Prunella Scales and Timothy West during their marriage (Image: Getty)
Prunella Scales is living with dementia – but in their 2023 book Pru and Me: The Amazing Marriage of Prunella Scales and Timothy West, the latter argued that his wife could still “understand him perfectly”.
The main problem the pair faced when trying to communicate was her “degenerative” hearing loss. “The thing I find especially frustrating is that Pru can actually understand perfectly everything I am saying. She just can’t hear me very well,” he explained.
“Like the dementia, her hearing problem is degenerative and even with her ears in, she can barely hear a thing. ‘Sorry, my darling?’ she’ll say, then I’ll repeat myself a few times and hope for the best. Sometimes she’ll hear me, and sometimes she won’t.”
However, he emotionally vowed: “I shall always keep trying. If I didn’t it would mean just ignoring Pru, and I could never do that.” He added that although he sometimes didn’t “get it right”, persistence had been the key to maintaining their love, which blossomed after the pair met through work more than sixty years earlier.
They’d been filming a costume drama together, which led to joint work on various sitcoms and ultimately a 61-year marriage, during which they welcomed two children. However, for the last two decades of that marriage, Prunella was struggling with dementia.
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Prunella Scales and Timothy West back in the 1990s before her dementia battle began (Image: Getty)
Tim had confided in about the changes she was experiencing during an appearance on an episode of the star’s Life Stories show.
The ex- and star explained: “The sad thing is that you just watch the gradual disappearance of the person that you knew and loved and were very close to.
“When we’ve been to a concert, or a play, or a film, there’s nothing very much we can say about it afterwards because Pru will have a fairly hazy memory.”
The love between them endured until the very end, with Tim revealing: “Pru doesn’t have much awareness of time so when she joins me in the living room, her face lights up as if we’ve been apart for days.
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Prunella Scales with Queen Camilla (Image: Getty)
“The look on her face makes me realise how much I love her.”
Though he missed the “companionship” he’d had with his “best friend”, his memories sustained him.
When he died earlier this month, he left behind a sister, a daughter, two sons, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren – and of course his wife.
in the recently, revealing: “We knew it was really a love story, tested by my mum’s dementia and seasoned with all the attendant scrapes and narrows and minor irritations of 61 years’ marriage, but held together by great cables of respect, companionship and love.”