“The goldfish has died,” she whispered to Baroness Hollins, “but don’t worry I’ve flushed it down the loo,” reports the Catholic Herald.
She replied: “Go down to the pet shop and buy another one straight away. Next time one dies, please show the children the dead goldfish.”
Baroness Hollins calmly relays the anecdote as we sit together on the House of Lords terrace drinking tea in the afternoon sun. Her worldly frankness jars with the serenity of this removed and privileged setting: “Death is the one thing you and I have in common,” she tells me. “Isn’t that extraordinary?”
She continues: “That’s why we have pets. One of the reasons is that it’s an education for the children to learn about life and death and they learn about how to manage their sadness and this is one way of helping them. That’s part of death education.”
As she talks, it is evident that she champions education at its most holistic.
Copies of recent books from the “Books Beyond Words” series on communicating difficult messages to people with learning disabilities, including the topics of death and sex, remain on the table from a previous meeting.
The books originated from her experiences with her son, who has a learning disability.
Above all, she values a critical approach to questions, especially those concerning faith and remains inspired by her mother, who converted to Catholicism when her daughter was aged nine.
“She certainly wasn’t going to accept anything blindly because someone had told her to,” she says. “She made her own decision to become a Catholic. But it wasn’t going to be swallowing every ritual and tradition blindly. She had a very thoughtful approach to it.”
It is clear, then, that from an early age Baroness Hollins possessed a natural resistance to arbitrary rules or authoritarianism.
The nuns at her school told her that she would not pass her 11-plus unless she attended a pilgrimage to Lourdes. (Her mother consequently refused to send her.)
They also expressed dismay that she did not wear a shamrock on St Patrick’s Day, given her Irish roots (her maiden name was Kelly.)
But she fondly recalls her headmistress Sister Monica: “She encouraged us to think about, ‘what if we’ve all been had? What if there is no God? Will I have wasted my life?’”