Isabel Walker remembers an inspirational colleague: Former MJA member Judy Kirby, who died after a sudden illness in early June, aged 84, taught me one of the best lessons I have ever learned in my professional life as a writer and editor.
I had joined the staff of General Practitioner as a reporter in 1977. Judy was the News Editor and my immediate boss. I was still at that early stage of my career where you agonise over every word in an article, and try out various versions of an intro before committing, in the process wasting a great deal of time and running up against deadlines.
When I asked Judy for advice, she treated me to one of her characteristic eye rolls and said, with mild irritation, ‘Izzy, just fucking get on with it.’
Start writing
So, I did. It is a lesson all writers need to learn. The best way to start an article is just to… start writing. It might seem like you’re producing rubbish at first, but just keep going and eventually you will hit your stride. Then go back to the beginning and start revising and improving. Invariably you find the first attempt is not nearly as bad as you had thought, and the editing process goes smoothly and swiftly.
It’s a principle I have followed throughout my writing career. I passed it onto other writers during various stints as an editor and to my two children when they were struggling with essays and dissertation (well maybe without the swear word). And I owe it all to Judy.
East End family
Born in 1940, Judy was the youngest child – by a long way – of a very large East End family. When she was just a baby, the family was bombed out of their street in Plaistow and spent weeks in a park shelter, before finding a new home in neighbouring East Ham. She often told the story of how her father had to creep past the soldiers guarding the old property, which housed an unexploded bomb, to retrieve essentials such as Marmite and marge’ from the house.
Judy’s schooldays were not the happiest: unsurprising given that the less-than-inclusive motto of her secondary school was ‘the woods would indeed be silent if only those birds sang who sang the best’! She often said that her real education was five years of psychoanalysis, which unleashed her characteristic emotional intelligence and honesty.
Meticulous craft
Judy’s meticulous craft and no-nonsense approach were honed in the traditional training grounds of local newspapers and Fleet Street. After leaving school, she started work as a reporter on her local newspaper the Stratford Express. She then worked her way through news agencies and a regional newspaper to the then highly regarded and influential London Evening Standard, where she remained as a news reporter for eight years.
After a short stint as a TV researcher, Judy branched into medical journalism, first as News Editor of the then leading doctors’ weekly General Practitioner, where I met her 47 years ago, and later as a freelance writer for national newspapers and magazines, including Saga, where she served as Medical Editor for many years.
Her years of writing for consumer outlets gave her an ability to explain and simplify complex issues, which was a real gift when it came to medical writing. It mattered little that she was not a scientist: she instinctively knew how to craft an article so that it could be widely understood, and coach other writers to achieve the same results.
Working as a freelance made it possible for Judy to move away from London, and in 1989 she relocated to Wooler, a small Northern town that sits on the edge of the Northumberland National Park. This is where she found a community of like-minded people and settled happily for the rest of her life.