s very nice – people think he’s not, but he is. And Prince Charles was lovely as well.”
Presumably her mantle-piece is straining under the weight of all of her awards and honours? “You get loads of things, you wouldn’t remember them all,” she smiled, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t remember them all, but you know Michael Flatley and I got a doctorate from… where was it? Was it Trinity or UCD? I don’t know. I shouldn’t say that, because I got one from every one of them, but the one with Michael was great. We have great photos together. I should give you a copy. I love dancing as well. I used to be a great tap dancer.” She laughed suddenly. “Well, I wasn’t, that’s a lie. I was an okay tap dancer.”

Christina Noble isn’t quite sure what the future holds. She is a force of nature, but even her next trip is currently uncertain.
“I’m only back about two-and-a-half months or something,” she confided. “About two months. I came back just before Christmas, because the doctor sent me back, because of my blood pressure, and it was too dangerous for fear of a stroke or a heart attack. I was upset over the village we had built in Mongolia. I didn’t think the village was done right, because I had it revamped and I didn’t think they’d done it right, and I really lost my cool.”
I can imagine…
“You see, it takes a long time,” she said, “and it’s very expensive out there. You wouldn’t think it. If things are not done right, I’m real strict about money being used. Nothing must be wasted. I don’t do any counting, I’m not an accountant, but we have the best. And even that’s never enough for me. I still send inspectors and everything. But I want it done properly for the children. They must have the best.”
Just before we went back inside for lunch, I asked if Christina had a motto in life.
“Yeah, I suppose I have. Like ‘do the right thing’, that’s all. I keep everything very simple. I don’t go into all that philosophy stuff. And keeping everything simple is the way to go, because you can do so much with simplicity.”
We ate our lunch and continued to chat. Inevitably, her off the record stories and anecdotes were far better. There was a moment when I realised that the after-effects of the night before had been completely dissipated and I’d totally warmed to her. Sure, she can be difficult, and she’s undoubtedly damaged, but her heart is indisputablyy in the right place.
Whatever faults she might have, Christina Noble is a truly great human being. Thirty minutes later, as their car drove off, a Leonard Cohen line came to mind: “There is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.”