The latest from Kate
25 January 2007

This week, Jennifer was delighted to discover that she was going to be a grandmother again. Here's a reminder of her middle daughter, colourful Kate Madikane, who by her early twenties had already had two children by different fathers.

As Brian and Jennifer's first child together, Kate was materially very well cared for. Like Jennifer's other children, she quickly developed a taste for riding and by ten years old was entering gymkhanas on her pony Velvet. By adolescence, however she was more interested in getting rides on motorbikes, smoking and helping wreck the Christmas tree on the village green. She justified herself by saying she had no love or attention. When Brian and Jennifer weren't able to visit her at boarding school on her thirteenth birthday, she went missing for nine hours. The school felt she was a bad influence and asked her to leave.

She was no better back in Ambridge, running up huge phone bills to a German boyfriend, smoking at rehearsals for the nativity play and sneaking off to the disco in Borchester. Blossom Hill Cottage, vacant since grandmother Peggy married Jack Woolley, quickly became the hub of teenage shenanigans - including a forged letter which was to result in the unexpected appearance of Peggy's wartime sweetheart, Conn Kortchmar, in the village.

More dangerously, Kate's new boyfriend Warren was a thief. An accident in a car he'd stolen left her with a black eye and a police caution. In desperation, her parents brought in an educational psychologist. Family therapy was arranged, but fizzled out when first Brian and then Kate found excuses not to go.

She had her good points. She got on well with Lynda Snell and showed courage letting down the tyres on Clive Horrobin's getaway van during the raid on the village shop in 1993. Afterwards, she became withdrawn for a while, and started to spend time with her new age friends, such as "Spike".

Kate goes missing

Her growing rejection of conventional values was mirrored in her appearance, with a pieced nose complementing two earlier piercings in each ear. Coming back from Glastonbury on August 1994 to find she'd done badly in her GCSEs, she collected the takings form the riding course and headed off. Her family went through agonies not knowing where she was, until she finally returned the following March to explain that she'd been in Kent, trying to strop a motorway extension. Jennifer was too frightened of driving her away again to be angry, and agreed to her moving into one of the Home Farm cottages. Debbie by contrast was furious at Kate's selfish behaviour.

Kate brought two things back with her; memories of a short-lived love affair with another protestor, Luther, and a taste for drugs. Mostly she stuck to cannabis, but seemed willing to experiment, with the result that Richard Locke was called out one night when she seemed hyper. Her parents worried about what she was doing, but weren't in a position to stop it.

Jennifer was more pleased by the reforming influence Kate showed on her new boyfriend, Roy Tucker. Brian thought his daughter better suited to Jolyon Gibson, the well-spoken friend who to Roy's annoyance first became Kate's lodger and then her lover. Unfortunately he was also a drug dealer, whose idea of a Christmas present was a bottle of temazepam capsules. Feeling depressed on New Year's Eve 1995, Kate took whisky and the "jellies" together and ended up in hospital.

Pulsations

With Gibson out of her life she stared going round festivals with Roy, selling vegetarian food from a van. But if that brought them closer together, the widening of the Borchester bypass pushed them apart again. Kate gave up her job in the Cat and Fiddle to help organise protests against it. Roy was right to be suspicious when Luther turned up and was invited to stay at Kate's cottage. By the time Kate spent a night in the cells for her part in the protest, it was clear that she and Roy were on two different paths and they split up.

To complicate matters, she was shortly to find out that she was pregnant, and couldn't be sure if Roy or Luther was the father. She didn't want either of them involved but after giving birth to a little girl in a tepee at Glastonbury she couldn't stop Roy from establishing her paternity through a DNA test. At first Kate resented his interest in Phoebe but gradually saw the benefits of having another parent to share the responsibility.

She proved to be a capable and loving mother, and seemed to settle into resuming part-time work at the shop as well. But towards the end of 1999, she was feeling stifled in Ambridge. Desperate to get away, she took Phoebe with her to Morocco, only to return within a month, panic-stricken when her daughter contracted gastro-enteritis. She then had to make the hardest decision of her life. Much as she loved Phoebe, she felt she couldn't be a good mother until she had finished her own spiritual quest. Leaving Roy to look after their baby, she set off to travel thought Africa.

Calming Influence

The journey seemed to be the making of her. In South Africa she met, fell in love with and became pregnant by a young radio journalist, Lucas Madikane. Unhappy with the idea of moving from Cape Town to Johannesburg to further his career, she came back to Ambridge where she had her second daughter, Noluthando Grace ("Nolly") in January 2001. But when Lucas came over to be with her, Kate finally realised that she'd found the love and security she'd always been looking for. To her family's surprise, she married him on their return to South Africa a few months later.

In 2005, when Kate returned to Ambridge on one of her occasional visits, Roy found her much mellowed, so much so that Hayley feared that there was a spark between them again. She needed have worried; that flame died a long time ago and Roy was much more diplomatic on Kate's recent visit for Adam and Ian's wedding.

Adapted from The Archers Encyclopaedia by Joanna Toye and Adrian Flynn, and Who's Who in The Archers 2007 by Keri Davies (both titles BBC Books)

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