Agony aunt and novelist Claire Rayner has spent the last year battling breast cancer. IAN LLOYD caught up with her on a visit to a Barnet cancer charity

It is a moment everyone hopes they will never experience. But agony aunt Claire Rayner's response to being told she had cancer seems rather apt.

"I said: 'Oh bugger'," Mrs Rayner admitted before a talk at Cherry Lodge Cancer Care in Wood Street, Barnet, on Monday evening. The response matches her character honest but often quite brusque with a deeper soft side Mrs Rayner almost broke down discussing how she has come to terms with having breast cancer over the past year.

"One of the things about illness is that you feel so damn lonely. Some illnesses make you lonelier than others you think 'how can this be happening to me? I am the only person in the world like this'," she explained.

"Having a place like this Cherry Lodge where you can come and it is full of people just like you who have got the same problems and the same worries it can make you feel a lot better.

"Feeling better is being better, there is no fraud about it. If you feel better you are better, never mind what your body is doing."

Cherry Lodge offers an information service for cancer sufferers, giving them support during, and while, they wait for treatment.

It also provides a range of complementary therapies for people suffering from the side-effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Dermot Boyle, Cherry Lodge director, said: "When I first came to work here and spoke to people they described this place as a safe place, which I didn't really understand.

"But what they are feeling when they go through hospital treatment is that it can be depersonalising.

"They lose a sense of being related to as a person and understood as a person," he added.

"When they come to Cherry Lodge, one of the key things is that they get to know people who have been through a similar experience that provides a strong form of support in itself."

Mina West, nurse service facilitator at Cherry Lodge, said breast cancer patients were the most common users of the service followed by men with prostate cancer.

"Men are finally listening to their mates and to the advice that you must watch for the signs and symptoms of prostate cancer and get checked."

She said the biggest problem for cancer sufferers in the borough was that they had to travel to either Mount Vernon Hospital in Northolt or the Royal Free in Hampstead for radiotherapy treatment. "It is a bit far when patients are run down and tired," she explained.

For Mrs Rayner, a trained nurse and midwife, the notion of seeing cancer as a battle is "gobbledegook". She said: "There is this awful tyranny of positive thinking. You don't have to say 'I am going to beat this'. You don't say that if you break your leg do you? You just say 'oh bugger. What is it going to be like? What treatments are available?'. There is no reason why it shouldn't be the same with cancer.

"There are plenty of people walking around living with cancer. It is not a death sentence or anything like it, not in 2002."

Surprisingly Mrs Rayner, of Harrow-on-the-Hill, said the best way to advise cancer patients or anyone with a problem was to just listen.

"Giving advice isn't a case of wagging your finger at people. It is not about telling people what to do and how to do it.

"A large chunk of good advice is plain listening and at the end of it people will say 'gosh, that has been so helpful. Thanks ever so much', and all you've said is 'ah' or 'really?' or 'hmmm'."

For more information about Cherry Lodge Cancer Care or to make a donation call 020 8216 4486.

June 26, 2002 12:30