Never Say Die

Much water was slopped over Ward Eight that afternoon. Much water and enough laughter to reverberate around our corner of the hospital in sufficient volume that our activities were brought to the attention of Nigel, the hospital hairdresser. Nigel, today, would barely attract comment, but back in 1980 he was out on his own. He took the concept of ‘mincing’ to rarely seen heights, had shocking pink hair that rivalled Juli’s in lustre, and a ring almost anywhere a ring could comfortably go. He was also the hospital’s best gossip. After assessing my locks (‘Good God! What are these? Ugh! Streaks! And these roots!’) he set about his styling, furnishing me with titbits as he went. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s this Mr Davies like, then? I’ve heard he’s really big…in bones! Ha ha ha!’

But if his line in banter was of the kind that had nurses rolling helpless in the aisles, his hairdressing skills were seriously good. Standing up, or so I fondly imagined, the finished style would have had me looking every inch the pre-Raphaelite lovely. As it was, lying down, though the curls were still stunning, they massed around my head like a halo. If I were to venture a description of my look, it would have been ‘Shirley Temple has fight with small tornado’.

And it didn’t go unnoticed. Having applied sufficient make-up to distract the eye, I hoped, from my somewhat arresting coiffure, I must have looked as though I’d stumbled into Ward Eight en route to a travelling panto. I looked diverting enough, certainly, that when Mr Davies was finishing his afternoon ward round he stopped in his tracks by my bed and did a double take. He narrowed his eyes and looked sternly down over his glasses. ‘Has…’ he asked, ‘something, er, happened to you?’

But if Mr Davies was sufficiently motivated to comment, that was nothing compared to the reaction of my dad. He came so close to collapse as to need to sit down—with his piles, not something he did lightly. It was my Aunt Irene, however, who best summed up just how important this development had been. Visiting the following week when my make-up was slightly less florid, she recalls a gratifying sense of things turning a corner. ‘She’s done her eyes,’ she remembers thinking, ‘so she’ll be fine.’

At that point, in many respects, she’d been right. Despite the terrible thing that had happened to me, I felt cocooned in a bubble of love. I’d had endless visitors and presents and belly laughs and hugs and my care simply couldn’t have been bettered. Small wonder it seemed I’d be fine.

But it wouldn’t be long before the real truth would dawn—that the worst, in many ways, was still to come.

chapter 4 (#ulink_dfe54c4f-ea76-5214-9b33-d679f28cf4cf)

Monday 2 June 1980, and despite my every wish being wished as hard as could be, the trolley arrived that was to take me away. Today, just over three weeks after the accident, was the day when my time at Neath General was officially to end, it having been decided that now I was stable enough to travel. It was time to start rehabilitation.

I wasn’t quite sure what rehabilitation meant, much less involved, only that the process, up to now little discussed, was one that could take an extremely long time. If not all time. No one ever told me otherwise. The idea that I might spend the rest of my life incarcerated in an institution was so appalling to contemplate that I actively tried not to. Never sought to voice it, let alone discuss it. Just as I had while lying on the grass soaked in petrol, I adopted the ‘close your eyes and it’ll disappear’ approach.

Which seemed the only approach to take, because, for a fifteen-year-old child, it really was unthinkable. The only major trauma of my life up to now had been finding out that I had been adopted. And that hadn’t felt like any sort of trauma at all. All I knew was Mum and Dad, all I loved was Mum and Dad. What I didn’t know of the circumstances that had brought us together, I couldn’t have cared less about. This was different. This wasn’t about the past, but the future. The life I could no longer see for myself. A life that, so far, had been measured in small familiar increments. Birthdays and Christmases. School days. Weekend days. This term and that term. A week away on holiday. Even my three weeks at Neath—so singular an experience—had gradually attained their own comfortable rhythm: the treatments, the mealtimes, the visits, the ward rounds.

But all that was to change. I would not be coming back here. I might never go home. How could I ever go home? Home was a house on the side of a steep hill, with a multitude of steps and stairs and no accessible bedroom or toilet. But where else would I go? Mr Davies had already told me that my rehabilitation could take up to six months even in the very best—complication-free—circumstances. Even with a wheelchair-friendly home to go to. I pined uselessly for every single thing I’d now lost, from the comfort of my own bed to being able to make my body work right up to the O-levels I wouldn’t now be taking, exams that no longer had even the slightest significance. Or point. Who was going to employ a cripple?

But for the most part, I prayed. I was no stranger to praying, of course. I was like any other normal teenager—didn’t much bother with God when things were good, but bothered Him ceaselessly whenever they weren’t. Could He please fix my imperfections, make whoever I fancied like me, arrange it so my Maths test was easier than expected and generally ease my passage during turbulent times?

But the business of praying, when it’s miracles you’re after, is an altogether different thing to do, chiefly because you have to start off by apologising for all the selfish, insignificant things you’ve already pestered Him about over the years, before going on to try and make a convincing sort of case about just how truly madly deeply you need Him to be there for you now. And if He’d not seen fit to undo the damage I’d done to myself, could He at least find some way to give us hope for the future? Just the tiniest glimmer was all I asked.

Because I wasn’t just praying for myself. Despite my growing terror about what the future had in store for me—Would I ever see home again? Would I be crippled and useless and incarcerated for ever? Would I ever see the outside of some grim institution?—none of this felt quite as bad and unrelenting as the ever-present guilt about my parents. They had done nothing to deserve this. They had adopted a healthy baby girl (my mother often used to comment how lucky we all were; there were so many disabled babies up for adoption, after all. How wonderful, they’d agreed, that I was perfect in every way) and now, just fifteen years later, they had a six-foot useless great lump for a daughter, one that would be totally dependent on them all over again. It wasn’t just my own life I’d thrown away by my recklessness. I’d thrown all that love and care back in their faces as well.

The place where I’d been billeted for the next stage of my treatment was called Rookwood Hospital. It was a large Spinal Injuries Centre in Cardiff that took patients from South Wales and the South West of England, and about which I knew nothing whatsoever.

As was the case with my parents. Their only exposure to the business of spinal rehabilitation up to now had been the much fêted and publicised Stoke Mandeville Hospital, at that time inseparable from its then most famous patron, Jimmy Savile, whose tireless support and incredible energy had put the place firmly on the map. Working on the eminently sensible basis that somewhere so famous and so widely supported might be just the place for their daughter, they petitioned to have me sent there. After all, if I was going to have to spend God only knew how big a chunk of my life away from home, and in a totally alien environment, at least they could push for the best, and best-loved, one. The one, though they hardly dared voice their desperate hope, that might still offer some tiny chance that I would one day manage to walk again. But their reasoning fell on deaf NHS ears.

In rehabilitation terms, as Mr Davies was swift to point out, I would be equally well served in either place. And being sent all the way to Stoke Mandeville made little sense. Not if I wanted to see anything of my family. Stoke Mandeville was over 100 miles distant, Rookwood, in Cardiff, just 30. Besides, it was the centre intended for our region, and as with hospitals and schools one tended to go where one was told. So though Stoke Mandeville would come to figure later in my life, for now Rookwood, it was decided, it would be.

I was terrified. I’d been terrified from day one, of course, but as my final week at Neath General ticked by and 2 June got ever closer, my terror took on a new intensity.

By now I had settled into a routine at Neath General and trusted the staff looking after me—the very personal parts of me. I’d been eased through the metamorphosis from my old life to my new one by powerful tranquillising and painkilling drugs. Now I was about to be dragged off to an institution where I wouldn’t have such support—not to mention my mother’s constant presence through the nights. Did people ever come out of institutions? Weren’t they places where you went to die? It didn’t matter much to me that Rookwood was closer than Stoke Mandeville. It was still far away, and would be full of equally terrifying ‘inmates’. Who would want to travel and visit me there?

My terror became a constant, unwelcome companion. It visited me every time I let my guard down for an instant and crept into bed with me at night. Up till this point I simply hadn’t time for such terror. Too many routines. Too many distractions. The days full of people and things to be done, the nights eased by the comfort that was the presence of my mother, breathing softly beside me, just an arm’s length away. All this was to stop. To be replaced by—what? It didn’t help that none of my nurses knew anything about Rookwood either. The only person, in fact, who had ever been to Rookwood was my consultant, many years back when still a junior doctor, and presumably because he hadn’t heard of any murders, mass lynchings or other criminal atrocities, he was completely satisfied that it was the best place for me to be.

As with any lack of solid information—a small testimony from a grateful former patient would have done—Rookwood soon acquired the status of a terrifying unknown, a situation not helped by my increasing conviction that the reason no one admitted to knowing anything about it was because it was going to be so grim and dreadful they dared not speak of it in my presence. Even the name conjured dark forbidding images of tar-black flocks of huge angry birds roosting and cawing in malevolent forests; a Dickensian nightmare made real.

The departure itself was protracted. Once aboard my trolley to retrace, for the first time, the route I’d taken in reverse just three weeks ago (apart from my trip to theatre for my op, I’d not seen outside the ward, much less sniffed fresh air) I was soon joined by a procession of staff. Almost everyone in the hospital turned out to say goodbye—even off-duty nurses, who’d come in specially to wish me well. There seemed not enough words to convey my gratitude to everyone, much less space in my throat for the lump that was lodged there; it really did feel as if I was being uprooted from a substitute home that I’d only just got used to and being taken away to a strange place full of strangers for an indeterminate period of time—and that was assuming I survived. I didn’t know much but I wasn’t stupid, either. A long life was no longer something I could take for granted. How could I when so much of me no longer worked? The human body was not designed to be like this.

Perhaps if I could just hang on in A & E long enough, they’d forget why they were gathered and we could all go back in and pretend it wasn’t happening. But it wasn’t to be. All too soon, the ambulance had backed up into the porchway to admit me, and suddenly it was just me, Staff Nurse Liz, who had been given the responsibility of escorting me, and my small bundle of possessions, on our way to the big city and whatever we’d find there. I stared at the ambulance ceiling, my throat sore, my eyes puffy and my head full of regrets. The last time I’d visited Cardiff, I recalled, was to have the tattoo of Aldo’s name removed; my grand gesture towards a bright shiny future as a model. Now some other girls’ future. Not mine.

The ambulance shuddered into life. Liz settled herself into her seat beside my trolley and took my hand. ‘I’m not sure if this is a privilege or a torment,’ she confided. There had apparently been no shortage of volunteers to undertake this particular away-day from the hospital, about which I was touched, but all had also agreed that the prospect of delivering me into the hands of the people at Rookwood, depositing me there and then travelling back alone, was not one they viewed with any relish.

Nurses see patients come and go all the time, of course, but in hindsight what human could fail to be moved by the plight of a vulnerable teenage girl, so horribly disabled, who was about to be packed off into the unknown?

Once again, the ambulance was to proceed agonisingly slowly. Though it had been decided that my back was now strong enough to cope with the transfer, it was still on the condition that the journey be as smooth as possible. As the M4 motorway had yet to snake its way this deep into the South Wales countryside the route took in mostly trunk roads and lesser ones. As a result we caused lengthy tailbacks of traffic, most cars (either out of deference or caution) seemingly unwilling to overtake. Perhaps the sight of the ambulance moving so slowly made them think a little more before hitting the gas. They must have wondered who was in there and what terrible fate had befallen them. I couldn’t see myself, of course, but from what Liz kept relaying, our procession must have looked a little like a funeral cortège.

Somewhere, caught up in this tailback, were my mother and father, ensconced in the family’s aged Morris Minor, which they’d had to bring along, rather than ride with me in the ambulance, as the latter had to return to Neath almost immediately, while they would stay at Rookwood for a while to help settle me in. Having no idea where Rookwood was, much less how to find their way there, they had elected to follow us. My greatest fear on that journey, when not engaged in being terrified for myself, was that at some point we would lose them altogether. Without sat nav or mobiles or a map (Mum couldn’t read them), they were entirely dependent on keeping us in sight. But with many junctions and roundabouts and traffic lights involved, this was, even on a journey this slow, a challenge. And given Mum’s almost legendary navigational history, I had a very real fear that they might never get there and be doomed to patrolling the streets of Cardiff for all time.

It wasn’t hard to germinate such panics. During my time at Neath, Liz and I had become great conversationalists.

Despite my physical difficulties (it’s hard to laugh properly when lying on your back, plus the level of my paralysis meant my lung function was impaired, not helped by my having smoked for four years), Liz had always been adept at bringing out the teenage bravado that invariably saw me through difficult moments. But now, as the ambulance crawled for its interminable hours, neither of us could find anything to say. Seeing Liz, a year on, I was to find out that she’d cried without let-up for the whole journey back, but right then all I was aware of were my own racing thoughts. I was heart-in-the-mouth anxious. I didn’t want to be here. What I most wanted to do was to leap up and run away. But running wasn’t (and, I knew, deep down, would never again be) an option. So my woes circled round me like rooks themselves, while I remained in my dark place contemplating my dark future. A place no platitudes or chin-up type words could seem to broach.

Rookwood Hospital was—and still is—situated in Llandaff, on the western edge of Cardiff. It’s set in an elderly house and an assortment of low, antiquated-looking buildings, within sprawling grounds dotted with fat cedars and impenetrable thickets. We would come to joke later that should a patient fall out of their wheelchair and end up in one, it would be weeks, perhaps months, before they’d be found.

Rookwood was half a mile or so from Cardiff’s Llandaff Cathedral to the east and further away, to the west, tracing our route towards home, from the green spaces of the Welsh Folk Museum. To visit Rookwood now would be to find little changed. It still looks a little like a faded stately home that has been commandeered to provide a base for a bunch of troops.

But however evocative of better days the exterior surroundings, what the ambulance doors eventually opened onto was the back end of a single-storey ward block, far from the grand entrance, which was set among a collection of lock-ups and bins and looked every inch the sort of army barracks you’d see in a black-and-white war film. A set of double doors was presumably the entrance, but it was not them that grabbed my immediate attention. For beside them was a wheelchair, in which sat a woman of about thirty, a pathetic-looking soul in twisted tracksuit bottoms, who didn’t even seem to be aware that we were there. She just sat slumped, looking blankly at the adjacent brick wall.

It was a vision that would stay with me always. Was this it for me now? Was this going to be my life? Would my days now be spent staring vacantly at nothing? If I’d been scared before I was doubly so now. I would not, I could not, become like that woman. But how, I thought, panicked, was I to stop that from happening? As I was unloaded from the ambulance, the blue of the sky—the first I’d seen for so long—seemed to taunt me. I was flat on my back. I was useless. A giant baby. I couldn’t do anything for myself any more. My whole life, in all its most intimate aspects, was now in the hands of other people. Strangers. And where were Mum and Dad?

It came as no surprise that the first smell I encountered on passing through those double doors was urine. The smell I’d previously associated with telephone boxes, dank underpasses and the corners of multi-storey car parks seemed every bit as fitting in this bleak and cheerless environment. I wouldn’t have been even remotely surprised to find matted-haired vagrants shuffling up to meet me, or beached up, semi-conscious, against the ward block walls.

A heavily pregnant nurse appeared to greet us and spoke in staccato terms to Liz. Her words, spoken low, were impossible to decipher, but one thing was clear. She seemed to have no intention of talking to me. All I knew was that I was now being wheeled I knew not where, and the sense of being out of control was acute. Liz held my hand and tried to keep me informed. Our destination—the female ward—was approached via the male ward, though in fact the distinction wasn’t clear. The two wards were only separated by a set of partial screens. There were doors, apparently, but as I was to find later, there might as well not have been because they were never shut.

Our passage through this section was illuminating too, accompanied by mutters of ‘Here’s a new one’ and also wolf whistles. Liz was very pretty, so male attention was unsurprising, but wolf whistles? Here? It felt horrible and wrong. She held my hand tightly and, with the help of the ambulance crew, lifted me carefully into bed. Then, our journey done, we were offered a cup of tea.

Not the biggest, most significant thing in the world, a cup of tea. Not most of the time, anyway. Cups of tea were a regular occurrence at Neath General; they punctuated the days just as surely as the ward rounds, the mealtimes, and Auntie Mad’s cakes. At Neath I’d always been given my tea in a cup and saucer; they prided themselves on such details. Tea served in a cup and saucer felt normal—tasted normal—no matter that, being flat on my back or my front, I always had to drink mine through a straw. And not just any straw either. The nurses kept a supply of coloured bendy ones for me, which someone had taken the trouble to go out and buy; different nurses, different colours, and always a new one.

Here my tea arrived in a plastic feeder beaker. The sort babies have; a murky-looking, semi-transparent trainer cup. Liz automatically removed the trainer top and asked if a straw could be provided instead. This didn’t seem too outlandish a request, and the ward nurse went straight off to fetch one. What came, however, gave us both the shudders—a length of plastic tubing, horribly similar to that used for bed-bags, which was unceremoniously dropped into my cup. By this time Mum and Dad had arrived on the ward and joined us, having, to my great relief, finally found their way there, via goodness only knew what diversion. Their faces said everything. They too were disgusted. The tea cooled in its beaker, undrunk.

And then, all too soon, it was time for Liz to leave us. The ambulance had been delayed for long enough. How I envied the patients she was going back to care for. How I dreaded that, as of now, our connection would be severed. How long would it be before I saw her—or any of my lovely nurses—again? She hugged me a final time and whispered in my ear. ‘It won’t be that bad,’ she said. ‘It won’t be that bad.’ And it wouldn’t be forever. If I was to get through this, I had to keep telling myself that. Even so, we both cried, and as I watched her walk away, accompanied by another round of cat-calls and whistles, I thought I’d be happy to curl up and die right there. I clung to Mum and Dad while my sobs refused to quieten. She was wrong. It already was that bad.

chapter 5 (#ulink_dec0a5e9-2cfb-50f9-b0cc-8269ce0e7840)

There are events that happen in any life that become significant only once put in context with what follows them. My moment on the catwalk was one such.

Four days after my admission to Rookwood, Mum and Dad brought in a photograph for me. It was the one that had appeared in the Western Mail newspaper several weeks earlier, as part of their coverage of a not particularly important news event: the Glanafan Comprehensive School fashion show. I was fourth from the right of our line-up of models, all of us decked out in that season’s new nightwear; there was sufficient nylon that had we rustled too much there would no doubt have been enough static electricity to launch a zeppelin.

‘Thought we could put it on your locker,’ Mum suggested. ‘You know. Something to cheer you up.’

Mum had a point. Having spent much of the preceding few days in what I had come to decide was an extreme form of solitary confinement, to retreat inside my head was beginning to feel not just a means to escape the horror of my situation, but more a series of visits to a much nicer place—a dreamscape, almost, populated by a version of myself that was no longer imprisoned in this hateful bed.

Not that I’d wanted to be a model at the outset. (I certainly didn’t want to be a model as a life choice—I just loved the feeling that if I’d wanted to, I could.) When it had first been put about that they were looking for models, my response was the same as pretty much everyone else’s. A mass teenage lack of self-esteem, coupled with an equally natural fear of being made to look silly or uncool, meant our fall-back position was that anyone who dared put herself forward as a wannabe Twiggy would, without exception, be a tart and a poser, and utterly in love with themselves. Not the sort of girl, we all agreed firmly, that we’d want to have anything to do with. Dorothy Perkins, the store running the event, would, we decided, have to look elsewhere for their complement of catwalk crumpet.

But our group dynamic (not to mention our natural adolescent mistrust of things organised by adults) didn’t prove much of a match for our girlish human nature. As the hour passed that stood between break-time and lunchtime, it seemed it wasn’t only us that had had a major change of heart. By the time Juli and I turned up at the gym, we found ourselves in the midst of a heaving mass of girlhood, by turns giggling and strutting and giggling some more.

It seemed that despite our refusals to have anything to do with it, almost every girl in the fifth form had suddenly changed her mind. Someone even mentioned the Pirelli calendar.

This wasn’t exactly New York fashion week, but there was a real sense of anxious anticipation as the three women from Dorothy Perkins, who up until now had been observing the preening teens with a stern and slightly jaundiced eye, gathered the mob into three separate groups. Under their critical gaze, we were directed to walk a single length of the gym floor.

When my own turn came it was with less surprise than I might have felt, given my earlier pronouncements, that I found myself 110 per cent committed to being a tart and a poser. Whatever it took, so be it. Besides, I was really enjoying myself. I strutted my stuff, head up, shoulders back (as I’d read somewhere), willing the woman to notice my height and my grace, and desperate to hear that magical ‘yes’.

But my moment of glory was short-lived. Even before I’d fully had time to assimilate the long-term potential of my new status as catwalk beauty (being spotted, getting famous, lying on tropical beaches, sipping cocktails with umbrellas in, being swept away by Paul Michael Glaser and so on) I was the recipient of a sharp poke in the arm.