Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
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.
One of the shorter (and unchosen) girls glared up at me. ‘You were always going to get in, Bowen,’ she hissed. She nodded towards Juli, who’d also been picked. ‘You and her. Any lanky bitch was bound to. And you know something else? You’re going to look a right prat.’
Prat or not, I was delighted. No amount of bitching or barracking or bile could take the shine off the thrill of that day.
Next up, of course, we were to be ‘styled and sized’, both novel concepts in themselves. Not that I was a stranger to fashion and make-up. Though my wardrobe consisted mostly of T-shirts and jeans (I grudgingly owned two skirts only because they were a part of my school uniform), I loved make-up just as much as any other fifteen-year-old, and considered my unruly mop of curls to be a blank canvas on which to experiment with all the cheap hair-colouring products of the day. I’d been dark, I’d been fair, I’d been every shade of red, and was currently posing as a sultry chestnut brunette. Perhaps highlights? I knew I would have to consult Juli. She might have tired of her current strawberry blonde locks, and it was important that the two of us didn’t clash.
Dorothy Perkins being one of the trendier names on the high street, we didn’t harbour too many worries about what they’d be kitting us out in. Despite their constant edict that it was the clothes and not our excitable selves we’d be exhibiting, we knew better. It was us in the clothes that would make all the difference, so every one of us embraced the role of self-regarding prima donna with the sort of commitment almost never seen in class.
The night of the show itself was unforgettable; I would like to have added ‘for all the obvious reasons’, but it rapidly became clear that modelling, though not quite rocket science, did require a degree of poise and expertise. So it was that the most memorable aspects of the show involved strangulation by feather boa (it was said for months afterwards that the poor girl’s eyes bulged so much that the whites of them could be seen from the back of the hall); near disaster by necklace (stray beads were still being found in corners of the school hall for months afterwards, and on the night the only solace was that she didn’t take out the headmistress with a flying tackle); and finally, near choking by baby-doll nightdress, my own contribution to the evening.
This last was also an early lesson in the idiom that less can be more. In my element, clothed in a red satin baby-doll nightdress and skimpy knickers, I swept down the catwalk amid some gratifying whistling, and, avoiding the eyes of my parents (they were both purple), I paused for my twirl at the end of the runway as I’d been instructed during rehearsals. It was at exactly that moment when a man in the front row took a bite from a bar of chocolate and it seemed that the proximity of my thinly veiled derrière brought on a violent bout of choking. He eventually received assistance from a fellow audience member and the panic in the hall quietened down.
I don’t know to this day if the two were connected, but at the time I was quite sure they were. ‘Fancy that,’ I remember thinking as I shimmied back up the catwalk. ‘My bum nearly killed someone. Fame at last!’
But my fame was to be as short-lived as it was glorious. The intervening three months might as well have been a lifetime. Mum fixed the photo to my locker, as she’d suggested, and it wasn’t long before it was spotted by one of the nurses. She pointed at the picture. ‘Was that you?’ she asked. It was all I could do not to contravene my own rule and break down at the import of her words. Not ‘is’ me, but ‘was’ me. A person no longer here. Not the biggest distinction, but one that cruelly, however unintentionally spoken, addressed the stark reality of what I’d become. I was still me, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?
The routine at Rookwood would soon become familiar, but for the first few anguished days I felt adrift and alone. From the moment my parents first arrived on the ward to join me, I was aware that all too soon they would have to leave me again, that they were no longer fifteen minutes but a whole hour away, and that I would have to get used to being without them every night, and instead, in the company of strangers.
And not just any strangers. The staff at Rookwood were different; to my ear, they ‘talked funny’. With my lack of years and travel I’d never heard a Cardiff accent before.
After Liz left to go back to Neath, two auxiliary nurses arrived to carry out their usual routine. It might be doing them a disservice, given my traumatised state, but to this day I don’t recall them introducing themselves to me, much less engaging me in conversation about what they had to do. I felt like an outsider—a new kid at school; only, generally, at school, all the new kids start together, so you have, at least, comrades with whom to share your disorientation. As for Mum and Dad, they were all at sea as well. They’d both lived through the horror of a world war, yet Rookwood still managed to terrify them.
Ward Six—my ward—held little in the way of hopeful allegiances. There was no one close to my age in the female section when I arrived, and none in the male section either. I imagined this must be a little like prison, though in prison at least the convicts got to move around a bit. I was imprisoned by my body and without control over any single aspect of my life. It felt less that I was spending further time in another hospital and more that I had actually started what was to be the rest of a life spent in captivity. I couldn’t seem to get past the notion that even when I’d finally made it out of bed, I’d still be confined to this urine-stinking hell-hole; the only difference was that I’d now be in a wheelchair and could haunt the place much as that woman I’d seen staring, unseeing, at a brick wall when I’d arrived. I knew I would have to learn to cope with things minute my minute, but didn’t have the first idea how.
The minutes passed, even so, and within the first twenty-four hours it became obvious that meals at Rookwood weren’t going to be a highlight. There was choice, certainly, but that choice never seemed to vary. It was invariably Spam (or a Spam-lookalike) accompanied by limp salad, or one of two varieties of stew. The latter was either brown with unidentifiable lumps or white with unidentifiable lumps; not remotely haute-cuisine, not even meals-on-wheels; the inmates, appropriately, as I soon came to learn, labelled it ‘muck on a truck’.
But the food did at least have one thing going for it. It was so vile, I found it hard to eat. This was a circumstance that was to bring me a small but definite crumb of comfort. A week or so into my relocation, I received a visit from John, the guy I’d secretly carried a torch for, the guy who’d made it clear he felt the same. I had mixed feelings about seeing him again. On the one hand seeing anyone was a welcome relief. I’d refused to see Aldo at Neath General, and I felt ambivalent about agreeing to see John now. All attempts made at physical normality at Neath (the hairdressing sessions, the carefully applied make-up) seemed almost nonsensical in this desolate place.
My body didn’t feel like my own any more, in either a physical