Living a life without Peter

By MICHELE HEWITSON

This year, says Lady Pippa Blake, "I'm 50, Sarah-Jane is 21, James is 17. And it would have been our 25th wedding anniversary. Quite a big year".

Would have been. As we all know, that was an anniversary she celebrated alone because her husband, Sir Peter Blake, was killed on his boat on the Amazon River in Brazil in December 2001.

In two and a half years you can do a lot. Pippa Blake has. She has held a successful exhibition of her paintings, enrolled in an MA course in painting, taken phone calls every day from her drama-student daughter, continued to raise her sporty, outdoorsy son and become a trustee of the Sir Peter Blake Trust, launched yesterday.

But two and a half years is nothing really when you have been married to a man for 22 years. You could have expected to celebrate the anniversary.

She is still, she says from the couch in the Takapuna home of her good friends the boating Blackmans, struggling "with being me. It was always me and Peter. Now it's me. And it's quite hard being me".

If this passage of time seems longish to get a trust up and going, you don't have to spend long with Pippa Blake to see that grieving is not a process which can be measured by such concepts.

She has just this morning arrived in New Zealand, she is jet-lagged and exhausted and apologises for being a bit fuzzy around the edges of her thinking. She is also very thin, but then she has always been. You suspect she might not eat much but she says she does eat.

I have asked about her health because she has mentioned, in passing, that she has been seeing her doctor "a lot lately".

And she thinks for a bit and holds a conversation with herself: "I could say this ... Will I say this?" before deciding that what she will say is "possibly the trauma of what happened two and a bit years ago, you just can't keep going and sometimes ... It's still very raw, I have to say."

But she has enrolled for the MA course to "give me some structure and purpose" and has started painting again after a break of a year. She walks every day, plays tennis quite often and people have started asking her out on boats again.

Blake grew up "not in boats but messing around in boats. But I love boats and I'm finding that more and more I really miss being around boats".

She thinks that, in Emsworth, Hampshire, where Pippa and Peter and the children lived and where she still lives, "people were at first a bit wary to ask me out on boats. I think they thought it would be difficult for me to be on a boat without Peter - and [since they met] I had never really been on a boat without Peter, but I've broken that barrier now".

That's one step forward. She finds it slow, hard going. But there is no rushing this hard bit, not that she would want to: "From my point of view, it's still very, very early days. I mean, for example, say a headstone for his grave, it took about a year and a bit to decide about that."

I hadn't actually come to talk about Peter, or not just about Peter, but Pippa Blake loves to talk about him. And if talking about him makes her eyes fill up - "you'll have me crying" - well, that's better than not hearing his name spoken.

"I'm very happy to talk about Peter and I'm very happy to talk about what happened to Peter - well, not what happened, but life and emotions and feelings."

She and the children talk about Peter, include him in their daily lives by talking about him, but "we don't talk about what happened or how much we're missing him because it's still too raw and I dissolve into tears and that's hopeless".

New Zealanders go to Emsworth to talk to Peter Blake. Pippa Blake will go into a village shop and be told, "Oh we had some Kiwis in here the other day" looking for his grave. They go to have a yarn, pay their respects and leave "umpteen pairs of red socks which are getting very manky because they've been out in the rain, lots of little Kiwis, people leave bits of paua shell, coins, little flags. I've been left little messages there. From complete strangers".

Peter, she says, would have been amazed. As is she - and moved, too.

He was the one who got recognised. He was hard to miss with his messy hair and that moustache. Pippa Blake has always been the one who was hardly ever recognised, unless she was with him. She has never been comfortable with any recognition. "I'm not great on fame and I find it embarrassing, actually. Well, I'm a bit awkward about it."

But she says, laughing, that she is quite well known in Emsworth and "I think I've really made it in life now because I've just opened the local parish fete. I've finally done it".

She stood there and said, "I have great pleasure in declaring this fete open", feeling rather proud of herself, and "everyone just carried on" going around the while-elephant stall.

Since Peter Blake died she has rather grown in to being a Lady. "In Britain", she says, "they have a different perception. You're meant to be posh if you're a lady. Look at me. Do I look like a lady?"

She's never been much fussed about being called Lady Pippa but "since Pete was killed I feel proud of it".

She is proud of the trust too, and thinks this is a fitting sort of memorial. It involves young people in leadership and the environment.

Pippa Blake is a trustee and would prefer to leave most of the public speaking to others. It is an odd and obviously unwelcome irony that she is now the one giving interviews.

She could , this essentially private woman, have insisted on talking only about the trust but she feels, perhaps, that because Peter was a public figure, that her grieving has inevitably to be partly public too.

You can see that she must be very good fun - she loves the "gossip and intrigue" around the America's Cup, laughs and cries easily.

And New Zealanders regard her as an honorary one of us.

She thought that New Zealand "might drift away, but in fact it's completely the opposite. I feel more and more strongly each time I come out that I want to be here."

The way New Zealanders respond to her and talk to her about Peter makes her warm and happy.

So do "the children and meeting up with friends but happiness is quite hard, actually, to be honest".

And you leave admiring her honesty and hoping for some more happiness for her in the future because she is such a nice woman and, no, not posh at all.