Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
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.
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