Helen Nicholson worked as a hairdresser in London in the 1980s. She became close friends with three young men David, Shane and Ralph, who were each diagnosed with HIV. Shane made headlines when he spoke to Princess Diana at the opening of an AIDS ward. She tells the story of their time together. 

I came to London in 1980 and started working as a hairdresser, where I met my friend David. We were young, full of life and having a lovely time. Everybody went out drinking and dancing, and we had no idea what was to come.

I got to know Shane through David in around 1986. Ralph also worked with us. Ralph’s name was actually Steve, but there were two Steves at work, so we called him Ralph. He used to DJ at Heaven. He went to San Francisco with 21 friends to the bathhouses and clubs. 21 friends went to San Francisco and only one came back without HIV. Ralph was the last one of those 20 to die. He watched all of them, one after another, die in front of him.

There were a lot of homophobic, ‘gay plague’ headlines around. David was the type of person who could just say, ‘Oh, just ignore it. Don’t let it bother you.’ But Ralph was very political and would get furious about it. David was the kindest person in the world: considerate, helpful, and very, very funny. We were very close.

He met Shane through an ad in the Standard. Shane had worded the advert something like: If you’re positive, you’ll want to meet somebody.

David had been trying to tell me that he was HIV. He would say things like, ‘Helen, if I die, you can have my video recorder.’

I’d say, ‘Stop it! Why are you saying a thing like that? Terrible thing to say!’

He was trying to feel his way to see if he could tell me, worried I’d freak out – which I did, eventually.

But they were both HIV positive when they met. When Shane came on the scene, we had even more fun. He was absolutely hilarious.

I left the hairdressers and hadn’t seen David for a few weeks. I was working in animal rescue and was busy. I didn’t worry about him – he had Shane. Then I got a phone call. Unusually, David was very cross with me.

‘Why haven’t you phoned?’

I said, ‘I’ve been saving animals.’

‘Is it because of Shane?’ he persisted.

‘What about Shane?’

‘Haven’t you seen the newspapers?’ He told me that Shane had HIV.

I said, ‘Oh my God. I’m coming round.’

I got in the car and it hit me. I just felt my heart sink, because that must mean that David had it too.

At that point, it was a death sentence.

It turned out that Shane had opened an AIDS ward with Princess Diana. It was all hush, hush. Shane said afterwards, ‘I was determined to say something to her, talk to her privately and say something’s got to be done here. Kids are just carrying on. People think it’s a gay thing. It’s not.’

And he did. He took her to one side and started talking to her about it. The newspapers gave him a private interview. He was so high on it. ‘I did it! I was determined to do it, and I did it!

But it was splashed across the media: Should we allow our future queen to shake hands with an AIDS victim? All this bile. Bile about Shane.

David was apologetic that he hadn’t told me about his diagnosis. Shane had been positive for three years, David for two. Then they became AIDS.

It really hit me that David was ill when I went to his flat to pick up a TV he’d borrowed. He was carrying it to the car and walked in front of me down the stairs. I noticed for the first time that he’d gone very grey and was losing his hair at the back, where he’d always had loads of hair. He was 34. I felt a lump come up in my throat. And I had to hide it. I got in the car and cried.

When David was in hospital, the Westminster, towards the end, Shane was in the Mildmay. They were both poorly, but it was David who took himself off first. He told his mum, ‘I can’t wake up one more day feeling like this.’

He’d told me previously that he had a kit – he called it a ‘kit’ – that meant he could take himself off when it got too bad. I offered to stay with him.

‘You can’t, because it’s illegal.’

I said, ‘I don’t care. You can’t be on your own doing that.’ I saw him in hospital on Sunday and arranged to see him the following Wednesday. But I woke up on Wednesday morning with a streaming cold. I phoned the hospital and told the nurse, ‘I’m supposed to see David today. I have a dreadful cold.’

She said, ‘Please don’t come here with that. You can finish somebody off.’

A couple of hours later, he took a load of paracetamol. I’m haunted by a picture of the nurse saying to him, ‘Helen can’t come today, David, because she’s got a cold,’ and him thinking: Might as well do it today then.

He had a thing about physical contact. He didn’t like it. But that last Sunday, he put his arms around me, kissed me so hard and held me so tight.

I said, ‘I love you, David.’

And he said, ‘I love you, Helen.’

And I never saw him again.

The doctor that had been looking after David when he died asked Kate, his mother, if she would allow a postmortem, ‘because we’re still driving blind with this thing.’
Kate said, ‘Ah, sure. But leave his poor, wee head alone.’

When I saw him after he’d died, his hair was pushed the wrong way, I think because he must’ve been in the body bag. I couldn’t leave him until I’d straightened that little bit of hair. I knew it would bother him.

Kate, and I went to visit Shane. He was like a skeleton in the bed. But he wasn’t having any of it. ‘I’m going to be the first person to live with AIDS! I’m going home. I’m buying one of those hospital beds, and I’m going home!’

He couldn’t get up, he was so poorly.

Shane had lost the plot a little bit by the end. When we walked into his room, one of the first things he said to Kate was, ‘Why hasn’t David left me any money?’

‘But Shane, why would he?’ She couldn’t say: Because you’re going to die!

He didn’t need money. But he’d got this into his head and it was festering with him. He called Kate every name under the sun and threw us out of his room. He was broken, so ill.

Just two months earlier, I’d been diagnosed with cancer. Shane came every day to sit with me in King’s College Hospital. I had a drip of morphine going into my back and was in absolute agony. I kept telling nurses. They’d come and turn the drip.

I said to Shane, ‘I can’t take this pain any more.’

‘Come here, let’s have a look at you.’  He was senior in the nursing profession. He pushed me over and saw the needle had come out of my back so I wasn’t getting any pain relief. Shane ran to the nurses’ station.

‘Oy, you, come here! Look at this! What you’ve done.’

He would stand up for you, fight for anybody. If he saw anything that shouldn’t be happening, he couldn’t stay sitting down. After Diana, he’d continued on to Margaret Thatcher. I don’t know exactly how it went, but he had an interview with the Prime Minister. In his version, she said, ‘Oh, we don’t have the funds for this sort of thing.’ She got up to walk away. He said to her, ‘Sit down, you, I haven’t finished yet!’ I wish I could get a copy of that interview. It’s just him! He was so tenacious and as stubborn as a mule. If he’d got a bee in his bonnet about anything, you couldn’t shut him up. You wouldn’t want to, anyway. He was hilarious. He was a little guy, but wiry, gobby, and fantastic.

  David’s funeral was at the Mildmay. Shane turned up in a wheelchair, so poorly that he didn’t want to speak to anybody. I got up to talk about David and when I came down from speaking, I put my hand on Shane’s shoulder, gave him a squeeze. He put his hand up and touched me. That was the last time I saw him. He went straight back to hospital afterwards. And then he was dead.

David had said he wanted to go to the crematorium on his own. But one of us had to go, as a legal requirement, to hand him over. So John, his dad went.  They asked him, did he just want the ashes scattered, and he said yes.

  We said, ‘Why did you do that? We wanted his ashes!’

We decided to go to Putney crematorium and see if we could find where they’d scattered David. At least we’d know where he was. When we got there, they said, ‘Oh, he’s here! He’s on the shelf! We’re waiting for somebody to pick him up!’

We were delighted. We met a guy who did the cremations, the nicest person. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we don’t care what anybody has died of. We treat them all with the utmost respect when they come here with us.’

Amidst the stigma, that was so kind.

We took David for lunch in a restaurant in Putney – me, his mum and his sister. We got a table for four, and put David on the spare chair. It’s hilarious when you think about it. We know that he’d be laughing!

Shane died 10 days after David’s funeral. He’d planned it right down to the last detail. It was held in an autopsy theatre, as if we were people learning about dead bodies. We were all in an auditorium, in the round, in raked seating, with a stage at the front. It was packed. He left us to watch a film, French and Saunders doing the Opera Singers. ‘I should be so lucky!’ It was hilarious. His father got up and did a resounding speech that ended up with, ‘But he was my son!’ Everybody was clapping and laughing and crying.

Every Saturday night my band would play at a pub. We made lots of money for that place because it was packed whenever we were playing. When they both died, I decided to raise some money for Mildmay. I did a mini-festival with seven bands all in one day. The landlord, with his cronies standing at the bar at the end of the night, said to me, ‘I don’t know why you bothered, I mean, they’re all poofs!’

He lost a lot of money after that, because we never played there again. The place was so quiet, they ended up closing it down and turning it into flats. Karma.

David and Shane died in 1992, and Ralph – Steve – lived on till 1995. His mother phoned me towards the end asking me to see him, ‘because he’s lost touch with all his friends. Well, they died, you know?’

I don’t think he really knew who I was. He died soon after that. I was glad I’d been to see him. Oh, he looked so old; and he was once so gorgeous. He lasted a long time.
I’m left feeling that life is just a little thread that can be broken at any minute. There were so many. It makes you more aware of your own mortality. We’re all hanging on in this world. It’s never left me: the whole tragedy of that era. Young, vibrant people, that had so much to give in this world. Gone.