Maggie's Centres, cancer caring centres now growing apace in Britain, arose from the experience of my late wife Maggie Keswick. They came from her struggle fighting cancer over many years. By 2008 there were six Maggie's Centres up and running and five in the pipeline, a completely unexpected situation. When Maggie and I had the original idea in 1993, we had contemplated only one small room with a big window looking out on to a green space nothing like eleven buildings and a whole programme of cancer support. Maggie was first diagnosed with what she called "the dreaded disease in 1988 and,after undergoing a mastectomy and radiotherapy, she considered herself cured. So when the affliction returned five years later she mistook the symptoms for an old backache, one that felt very much like those of her youth. She then followed the zigzag path that many do when they have intermittent pain, the wrong information and a misdiagnosis. For five months she went to one back doctor after another, one visit for an MRI scan that was misread, several appointments with her own doctor who told her what she wanted to hear (that she was alright) and then, in a traumatic meeting in June 1993, she was finally told the truth. The breast cancer had spread to her liver that was the pain and her bones. This prognosis was delivered in a Scottish surgery in the town of Dumfries near where we lived. We went in to see the oncologist who regularly came from Edinburgh, a pleasant doctor who, like those in the NHS, was hard working, and with little spare time on his hands. She later recounted the experience in a home movie made for her mother, and her wry irony sums up a situation that was to recur. It crystallized our thoughts