Louise Speed is sitting on a grey sofa in her beautiful house near Chester. Her four-year-old cockapoo Alfie is at her feet. Outside, just beyond the garden fence, two pheasants compete for territory. It is a beautiful late autumn day.
But for Louise this is always the worst month of the year and this is always the very worst week. It is the anniversary of her husband Gary’s passing.
Gary Speed, the boy-next-door footballer so many people inside and outside the game loved and admired. It has been 10 years now and Louise has found a way to live again, to once again feel happiness and joy.
There will never be answers explaining why Gary — manager of his beloved Wales at the time — took his own life the morning after a night spent with friends in November 2011. But Louise has found a place to lodge the pain and the sheer sense of disbelief that inevitably endures.
Usually at this time of year she disappears. Often to New York where her and Gary’s two sons, Eddie and Tommy, are studying. But always somewhere. This year, though, she has chosen to sit down and talk.
‘I know this weekend is significant for people because it’s the 10th anniversary,’ Louise tells Sportsmail. ‘But it’s not for me. It’s no different to the previous nine years. I always remember Gary on his birthday in September. That’s when I have a drink to him. That’s my day of thought and celebration of Gary.
On the 10th anniversary of Gary Speed's shocking death, widow Louise (pictured) opens up in her first interview on how she and her two sons are finally finding acceptance
‘But the anniversary is always different. It’s there, it’s looming and I dread it. All of November is a non-event month for me. I just can’t wait for the month to disappear.’
Time spent with Louise Speed is life-affirming. Her story is one of almost unimaginable trauma but also of recovery and discovery. There are some tears during our morning together but also much laughter.
She is 51 now and has rebuilt her life and her sense of self from the dreadful two years that immediately followed Gary’s death.
That was a time when she struggled to get off the sofa and felt smothered by a cloak of universal sympathy. For a long time, alcohol was a crutch she leant on heavily. No longer.
‘I was 41 when it happened and it felt so young to have that label as a widow,’ she says.
Speed, manager of his beloved Wales at the time, tragically took his own life in November 2011
‘It felt very uncomfortable. People were so kind but sometimes it just took one look.
‘I was almost caught in a barbed wire situation where that was all I felt. I was in this pigeon hole of pity and sympathy.
‘It was like being in the worst nightmare possible. There were no answers and no Gary walking through the door again. Nothing was ever going to be right again.
‘I was trudging through life, just functioning. If I could have been anybody else apart from me, for a long time, I would have happily taken it. But we are 10 years on now. It’s a cliche but time is a healer even if it takes years. I have learned that life can be good again, can be great again.
‘I feel different in myself. I still feel many things but not right in front of my face. I know it. I am Gary’s widow and I can say it now. I think of him every single day.
'It could just be a flashback or I will see something and wonder how he would react to it. Most often now it’s nice thoughts. I have myself back and the boys have all of their mum back. Back then I felt they had lost their dad and only had half a mum.
Louise was 41 when it happened and revealed she 'felt so young' to be labelled as a widow
‘It was not fair on them above all. They had lost such a chunk of me as well. But it has come back now. They have me back.’
Louise's first date with 15-year-old Gary was at the local tennis club in Hawarden, Flintshire, but he forgot to bring his racket. So instead they walked and talked.
‘Lots of the girls fancied him,’ she smiles. ‘He was a good-looking boy. I was probably one of the ones who thought he was “all right”. Playing it cool!
‘He was quite a shy boy but through other people he asked me out. Like you do that at age. By the third person asking me I was like: “OK then I will...”
‘We had a lovely walk and even then he was saying he would like a nice home and be able to fish in his garden. He said he would like to be able to bring up children in a nice place. They were his values even back then and they never ever changed. He was modest and humble. Grounded.
‘When I think of him I think of us as a family. Him with the boys. Holidays. Him practising the guitar. The same chords over and over and me having to listen!
‘The good times I remember are not necessarily the football but family life. The football obviously was his world and his career and he was devoted to it. But I enjoyed Gary at his best when football was not properly involved.’
For 20 years, Louise gave herself to Gary’s career. She moved to Leeds where he won the old Division One title under Howard Wilkinson and they married. She followed him back to the North West to Everton and then to Newcastle. Speed played his later football at Bolton and finally Sheffield United.
Louise and Gary first met in their teens and had a date at their local tennis club in Hawarden
Louise was uncomplaining but hankered after something simpler. In truth she wished for his eventual retirement and the uncomplicated life that would follow. And this is one of the great tragedies of this story, that Speed left her just when life was finally slowing down. It is understandable that she continues to feel utterly robbed of all that time that was to come.
‘Yes that’s for certain,’ she says. ‘We had our first Easter holiday together in March 2011. We went to Egypt and I thought that was the way it would be from then on.
‘He loved the Wales job but it was not so full-on. It meant we could plan and book. I was excited. Gary died later that year.’
In New York, where they live just 20 minutes apart, Eddie and Tommy Speed feel that sense of unfairness too. They were 14 and 13 when they lost their father. Both are now talented footballers and athletes. ‘It hasn’t been easy but we are getting there,’ Tommy tells Sportsmail. ‘It has been hard to move on but I have to.
‘I am proud of Dad. I always watch videos of his goals and matches. But I couldn’t be the man I am today without mum.’
Speed was an enthusiastic and inquisitive traveller. Family holidays would always involve more than the beach. So doubtless he would be proud of how his sons have flown.
Louise moved with Gary (left) to Leeds, where he won the old Division One title under Howard Wilkinson in 1992
They soon married and Louise would give herself to Gary's career for the next 20 years
‘Every day I think about dad,’ explains Eddie.
‘I do think about his death and the way he left us. But more now about the good times we had. Our one-on-one days, going to watch the football, dressing smart and then a game the next day at somewhere like Wrexham.
‘I know how proud he would be of me and Tommy. How much we have grown. How much we both look like him!
‘A big thing for me, which he would want the most, is the respect and the manners we try to show to the people we meet. Always be polite and smile when you are speaking to someone. That’s what he would be most proud of.
‘It’s the little things that help us carry on and move forward in life.’
Louise followed him back to the north-west to Everton and then to Newcastle (left). Speed played his later football at Bolton (right) and finally Sheffield United
Both boys were at home that ghastly morning their father died. For several years after they would not let Louise sell up and move. For a while she thought of fleeing to America, to San Diego where Speed’s old Newcastle team-mate and friend Warren Barton lives with his wife.
But she stayed, largely for Eddie and Tommy. Somehow she got them through. They got each other through. ‘I was very lonely and it was actually Tommy who triggered me to get past that a little bit,’ Louise explains.
‘I would be laid on the couch every night after 6pm — just staring somewhere and kind of just being there. The boys would be playing somewhere.
‘But it was Tommy who actually went to ask my neighbour Sarah if she would come over and just sit with his mum. And from then I started going round there. It helped.
‘But yes I was lonely. Anyone who loses someone will tell you about that. It’s not having someone there to do nothing with, if that makes sense. If I am honest, I used to think I was OK on my own until I had no choice.
‘Everything came to me all in one hit. The pain, the loneliness, the abandonment, the devastation, the shock, the hurt. It was all about getting through in the early days.
Sons Eddie (right) and Tommy (left), pictured on a family holiday with mum Louise, have very fond memories of their father
'That was all you could do really. Somehow we managed it, together, and Gary would be so proud. If he was looking at us now I think he would find it all incredible. I wanted the boys to go somewhere and find themselves and they have.
‘They are Eddie and Tommy Speed. That’s it.’
Louise does not know why Gary did it. She tries not to torture herself with questions she cannot answer. But finally she seems ready to forgive him. It has taken the best part of a decade and two periods of grief counselling but it feels as though she is almost there.
‘Have I forgiven Gary?’ Louise says with a deep sigh. ‘I ask myself this often. Can I? Have I? Will I?
‘I don’t know. I have witnessed the hurt he has caused to his family and friends, particularly his boys and his mum and dad and myself. The void he has left within us all. So I don’t know. I just don’t know if I have forgiven him yet or not. But of course I want to.
‘The anger has only just subsided and that is part of it. I was angry with him for a long time but that also kept me strong, if you know what I mean? It’s when I released that anger that I felt a little bit vulnerable.
‘You do have to start feeling real emotions again, though. If you don’t then you don’t move on.’
Speed was not a man who talked about his deepest feelings. Louise admits that he was not the type to admit to weakness. She accepts now that he must have been mentally ill.
Louise walks her four-year-old Cockapoo Alfie near her beautiful home near Chester
While going through a box of possessions a few years ago she came across a letter he had written but never sent to her when he was first at Leeds. In it he admits to suicidal thoughts. He was 17.
‘That letter was never sent,’ she says. ‘That was the first I knew of it. But my conclusion is that to do what Gary did you must be unwell in your mind. He couldn’t talk, didn’t want to talk. He had all the opportunity through people like the League Managers Association.
‘If anybody in football had come to him with problems he would have sent them off in the right direction. But he didn’t do that for himself. So all I can say or presume is that he didn’t want to or couldn’t talk about whatever it was.’
Speed was not a man who talked about his deepest feelings and Louise admits that he was not the type to admit to weakness
Louise has locked the memory of what she found that morning 10 years ago away in the back of her mind.
‘I try not to ever go there,’ she says. ‘If I could have some kind of injection to erase some vision or memory that would be the one. If that could just go away...’
Speed’s formative years in football were the 1980s. He had perfect mentors at Leeds in men such as Gordon Strachan and his manager Howard Wilkinson.
Still, English football could present an unforgiving environment in those days. Naturally, Louise wonders whether the stresses of his profession lay heavily on her
