Fighting cancer together, our national treasures share their bond is stronger than ever. Photo / Woman's Weekly
The Topp Twins, Dame Lynda and Dame Jools Topp, hold a special place in all of our hearts thanks to their humour, songs and unforgettable characters such as Camp Mother and Camp Leader, Ken and Ken, and the Gingham Sisters.
But recently, times have been tough for the sisters, both 65, as they’re each dealing with cancer diagnoses which have left them struggling to live the joyful lives they’re renowned for. But thanks to their relentless positivity, they are managing it.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Jools was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and she says she’s never let it slow her down.
“Every day above ground is a good day,” says Jools. “There’s this life we’re living, and we’re supposed to live it and to try to do the best we can. I’ve lived with my cancer for nearly 20 years and I’ve never let it stop me. Not once. No way.”
Jools says she’s talked to other people who have cancer and “they’ve kind of lost their way a little bit because they don’t think they’re useful anymore”.
She lives in West Auckland and says she has chosen to be single. “I live the dream every day because I get out of bed, make sure the dogs are happy, the cats are fed, the fish have food in the pond, and the cows and the horses are good. And I have a big smile on my face because I’m really fit for my age.”
Sometimes she wakes up at 8am and doesn’t come back inside until 8pm.
“I still have a lot to give and I have a lot of energy.”
Unfortunately, Jools’ cancer has metastasised and she has eight tumours in her body. Her treatment involves injections in both buttocks every three weeks.
“I said to my oncologist, ‘Who comes up with this stuff?’” she laughs. “My only worry about all that jabbing away at my bum was that I wouldn’t be able to ride my horse any more, but so far, I’m okay.
“The injections find my oestrogen, which is what my cancer feeds on, and it smothers it so the cancer can’t find it,” explains Jools. “I decided to take the injections because my mate Cody told me to, and she’s a district nurse. She said it might save my life, and it had some good outcomes, but it also appealed to my farming sense of sensibility. Because if you don’t feed something for long enough, it’ll die.”
In the first six months of treatment, Jools’ tumours reduced by at least two millimetres.
“I also take a tablet every 21 days to help the injections, and my last CT scan shows that while there’s no more reduction in my tumours, they are completely stable, so my cancer isn’t growing.”
Lynda has also been diagnosed with breast cancer, and says the worst thing about having a double mastectomy was worrying she wouldn’t be able to hold up Camp Mother’s pink strapless jumpsuit any more.
“But a friend has made me a new one complete with boobs,” she laughs.
Lynda had been having weekly chemotherapy sessions, which she found “quite rough”, and then she developed peripheral neuropathy in her feet, which means her nerve endings have been damaged permanently by the chemotherapy.
“It’s debilitating because you get numbness in your feet and you also get this intense pain like somebody sticking 100 needles into the bottom of your feet,” she says. “For a whole year, I decided I’d be drug-free, and I’ve managed to do that, but the pain was getting worse, and I was just contemplating doing something about it...
“I went out to take my labradors to the kennel and put them away for the night. They have little straw beds they like, and they were waiting for me at the door. I must have tripped on the lip of the door, and because I have numb feet, I don’t get a signal to my brain that I’ve hit something.”
Lynda fell on the concrete and knocked herself out.
“When I woke up, my beautiful labrador Dream was licking my face. Then she went behind me, putting her nose and her whole head underneath my neck, supporting me until my beautiful wife Donna came and found me.”
Lynda married Donna Luxton in 2013 and the couple live in Methven, Canterbury, where Lynda loves to fly-fish in nearby rivers. While Lynda was in hospital following her fall, doctors realised she was getting pressure on her spinal cord.
“So we’re dealing with that at the moment. I’m on concussion watch. I’m hoping it’s not anything too major. I get around with a walker and a stick, but I really can’t have another fall.”
But like her twin sister, Lynda isn’t letting this latest health issue get her down.
“When I got home from the hospital, the first thing I did was take my walker out into the paddock and spend a whole hour with my dogs, who always bring me joy. I think that if something not-so-great happens, there will always be some joy there that lifts you up again. My line is that my cancer has gone away, and that’s how I define my journey.”
Throughout their trials, the twins have remained connected, even though they live so far away from each other.
“There’s a golden thread between us,” reflects Jools. “It’s a connection that’s never been broken.”
Adds Lynda, “We just know. I’ll be pottering around, maybe doing some gardening, and then I’ll go, ‘Oh, better ring Jools’.”
The two talk every few days and continue to create together. Their latest project is a book chronicling their lives called Untouchable Girls.
“It’s quite hard writing your life story when it’s not over yet,” says Jools. “I once heard this old coal miner down on the West Coast answer a news reporter who said, ‘Have you lived here your whole life?’ and he answered, ‘Not yet’. I thought that was a brilliant line, and I felt in some strange way we were writing this book which would never have an ending.”
Living apart, the twins did what they have always done – tell stories. The difference this time is that they’re about their own lives.
Lynda says her job was to go through every year since they were born in 1958 and write down what happened.
“I’m the computer kid in the family, so I found all these things, and they acted as a prompt,” she tells. “We were apart for a lot of it, but then we came together about four times and we looked at each other’s stories. Our job was to say, ‘I really love that story’ or, ‘That story’s not really going anywhere’.”
Many of the tales reveal the amount of activism the twins were involved in during the turbulent 1980s.
The sisters relive the frightening details of being chased and beaten by rugby fans at the infamous Springbok tour protests in Hamilton. They were front and centre at the Bastion Point protests, as well as the protests for a nuclear-free New Zealand and the Homosexual Law Reform. For each protest, they wrote a song about it.
“Protests came first for us,” says Jools. “The entertaining was later, with all the characters and the comedy. Because there were two of us, it was easy for us to stand up because we had each other’s backs.”
They were not, however, at the Parliament protests last year.
“We got a lot of flack over that,” says Jools. “A lot of people said, ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you backing New Zealand?’
“We said, ‘We’re backing the people who are trying to keep us safe and saying: please don’t let our 92-year-old mother get Covid’. The thing is, you can’t protest a pandemic away.”
One thing which shines through about their childhood on the farm was that they had to share. They had one horse, one guitar and one bike between them, which proved to be the only time they couldn’t find the will to let the other twin have a turn.
“We came up with a rule that whoever had the bike at the end of the day got the bike the next morning,” says Lynda. “So one night, Jools took the bike nearly two kilometres up the road and hid it behind an old calf shed. I saw her wake up early, so I got out of bed and followed her. She was still in her pyjamas and the pant leg got caught in the chain. I helped her get the bike back home, with Jools hopping all the way with her arm around my neck.
“But even as Mum was cutting the pyjamas free of the chain, we each had both our hands on the handlebars because we were going to get that bike once it was released!”
Lynda believes they developed their comedy during a Sunday ritual.
“We had a bath once a week, and we’d sit on the edge of the bath and try to make each other laugh. Bathing and laughing, we called it.”
And they’re still doing it. During our interview, they beam at each other as they talk about their new book and tell stories which didn’t make it into the final draft.
“I think we’ve got enough stories for another book,” laughs Jools.
“I’ll start writing them down now,” quips Lynda.
Untouchable Girls: The Topp Twins’ Story (Allen & Unwin, $49.99) is out now.
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