Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
from day one, when she popped in to see me one evening before a night out, she refuted all other claims to it. She was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Teenage crushes take many forms, but few can be more intense than that between a young patient and her nurse. She looked beautiful in her uniform. Tonight, in a red dress, with her hair flowing down over her shoulders and her make-up all done, she looked beautiful beyond belief. So much so that I realised that was what I wanted—not to be looked at with pity but as the young woman I used to be.
I told her, the following day, on the ward.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s no reason why you can’t make up your face if you want to.’
I could? This thought had not yet occurred to me, because I stopped seeing myself as a pretty young woman the moment I learned I couldn’t walk. Aldo, who’d broken his collarbone I now learned, had come and been sent packing by my auntie. Not because I blamed him—to climb aboard the bike had been my choice—but because whatever we’d had left between us was now gone. As for John, he’d been attracted to a functioning young woman; I absolutely did not want to see him like this, and I certainly didn’t want him to see me. But Elaine knew a lot more about self-esteem than I did.
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘And you should. You can use your arms, and we have mirrors we can fix to the bed so you can see. Why don’t you have someone fetch your cosmetics for you? I know you use lots of mascara,’ she said, grinning. ‘Because it was me who had to wipe it all off when you came in!’
She leaned down beside me and picked up the small hand mirror that lay on the cabinet beside my bed. We looked into it together. She smiled. ‘See?’
She had her hand on my head and was stroking my hair as she spoke. ‘And this,’ she decided, pulling on a strand of it, ‘needs washing.’
Having a makeover when you are a newly post-surgery spinal patient who is required at all times to lie supine, or prostrate, or on one side, is no mean undertaking. Sister Elaine O’Rourke, however, wasn’t one to let a technicality thwart her ambitions, so once she had dismantled the head of the bed, rustled up the requisite three nurses to shimmy me up it till my head hung over the edge and—crucially—hold me in place there, found several bowls, a plastic cup, three plastic aprons and (this the most testing) a quantity of shampoo, my transformation from the dragged-through-a-hedge look to glamour-puss could begin.
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.
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