Kate Garraway gives heartbreaking update on being a single mum on Mother’s Day after death of her husband Derek

There is nothing stronger than tea in the teapot, honest, and it’s early afternoon rather than evening. But given that half this lot have been up since 3am, it feels – and sounds – like a night out with the girls from work. Being in front of the camera may be the natural habitat for the women of Good Morning Britain, but today the setting is a photographic studio rather than a TV one and the laughter is loud.

 

Our day with Susanna Reid, Kate Garraway, Ranvir Singh and Charlotte Hawkins is ostensibly to mark Mother’s Day, and to find out their thoughts on motherhood, although as stickler-for-accuracy Susanna – head girl of the operation, surely – points out, the traditional term is Mothering Sunday. ‘My mum always insisted on it, so my brothers and I still seek out cards that say Mothering Sunday rather than Mother’s Day,’ she says.

What these women don’t know about mothering, particularly what it is to be a working mum, probably isn’t worth knowing. They have seven children between them (Susanna has three boys, Sam, Finn and Jack, aged 22, 21 and 19, Kate has a daughter, Darcey, 19, and son, William, 15, Ranvir’s son Tushaan is 12, and Charlotte’s daughter Ella Rose is ten). Three of the four (only Charlotte is married) have been single mums, and all are members of the ‘sandwich generation’, knee deep in responsibility. Yet it’s a requirement of their job that they have to greet each day with bright smiles.

Kate was hurled into the world of being a single mum when she first nursed her husband Derek through Covid, then lost him to it. She tells me that fellow single mum Ranvir turned out to be her ‘rock’. Ranvir’s marriage collapsed when she was pregnant with Tushaan, and for the last 12 years she has raised him on her own.

‘Before, I was in awe of her,’ says Kate. ‘We’d chat about parenting things – actually, she’d ask my opinion and mostly I’d say, “Let me ask Derek” because he’d trained in psychology and worked with kids, so he always knew more than I did. I remember watching Ranvir juggling it all, thinking, ‘How does she do it?” And then I was a single mother, and Ranvir was the one giving me advice.’

Ranvir nods. ‘I do have very vivid memories of being at some do and chatting to Derek about this parenting thing, which can be terrifying when you’re doing it alone, because there’s no safety net. Or it can feel like there isn’t. But when other women are there to support you, it’s everything.’

Kate agrees. ‘All these amazing women have been there for me. They’re all mums. They understand. They’ve held me up. I honestly don’t think I could have got through the last five or six years without them.’

The first subject these four want to talk about is sleep, of course, or lack thereof. Susanna, 54, and Ranvir, 47, have been on air this morning, and Susanna has also had a power nap, which appears to be the secret of how she managed to raise three sons and work her way to the top of an industry known for its brutality.

Her power nap techniques – imagining she’s swimming – are taken from military training manuals. ‘Sleep is a pillar of my life. You just can’t do the job unless you have enough of it,’ she says.

The chat today is about how on earth you manage to see your mum on Mother’s Day while staying in bed long enough to give your kids the joy of presenting you with breakfast in bed. ‘It’s a nightmare for us,’ says Charlotte, 49. ‘I’m hardwired to be up early. Even if I’m not working, I’ll be awake by 5 or 6am. Ella Rose loves to do breakfast in bed, but she doesn’t get up for hours after that.’

Most working mums would baulk at the idea of a career with 3am rises, but Ranvir points out it actually makes the ‘having-it-all’ thing possible. ‘You have the job and then you can come home and still do the school pick-up.’ Setting the alarm for 2.45am, though, to achieve it all is a tad masochistic. ‘Oh it is, but I think to do breakfast TV you have to have an optimistic approach. You have to have the mindset, “This is the job I always wanted, and how lucky am I to be doing it – and to have the child I was never sure I would have.”‘

But can the four of them really be friends? Don’t daytime telly presenters hate each other? ‘If that was true, you wouldn’t be able to do the job,’ says Charlotte. ‘You’d be miserable.’ How interesting to see them off-duty at the same time, though, because they’re such different characters. Is there a pecking order? ‘Well I’m the oldest, but let’s not remind anyone of that,’ says Kate, 57. Ranvir reckons Susanna is in charge. ‘Susanna is our leader. She kind of sets the tone.’

Kate suggests Susanna is ‘head mum because her children are the oldest. Whenever you have a parenting problem, particularly with boys, Susanna will have been there. She gave me one of the best pieces of parenting advice ever, which was to seize every opportunity to be a taxi driver because the best way to get your children to talk to you is in a car, when you’re just chatting and not asking them, ‘So how do you feel?’

Ranvir, says Kate, is the one most likely to dispense a hug and turn up on the doorstep with a lasagne. What role does Kate bring to the group? ‘Am I the fool, the court jester? I’m certainly not the organised one. There’s always been an element of chaos with me, and this was before there was proper chaos in my life. There is a sort of unpristine quality with me. I’m kind of a disaster. I’ll buy something for dinner and Darcey will say, ‘You’ve got the wrong thing, Mum’.’

They don’t have the sort of relationship where they hang out in each other’s homes, but she tells me she did happen to be in the area where Charlotte Hawkins lives once, and popped in for tea and cake. I bet her house was pristine? ‘It was gorgeous,’ she says. ‘And do you know, she had a homemade cake in a tin. Charlotte is like a living angel, beautiful inside and out. But she has a mischievous side, and on a night out she can drink. She can handle it.’

Charlotte might appear to be the sweetest of the line-up, but her appearance on daytime TV predates the others’. As a student she also did some modelling, and once appeared on This Morning with Richard Madeley, now a GMB host. She was modelling raincoats, and has never been allowed to forget it. ‘I was a terrible model,’ she says. ‘I tried to do the pout but everyone just told me I looked really p****d off.’

When it comes to surviving the hurly-burly of motherhood, Susanna deserves the gold star. All three of her children are back at home at the moment but she knows she’s on the cusp of being an empty-nester. ‘I feel I’m about to wave them off for good, but who knows,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure they’ll be able to afford rents.’ Her house, she reckons, is the calmest it’s ever been. ‘I’m enjoying the privilege of cooking for them, because I know this phase won’t last.’

She says her most difficult stage was when all three were under four. She mimes a head explosion. ‘It was like herding cats, and there is something about the sheer physicality of boys. I remember just trying to get them out somewhere to run.’

She considers herself lucky, though, because her boys’ early years pre-dated the smartphones-for- everyone era. ‘Thank God there weren’t iPads and iPhones around then. My eldest didn’t have his first phone until secondary school. The internet wasn’t a huge presence in his life.’

Talk of Mother’s Day – yes, her favourite gifts were the leaves stuck on card and the handmade sculptures – has made her wistful. As her screensaver she has a picture of her boys when they were young enough not to object to being dressed head-to-toe in Boden. ‘They would kill me now,’ she laughs. ‘But what mum wouldn’t give anything to go back to that time when they were all snuffly and wanted to climb into the bed for cuddles and they wanted your kisses? I’d love to have that back.’

Susanna is a direct talker, and says she likes to keep her work life and home life as separate as possible, but even she talks about a sisterhood at work. ‘I didn’t grow up with sisters,’ she says, ‘so I do find this interesting. There is a definite sisterhood at work – not in a feminist way, but more in a having-each-other’s-backs sort of way.

Derek would often sort out the Mother’s Day gifts… but not always. ‘Some years the kids obviously wrapped things that were already in the house, like Derek’s crystals. I’d say, “Isn’t this one of Dad’s?” knowing that it was, because I dust it, and they’d say, “No, just similar”.’ Kate and Derek in 2019

Kate says Darcey still believes her dad is in charge of ‘everything’. Kate and Derek pictured together in 2019

‘It’s interesting each of us had a strong mother. Mine was a single mother, and she is still my hero.’ Her mum – a retired nurse and health visitor – sounds awesome. ‘She still does volunteering and when she was 78 she abseiled down St Thomas’s Hospital. I have the best role model.’

Ranvir grew up in a family of women. Her dad died when she was nine. She says her sisters swooped in when she found herself going back to work five weeks after giving birth. It all felt quite wrong. ‘I have a vivid memory of my sister taking this tiny bundle off me. She was only taking him down the hall to another room so that I could get some sleep, but it felt like I was sending him to Australia. Your body says, ‘This isn’t natural’.’ But your mind says this is the career you’ve always wanted? ‘Yes, and I have no regrets, but it hasn’t been easy.’

It’s only in the last few years she’s shared the burden. She’s now in a relationship with Louis Church, a producer on Strictly. They met when she appeared on the show, and introducing him to Tushaan was a huge deal. ‘I think when you have a child the bar is so much higher. You can take risks with your own life, but when you have a son you have to be sure this is someone who’ll be a positive force in his life. And Louis is. He does all the football games with Tushaan. He does the fishing, all the things I couldn’t do. I think it’s a huge worry, the question of who your child’s male role models are.’

She adds, ‘I don’t think our parents thought further than school, university and a good job. Now, just look at the statistics. Male suicide is the biggest killer of young men. You want them to have good morals and safe influences, and that becomes harder, particularly with mothers and sons, because they naturally gravitate towards male role models.’

It’s Ranvir who says that single parenthood is ‘like hiking through snow in flip-flops’, which Kate understands now. She’s heartbreakingly honest about how difficult she’s finding solo parenting. It’s the hardest part of grieving, she says. ‘So many times I just think, ‘Derek, where are you?’ When he was here we didn’t plan which one of us was bad cop to the other’s good cop. You just sort of do it without thinking. One does the food; the other is the fun parent, and then you flip – although Derek was always better at the discipline. I remember Ranvir saying that a day with no ups and no downs is actually a great day.

‘Now I have to be everything – the one who’s fun, the one who chivvies everyone along and the one who yells, ‘Oh my God, you are going to fail everything.’ I make so many mistakes, but doesn’t everyone? Does the perfect mother exist? I suppose one of the things about what’s happened is that I’ve had to have very grown-up conversations with my children. It means I can say, ‘OK, maybe I did get that wrong.’

Derek would often sort out the Mother’s Day gifts… but not always. ‘Some years the kids obviously wrapped things that were already in the house, like Derek’s crystals. I’d say, “Isn’t this one of Dad’s?” knowing that it was, because I dust it, and they’d say, “No, just similar”.’

She tells me Darcey still believes her dad is in charge of, well, everything. ‘We were in a queue in a theme park and they said there were no more tickets – then, as we were leaving, some became available. Darcey said, ‘It’s Dad. He’s done this.’ She bursts out laughing. ‘It’s kind of mad – if you had influence over anything, you’d go for world peace, not theme park tickets – but I kind of love it.’