Chapter 1 Who’s that boy in ICU?

It has been reported that earlier today, Sunday, 23 February 1986, at approximately 1.00 pm, a car hit a bridge and veered out of control. No other vehicles were involved in the incident. However, inside the vehicle two parents and their two children, who were travelling back from Scotland after a half term break skiing, were seriously injured in the incident. The crash took place the other side of Bristol, resulting in major traumas. It is alleged that the father swapped driving roles with the mother when they stopped off in London to visit the Carnaby Street market. The mother broke her neck; the father broke his collar bone whilst the young daughter, aged just two and a half, did not survive the crash. The son was rushed, along with both of his parents, to Frenchay Hospital in northern Bristol where doctors had a three day fight to get him into a stable coma and onto a life support machine. The boy, aged only five and a half, sustained massive head injuries, as well as breaking his pelvis and developing an infection in one of his lungs. The mother was rushed to a specialist unit where she was put in traction; weights were put on her head so she could not move her neck, which may have resulted in spinal traumas as well. The young boy was taken immediately to intensive care in a very critical condition that did not look hopeful at all. Doctors and nurses fought to help the poor child and struggled to get him into a steady coma. His limp pale body, overcrowded with wires and tubes, looked as if it was floating on the waterbed they had him on whilst fighting to save his life. The life support machine had been working overtime to keep the boy alive in his coma, but doctors and nurses had spoken to the boy’s family, warning them that one day the machine would have to be switched off, as no signs of change could be seen in the little boy’s condition, and asking if he had been christened. Medical staff also warned that, even if the helpless child did come out of the coma and managed to breathe unaided, because he had sustained such massive head injuries and bodily damage, he would most likely be a cabbage in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. The machine was one day turned off, as still the boy’s condition showed no signs of change. The boy did not respond or breathe on his own. His traumatised family pleaded with the medical team to turn the machine back on and give the boy a little more time. Their protestations were so adamant that the medical staff agreed to give the kid a few more days to try and breathe without the help of the life support machine that had been keeping him alive or almost three weeks now.

The family prayed to whatever was out there that their boy would one day make it by himself. They had already lost a daughter. And to lose the boy too – that would destroy them all. They so longed desperately for their little boy to open his chocolate brown eyes once again. Both sets of grandparents rented a flat near Frenchay Hospital so that they could visit and be with mother and child as often as was possible. That day came though when the artificial breathing device would be turned off for good. There would be no more second, third, or fifth chances for him; it was crunch time. The breathing machine was switched off. The helpless child, who had sustained horrific injuries in the road traffic accident, lay there peacefully, unable to do anything. But in his vegetative state, he started to take air by himself, unaided by bits of equipment with flashing lights and a deathly beepy blip sound. The boy’s family could not believe it; it was a miracle, and their prayers had been answered. Yet the child still had the diagnosis of a Cabbage Patch Kid doll existence to overcome – a life of not being able to fend for himself ever again. The kid at best, doctors said, would be a turnip, a root vegetable in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The diagnosis was not great, but the family were just so happy to see the child’s stomach rise and fall as he inhaled oxygen on his own for the first time in three weeks. He opened his deep dark chocolate brown eyes for the first time on Saturday, 1 March. During his coma-induced state, the boy had been able to hear voices. Yet, he’d been unable to respond, for example, to the words, ‘three spoonfuls of ice-cream,’ which his grandma kept repeating in his ear whilst she stroked his forehead trying desperately to get her grandson to wake up. His strict head mistress from the school he had gone to had recorded a tape of the student register being called out: ‘Phillip Brown, Sarah Taylor, Lloyd Conaway, James Gardner?’ Anything, to try and get him to come out of the deep coma he was in. Obviously he was not attending school that day. In his mind, in his head he was taking a nap on the floor of his grandparent’s living room, the roughness of the carpet against his young face and soft skin, too tired to care. The boy was lost, in a dark and cave like place at a junction, with the options of taking the left or right tunnel. Which one would take him home?

I woke up not knowing where I was or what was going on around me, unable to speak, unable to move, yet never alone. My mum was going to be ok too, and the news that her son, her little boy, was going to survive to fight another day gave her an extra glimmer of hope. And on 20 March she got to see me herself for the first time since we had been admitted into hospital and put on separate wards. She stared at me, her little boy, in shock – an obvious mixture of happiness and fright. During the next few days, my condition improved and stabilised, and my mum gradually regained her composure. Once I had fully returned from my coma-induced adventures and was breathing ok and my condition stabilised, the medical staff moved me from the intensive care unit on to a ward with other children; it was a Wednesday, 25 March, I was still unable to speak. My family had mixed feelings about the transfer. They were concerned about me being moved onto a more generalised ward because the attention and care I had been getting in the intensive care unit was perfect, and they did not want my condition, which had improved little by little, to start deteriorating. It took the family a few days to get used to the more general type of care I received on the new ward. The doctors said things would be ok and thought the stimulation of the other children around me would be a good thing. My family had cassette tapes played to me, as well as the school register, stories of Wind in the Willows. If only they knew that I did not like the stories they played. My situation improved gradually. Yet I was this living boy frustrated at the fact that I could not do anything. Just make your damn cassette stories stop! I wanted to shout. As my condition got a little better, I was treated to rides in a wheelchair up to my mum’s ward so that she could see me and be reassured I was alive, rather than simply relying on stories from others of how my condition was slowly but steadily improving. Speech therapists and physiotherapists came to talk with my family and try to explain the sorts of slow progress they could expect in the coming days and months ahead. My family was continuously staring into my eyes trying to make

contact, hoping to switch my little brain into action. My nan sat me in a chair in the small classroom and got out some Lego in the hope it would help; not much response from that though. It seemed like every time I had a good day, the following day was not so good, as I was too tired and not interested. This made everyone sad and impatient. My family tried anything and everything to spur my recovery on, even putting marmite on my tongue to try and stimulate my taste buds – well marmite, of all the things in this world! By day twelve, my grandma thought my eyes were a lot brighter and the family now thought they had the attention of my eyes. My eyes were the only windows inside to see how I was; doctors and nurses would often shine bright penlights in them whilst they took my temperature. Why did they shine bright light in my eyes? I was given a penlight of my own to play with and shine back at them when I was strong enough to do so. On the children’s ward, my bed was opposite the nurses’ station midway up the ward. Wanting to be the centre of attention was a trait I picked up from an early age, and it still continues up until this day. Was this a trait I was born with? Or was it because I was critically ill and needed constant observation? The boy up at the end of the ward was always banging and listened to bizarre music. My grandad gave him the nickname ‘Thumper’. The left side of my body was completely paralysed as a result of the brain damage I had sustained from the crash. My left hand clenched like a fist, unable to open. It kept me amused for ages; I imagined that inside were one-penny cola bottle sweets like I used to get from the post office down the road from where we lived. I tried to force my unresponsive left hand open with my barely moveable and shaky right hand, sometimes jamming my index finger into my left fist, imagining the sticky and sweet cola bottles inside. The unappealing bowls of mashed up Wheatabix with warm milk the hospital staff fed me meant the urgency to free the sweets inside my fist was ever mounting. A long period of time passed where nothing seemed to happen; I made no progress and saw nothing new. My family would just sit at my bedside and look at me and tell me stories and ask questions trying to get me to respond. They would hold me and would be filled with a mixture of emotions. The bruises under my eyes were becoming less prominent, and all the deep cuts and gashes on my hands started to heal. If I was healing on the outside, was I also starting to get better on the inside? Everything was so out of control that nothing was normal anymore.

Soon I was introduced to my physiotherapist, Christine, the first of many physical therapists I would meet over time. My family would come and watch Christine do exercises with me. She would place my limp ragdoll-like body face down over a giant bright orange gym ball and roll the ball along the floor, which would encourage me to lift my head up and was intended to stretch out my back. She then reversed the process and flipped me over so I looked up at the ceiling. Again my head raised as the ball slowly rolled. This exercise was for my tummy muscles. When she tried to make me stand up, my nan said I looked like Pinocchio, all loose and happy. Lots of friends would come and visit, bringing with them all kind of lovely presents for me and my mum, which at a time like this, helped so much. All the wonderful gifts were particularly a help to mum, who was grieving terrifically. I could never replicate feelings that could approximate how she must have felt. Mum would need a great deal of support from the family and especially her friends. Auntie Debbie tried really hard to wash all of the blood out of the new leather jacket mum had bought in London at the market, but it was impossible to get that amount of blood out of the interior lining. My sister and I had each gotten a sticky spider that crawled down the window in the car; that was the last thing I remembered from my previous life time. Auntie Sal and Uncle Nick returned from a skiing holiday and said they could see an improvement in me since the last time they had seen me before going on holiday. To the rest of the family though, those who were constantly there, nothing very much seemed to change or happen. ‘Will he ever get better? Sometimes we do despair, but deep down in our hearts, we do feel he is improving, and we try to look to a positive future,’ my nan says. My family was not going to give up; I was going to get better. It was next to impossible to get to sleep on the ward with all the other children coughing and spluttering throughout the night. The pillows were always so hot and hard. I wanted to go home, and I did not like it here. Looking up in terror and anger, I could not get to sleep and I was frustrated that my hand did not open. I saw my dad. He had come to try and help me get to sleep. He would turn the pillow over and it would be cool. I thought it was magic. I could get some sleep, a chance to get away from this ward, this strange place where people in white coats shine lights in my eyes and put a glass stick under my tongue. I wanted to go home and play with my toys. I had a new Glow Worm, which the nurses soon grew to strongly dislike because I always wanted it to glow during the night when I was frustrated and unable to get to sleep. How could anyone dislike my Glow Worm, with its smiley face and white wings affixed to its green body? It even had a little

orange fabric pouch to sleep in. It had to be put by a light source to charge its glow, so the nurse on duty was forever running to and from her office every ten minutes to put it by her desk lamp. In the morning, a toy trolley glided through the ward in front of a hospital volunteer. I always wanted the horse racing game; every time the trolley would come down the ward, I wanted that one. Everybody liked that game. You had to guess which horse would finish first, and the miniature plastic horses would bob along the track, moving up the track by the power of the battery operated motor inside when it was turned on. Lots of people came to visit me. Every time I had visitors, my chocolate digestive biscuits in the locker beside my bed would always get offered around. I could not swallow properly, so my food was always puréed – mashed up Wheatabix with warm milk, almost as repulsive as the semolina we had at school! However, I was very fond of and forever drinking Ribena with milk out of a baby’s yellow coloured beaker. I do not know exactly why I never could just have a normal strawberry milkshake. The notion of being normal – whatever that was – seemed a million miles away. Rachael, my speech therapist, came by the ward whilst my nan and grandma were talking to me. She could see the concentration in my face as I tried to answer their questions. She thought it would be worthwhile trying me at Visual Ad. It did sound exciting. Rachael took me to Visual Ad, and my family watched as she programmed a playschool-like picture of a house gradually building up on a computer screen. I clearly liked the bright colours and concentrated for at least two to three minutes. It seemed to the family as if it was only last week that I was learning my tables at school; it just went to show what a long way we had to go to get back on course. How life could change so fast. The little boy who could not wait to run out of school and tell his mummy he passed his times tables test now was back doing playschool tasks. Another exciting day lay ahead. An outing from my ward to my mum’s was about the only exciting thing I could manage – apart from watching the plastic horses bob up and down along the racecourse. When I was at my mum’s bedside, someone brought me a Sooty puppet. I liked the bright orange fluffiness of the hand puppet, and he even came complete with a magic wand. If only I could wave a magic wand and make it all go away, I would love my Sooty puppet even more. I started getting stroppy. Give me Ribena and milk! Everybody wanted me to do things, and I got angry at not being able to. Take me home!

I kept going to Visual Ad, and as I improved slowly, Rachael introduced me to new things. I had to push the button to make the picture come on the screen. I found it all very tiring and hard work, but I kept on trying. Rachael got out this big shiny red apple, and if I blew on it, a big green illuminated worm came out the top. She told me to blow, and I tried with all my might to blow and make the worm come out. Little things like this seemed so big – so huge. I ate a lot, and the people around me encouraged me to drink lots as I was still on a drip and taking in extra fluid and nutrients through a tube in my nose. If I could get off the drip, I would be able to breathe easier and I could try to talk without the hindrance of the tubes. It was a major highlight when my dad managed to feed me a whole chocolate mousse. Being carted to see my mum again to show her how well I was doing and now responding to instructions, ‘James, blow on the apple for Mummy – one, two, three!’; Even before three, I would be blowing with all my might on the apple, as if I was the big bad wolf trying to blow the three little pigs’ house down, trying to make the big green worm pop up. What a magical moment it was for my mum to see; her eyes filled with tears. This convinced my family that my mind was still ok. My mum was counting the days until she could come out of traction. The doctors told her it would be another two weeks before she could, and after that, she may need a small operation. It was vitally important that she could see my improvements because she had lost the will to live; her state of mind was all over the place. It seemed all doom and gloom. James Thomas, my best friend from school, came to see me. We played with the big plastic red apple, and he got me to blow on it and told me what was going on back at school. My Auntie Sal and Uncle Nick came in again, and James laughed with them before I got too tired and it was time to go to bed. Every day was now the same as the last. I got taken to physio with Christine, and afterwards, Dad wheeled me up to see my mum. One day one of the patients on mum’s ward shouted, ‘Hello,’ to me, and to everybody’s astonishment, I said, ‘Hello,’ back. ‘He can speak; he can speak!’ This was absolutely the best piece of progress I had made to date, and all my family cried. Their little boy was returning to the world. On Easter Sunday, I had lots of Easter eggs. I had lots of things and even some cute little fluffy chicks with cardboard legs. I had a large Easter egg at the bottom of my bed on a table, and I thought it was a person’s head; it really frightened me. In the early days, I sometimes suffered from hallucinations.

All of my family had come up on Easter Sunday, and they all ate hot crossed buns around my mum’s bed. I had my yellow beaker with milk and Ribena in it. The best Easter present for the family was hearing me say, ‘Hello.’ My Uncle Phil was escorting me with Dad back down the long sparsely kept hospital corridor in a wheelchair. The corridor leading up to my ward was long; it was painted white, but some of the paint was peeling off in places, which maybe added some character to the place. The only thing of any interest going down the long corridor was a metal machine on the wall. It was shaped like a big shoebox with two see-through columns that allowed me to see the machine’s contents. Annoyed because I wanted what was inside, I asked in a slow robotic sound for the four-fingered chocolate treat inside the machine: ‘Kit Kat!’ Continuing back down to the ward my mind was wondering about my sister, ‘Where is Katie? Where is my sister?’ I wanted to see my sister. Where was she? It was very hard, but my dad had to tell me that she had gone up to heaven with Jesus. I want to go home now. Please let me go home, Daddy. Take me home! Now that I could talk, I told my dad I did not want to do exercises on the ball today and I wanted to go home. I was told that, if I worked hard to sit up on my own, we might be able to. ‘He tries so hard to hold himself up – dear of him too!’ my grandma would say when she saw the determination in my face as I tried to sit up without any help. I sounded like a robot on empty batteries, but the family was so happy that their little boy was making progress. To encourage my progress, my grandma and grandad had contacted Robinson’s Jam to get the complete set of Golliwog brooch pins I had recently started to collect from labels off the back of jars of jam. I’d even had my teachers at school saving their labels for me. Progress was continuing, and things seemed to be going well. My body needed so much attention; even my right side, which was not paralyzed, was terribly shaky. I wanted to do some drawing and writing, but my hand shook so much I struggled to form any shapes or letters and hold a pen. It was so frustrating. Getting visitors was now a bit better, as I could talk and blow on the apple and show off my progress. My sense of humor started to come back, and I demanded to be the centre of attention. All my visitors were pleased with my progress, which was easier to spot if you had not seen me in a few weeks or so. My good school friend James came up again to visit, and I could actually talk to him this time. Things were starting to become a bit more normal once again, and it was only day forty-two at this stage. James and I played with finger

puppets James’s mum brought up with her, and it was a magical few hours. It was hard for my family to see and to come to terms with the fact that I was disabled now and to wonder if I was ever going to get better. I lost a tooth, and my grandma played Tooth Fairy and put fifty pence under my pillow. The family started to relax and started doing things outside of the hospital, which I’m sure helped take their minds off of things. On day forty-five, my mum came out of traction, but it was still not good news as she had to start wearing a collar around her neck and over her head. My dad had his plaster taken off, and he was the first survivor of this calamity to be whole again. I worked hard at trying to sit up by myself; it was frustrating because I did not understand why I could not do it. My speech still needed a lot of work, but I was able to communicate without people just staring into my eyes looking for some sort of acknowledgment. By the end of each day, I was very drained and my speech had deteriorated. April 8. Another day, another trip to physio. But today I had a go on the moving bed to test my balance, and I also managed to stand with my left leg to the ground. I tried so hard, my speech was a little bit better when I was stood up right. I was really enjoying being on the children’s ward. I got spoilt, and everything I wanted was given to me. I started to get noisy and excitable and extremely demanding. My family did not know how best to quiet me down without destroying my enthusiasm and the progress I was making. Mum was starting to walk again, and she came down to physio with me but found it quite distressing seeing the full extent of things and what hard work it was going to take to make me better. It was my left foot that was the biggest problem. It just would not go flat to the ground, and it was all twisted over. My movements were gradually getting more and more controlled with each passing day. Mum was now out of the hospital but still in her head brace and collar and was living back at the flat with my grandparents and dad. I was allowed out of hospital for the day to go to the flat. Uncle Nick took me all around and showed me the place before I had to do some exercises and stretches on the floor. I stayed for dinner and it was like a reunion of the family, but it was still not complete without my lovely little sister, Katie, whose spirit was always around us. The frustration of not being able to perform the exercises well was annoying, and I got angry.

It was still impossible for me to sit up unaided and hold my head still without wobbling. I had the shakes, and I really wanted to go home. Things moved quickly, and I was being checked to see if I would be suitable to go to an assessment centre in Exeter. My doctor had mentioned my case to someone back in Exeter, and he was trying to arrange my return to school for half a day of lessons and half a day of physio. The family was encouraged to hear that things were moving along nicely and were pleasantly surprised that my doctor was talking of my returning home. I wanted to walk, and I tried with the aid of a frame, but I could not. Out of sheer frustration, I managed to sit myself up right once I was back in my bed. I was allowed out again on the weekend, and it was good to see my mum and family out and smiling again. I wanted to go out and go shopping. I was adamant that we were going shopping, and the family took me to a shopping mall. On the way, I fell asleep and slept for two hours whilst my dad drove around saying it was like old times out with the family. I chose some felt tip coloring pens, and when we returned to the flat, we all did some colouring in. After dinner, my dad and uncle took me back to the hospital. The following day, I got picked up at about eleven and went over to the flat where mum was peeling vegetables. Auntie Sal was there too. I brought my colouring book and pens to do some drawing. After lunch, I had a sleep as it was important for me to get lots of rest. Later, some friends came and took me to feed the ducks, which was a nice change. But all too soon, I had to go back to hospital and to bed on my ward. I did not mind too much, which made it easier for the family to take me back. That Monday morning feeling started, and it was day fifty-nine. Mum came to see me but had to wait for my return from the hospital school I was now going to. Mum fed me lunch and then had to leave again so I could get some sleep. In the evening, I tried to stand and managed to get my foot to the floor again. It was getting flatter every day. The news that I could possibly go home at the weekend lifted my spirits, but Christine, my physio, was not so sure I was ready for that yet. I sat myself up and managed to hold it to the count of one hundred and could have even gone on for longer. Christine was pleased with my continuing progress, and Dr. Cummins thought I might be walking within four to six weeks. Trips to physio, speech therapy, and hospital school had become a daily ritual; my voice was getting softer, less harsh, and less like a robot’s. Everybody was pleased with the progress I was making, but the idea of ever walking again

seemed so far off, if not impossible. My doctor’s contact at Exeter was looking into whether I could continue my rehabilitation closer to home. I continued to stay at the family flat at the weekends, and I was getting stronger but still looked a bit grey and lifeless. We went to the zoo and saw the animals on a Saturday, and I really responded well. I was talking better. The following day, we went to Slimbridge to see the birds, and I held my right hand out so the birds could eat the grain from my palm, giggling as they pecked at my hand. The hospital staff moved me into a cubicle room with another little boy, as I was requiring less and less daily medical attention. They put me in a cot, but I did not like it one bit. Do you know who I am! I told my dad I wanted to go back to the flat and go home. This was a sure sign that I was now ready to face the real world again and start the long journey back to normality. As a six-year-old, I really had no idea how rough and tough that would be. There was a noticeable improvement in my physio and in my balance. The exercises on the ball were easier and more controlled now. In general, things were starting to become normal, and by day sixty-eight, which became our last full day at Frenchay Hospital, everyone was thankful and amazed by my progress. On day sixty-nine, the long ride home began. The journey to the light at the end of the tunnel was now full steam ahead. I do not think my family knew quite how tough it was going to be, but they were great. And I am sure I would not have got to this point without them all supporting me.

Chapter 2 UFO attacks leg of crash victim.

Dad decided to sell our house in Talaton where we had been living because it held memories of my sister and of my former self, and it would be best for Mum and me if we did not return there. We went and lived with my Grandma and Grandad in Exeter. They had a small bungalow, but adaptations were made, and under the circumstances, we coped well. Dad was building a house in West Hill near where my nan and grandfather lived, when I say dad was building a house, what I really mean is that the scaffolding business his dad and he had started and built up together were going to do start and then contractors were going to put it all together. I think that’s how it worked; my mind was on other things at the time. I did not even realise that we had not gone home to our old house but was just thankful to be out of hospital. Up the long driveway, which had a strip of grass running up the middle of it and flowers and hedges on either side, sat a garage. Next to the garage was an area for parking. It wasn’t very big, but it had a big pampas grass growing in the corner, and Grandma had a bird table out there too. She liked feeding the birds. Inside the house, the kitchen was up a big step around the back of the garage. For cooking, there was an aga; it was a lemony yellow colour and always hot. Every day, Grandad would put coal in it from a coal store he kept outside. From the kitchen, there was the front door to the left, and to the right, you went into the lounge; this was where I imagined I was asleep when in my coma. Just after you walked past the front door was a little toilet, and then next to that the bathroom. Opposite the bathroom was the dining room, which was converted into a bedroom for me and next to that a spare twin bedroom that Mum and Dad slept in. Next to that room was Grandma and Grandad’s room. Out the back of the house was a conservatory, which was always cold, leaked when it rained, and housed junk. In the garage, Grandma kept the little blue Fiat that she used to pick me up from school in. I will always remember I will always remember those rides in that car. A little troll man stood on top of the boot shelf; he had a fishing rod and wore a black hat, and he was really ugly. The first few weeks of being out of hospital were as to be expected, really hard. I had tablets to take and nasty tasting medicine. Grandma would give me some of her special chocolate, which made the nasty taste go away and had bubbles in it. I always wanted more. Mum would stretch my ankle each evening on the sofa, and my left arm was always bending and would never go straight, so Mum would pull that straight and stretch it all ways too. The hospital sent us home with a cardboard bottle for me to use to go to the toilet in at night because I

could not get myself to the loo. Once, Mindie, the dog, tried to eat it. Every night Dad would always blow on my head three times and say, ‘Go away, naughty brain; come back, good brain,” before he tucked me in. It was still important that I got my sleep, so I got put to bed early. I never wanted to go to bed when it was still daylight outside. We went to a place in the hospital at Exeter to look at physio for me. It was not very good there and did not ideally suit my immediate needs, but a man came and looked at my foot; my left foot was still all twisted over and bad, which is why Mum had to stretch it quite often. The man suggested a splint for my foot to make it go straight and flat. The hospital was not the place for me to be long-term for physio, and my family looked for somewhere I could go for my rehabilitation. Dad got one of his men at work to make a bar for me to practice stepping over; it was like a limbo bar and could be put up higher as I improved. I would hold on to the rail of the aga and try and lift my leg up and over the bar. Dad was really hard on me, as he wanted me to get better and better; sometimes my family thought he pushed me on too much, but it obviously paid off. I do not know how the next craze after Golliwog pin brooches passed began, but the new thing to encourage me on was Care Bear stickers. I had the album, which had numbers marking where to put the stickers on each page. We went to a newsagent in Whipton, and we must have bought their entire stock of stickers. I remember Mum coming out of the newsagent with about twenty packets of stickers, I could only have one pack at a time, for doing well and managing to balance with the aid of the aga rail. We would count to see how long I could stand without holding on. I soon filled my album with stickers and then started another one. My love of Lego was still there also and I had the new Lego police station. In my small makeshift bedroom, there was not really enough room for lots of Lego, so I only had a few Lego items. But my love of Care Bears went beyond stickers, and I started collecting all the little plastic bear figurines. I was determined to get all of the Care Bears, and I worked hard to balance and persisted on trying to step over the bar with my dad shouting me on with encouragement. Grandma and Grandad used to take me in a wheelchair down to Dawlish Warren to feed the swans. Just before the railway tunnel before you drove into the car park a van sold banana fritters on sticks. I had one every time we went there. I can still taste them now.

Someone recommended Vranch House School in Whipton in Exeter. Vranch House was a school and rehabilitation centre for children with severe mental and physical disabilities. My family and doctors all agreed it was the best place for me to go at the time. We went and had a look around, and it seemed a nice place. I would get daily physio, as well as having lessons in a classroom environment and many other things, including speech therapy and swimming classes. Vranch House had a waiting list. My nan worked on the board of governors at a school in Ottery St Mary and was able to speed up the process of getting me accepted. Home life was ok; we seemed to be coping with living at my grandma and grandad’s bungalow. On Friday nights, we ate dinner from the fish and chip van that would stop in the village. I liked steak and kidney pie with chips. I liked my food and had a really bad sweet tooth. Another of my favourites was steamed puddings, and I loved cakes. I liked most things though. At my new school, I was put in a classroom with four other children – Lisa, Barry, Steven, and Grace. The head teacher was called Mrs George, and her assistant teacher was called Berrol. Barry was in a wheelchair and communicated with a thing known as a blissboard. He pointed to certain symbols or something on the board to get his point known. I never understood it. Lisa was also in a wheelchair. Steven was in a big motorized electric chair; it was blue and had a seat cover that was like gorilla fur and looked like some sort of robot from Transformers. I wanted a big electric chair too. Steven’s chair was massive. I didn’t know how he managed to control and steer it, but he did. Berrol helped Mrs. George put Grace in a standing frame thing and strapped her in. When she wasn’t in that contraption, she was in a wheelchair, as was I. At lunch times, we all went into a big dining room and got served and fed. Lots of the other children could not feed themselves and relied on the kind help of all the wonderful staff and helpers. I could feed myself, but they always mashed up your food, as most of the children could not chew properly. I did not want them to mash mine – it just made it look disgusting – but they did it to everybody’s food. The school had lots of special devices, like a fork with a cutting edge all in one. I could not use my left arm, so I relied on these specially adapted tools. I got on well with all the other children, quite a few of whom were unable to talk or actually do anything. Their ailments ranged from cerebral palsy to spina bifida to head injuries like mine and a variety of others I couldn’t name. Oddly, I was never frightened by any of the conditions of the children around me. A man called Mark from Honeylands hospital, which I had visited before coming to Vranch House, made casts of my foot. He wrapped a plaster of Paris-infused bandage around my left leg and made a cast, which he carefully removed once it had set by cutting it open all the way down the front of my leg. Then he sent it off and had a splint, known by its medical term, Ankle-Foot

Orthosis (AFO for short), made. I thought Mark said UFO and I was going to have a UFO strapped to my leg. In about ten days, my splint came. It was strapped to my left leg stretching out my ankle stopping it from twisting – and the splint put my leg in a normal position. It was not uncomfortable to wear, but the Velcro straps sometimes rubbed if they were too tight. What did look uncomfortable were the leg callipers and braces some of the other children had to wear. The callipers went all the way up the leg, whereas my splint went from under the knee down to the bottom of my foot, and they had metal rods. I was glad I did not need one of those. In addition to my daytime splint, I wore a night splint in bed, which was a bit more uncomfortable and was made from molded plastic. You held it on by wrapping a big bandage around it and fastening it with a safety pin. I also wore smart clumpy red boots for added foot and ankle support. In the classroom, Mrs George had one of those apples you blow on to make the worm pop out. Another cool gadget helped familiarise us with how to form letters and number. It was like a marble track; you put the marble in and it rolled around in the direction in which you should move your pen or pencil to form the shape of the character. It helped me start to learn how to write again. I found writing really difficult. We also ran a little bank in the classroom once a week so we could do some simple maths. After lunch, we returned from eating mashed up and puréed food to clean our teeth and wash our hands in our classroom. Afternoons would normally be filled with physio or English. I had intensive super physio, and the ladies who ran the physio department were amazing. I can never thank them enough. Jessica, who I can recall stretching my arm outside of the cinema when we went out on a trip, was wonderful. I got on particularly well with one physio – Penny Hale. Penny helped me no end. Over time, we became great pals. In addition to Jessica and Penny, many great loving and caring people worked with me. I had speech therapy with a lady called Lindsey Parrot who put chocolate spread on the end of my nose and told me to try and lick it off with my tongue. I would laugh because she was called Parrot; she did not find me laughing about her name very amusing, but I had a sense of humour that everybody enjoyed. We said prayers in class, and one day, I took a turn saying the daily prayer. It had been really bad weather with heavy downpours of rain, and in my prayer, I asked God to make it stop raining all the time. After my prayer, Berrol told me we need the rain to water the flowers. I thought my prayer was good, even if she did not.

Physio was an ongoing event with daily exercises, which still included stretches over a big Swiss ball and balancing holding on to a ladder-back chair, whose seat was secured under one of the rungs so the physio could move the seat up and down, ensuring that whoever sat on it would have his or her feet flat on the ground. When I sat, I was encouraged to twist myself to the right as my body was twisted around to the left; it was always hard to remember to twist around when it is natural to twist in the opposite direction. At home, I watched Neighbours during dinner most evenings or Top of the Pops when it was on. People said that the singers on Top Of the Pops weren’t really singing, that they just put the tape on and played the music. I was really curious as to how they managed to play the instruments and hit the drums without making any noise and ruining the music. If only someone had explained to me at the time that they only played a recording of the vocals. Dad was pushing me to balance and step over his bar, which I did and got slowly better at. One weekend, we went on a picnic out on Dartmoor, and I managed to stand up on my own without holding on. My dad was thrilled, as was the rest of the family. Dad pushed me to take a step, and I fearfully did, taking my first ever proper step since the accident that led to me walking again. It was a monumental moment, one that everybody had only dreamt about. If it had not been for my dad pushing me on, I know that I would never have started to walk again as soon as I did. On Sunday evenings, Grandma usually made a nice supper of cakes and crumpets with marmite, butterscotch or strawberry angel delight, all sorts of sweet treats. Some weeks, Grandma made a pink blancmange in the shape of a rabbit; we had a plastic orange rabbit mould, and she would make green jelly and break it up with a fork and spread it all around the bottom of the rabbit as if it were grass. I liked these suppers and the chocolate cupcakes that came in shiny wrappers and also the marshmallow teacakes covered in chocolate. Yes, I liked my food. Because I was not able to do much exercise and ate all the cake and pies, I put on weight easily and got fat. Back at Vranch House, the news that I’d walked spurred on all the physio people, and all of my exercises were now focussed even more on my walking. I got a blue helmet to prevent further head injury if I fell or walked into something. I still wanted an electric motorised wheelchair though, and here I was with a blue helmet and clumpy red boots instead. In the physio department, there was a motorised chair called a pony. It was orange and quite basic, with four wheels and a handlebar, and reminded me of a granny scooter you sometimes saw out and about in town. It was nothing as grand as Steven’s. At

lunchtimes, you could book the pony and drive around the building during the break. I always wanted to ride the pony and booked it out quite a lot. Towards the end of term and on the run up to Christmas, we put on a school play. I played Father Christmas’s spaceman, delivering the children their presents, and the pony got all decked out to look like a flying saucer. It was so cool with flashing lights that I could control with a switch inside. As part of my costume my helmet got covered in silver foil. I was the coolest thing ever in my mind. I made my entrance onto the stage to the theme from Doctor Who. Due to the amount of people watching, the stage was quite narrow, and I had to have assistance turning my spacecraft around. It was quite funny, and I enjoyed the reaction of all the people clapping me on. I was enjoying making steady progress and being the central attraction in my world. We put on another school play the following year: The Pied Piper of Hamelin. I played the mayor and drove on stage riding the pony again, stealing the spotlight once more by spontaneously taking my three-pointed black hat off and waving it about in the air in a sort of queen-like wave. I think that bit stole the show! I worried everybody when we had swimming because I liked going under the water all the time, and I could hold my breath for a long time, which always unnerved everyone in the pool. I could stay underwater anywhere up to two minutes. I enjoyed swimming classes and swam under the water more than on top of it. There was a rubber-covered brick that sank to the bottom, and I would swim down to try and get it. The pool was always kept nice and warm, as were the outside covered pool area and changing rooms. One of our more special school outings was to the opening of a new swimming bath complex in Exeter, which was at the time called The Plaza; it had a big red waterslide inside. The Duchess of York came to cut the tape. There was a huge crowd, and some people from the local radio station came too. I spoke into the microphone and got on the radio. It was not that great an outing, and I was glad to get back to school in time for the school shop that was run every Tuesday afternoon. I had a Care Bears purse that secured through a loop onto my belt. It was red and had a blue zipper across the top. Care Bear characters were embroidered onto the front. Mum had given me money for the school shop, but when we got back from the swimming opening trip, my purse was empty. Surely I had not been pick-pocketed; maybe my mind was playing tricks on me and I had forgotten to get money in the morning from Mum. One of the care helpers lent me some money, and I bought

a black Siamese cat with diamante eyes in a plastic dome cover. I gave it to my grandma, as she liked cats and animals. The secretary ran a game where, if you filled an empty Smarties tube with penny coins, you would get a star. I pestered everybody at home for pennies so I could fill up empty Smarties tubes. Grandma ran a hairdressing shop and did the banking every week on the kitchen table at home. I used to get involved and put all the bank notes the right way around with the Queen’s head facing up. In return, I would get more copper one-pence pieces to fill my tubes so I could get more gold stars. One day I thought it would be funny to put hundreds of tiny silver stars, the kind you might put in with birthday cards, in the tube with the penny pieces. I put a load of these stars in the top of my Smarties tube so when the secretary took the lid off all the stars went all over her desk. My walking and physical condition continued to improve; Penny would walk behind me a lot of the time and make sure I did not fall. One day, she did a magic trick for me. Ever since getting a magic wand with Sooty I was mesmerised by magic, I even used to watch Paul Daniels on Saturday nights and get impressed by what he did, how tragic. Penny did a trick as I was walking. She said if I walked up tall, a fairy’s shoe would appear inside of my helmet. As she took off my blue protective headwear, she produced a tiny little red rubber shoe, and I was so amazed. I was probably one of the best customers at the little school shop, which a lady ran on a Tuesday afternoon. Once I bought one of those big squeezy tomatoes you put ketchup in; we used it on a Friday night with our fish and chips from the van down the road. I also bought some stickers in a box; the stickers were on a strip, so that as you pulled the strip, a sticker got dispensed. They had the Rice Krispies characters and funny remarks in speech bubbles. We went out on a boat for another school trip, and I decorated the boat in Rice Krispies stickers. There were horses outside pulling the boat along; it was like something out of a movie. At home, Dad raised the bar higher on his ingenious limbo-style step bar. He got aggressive to make me want to push myself to work harder and harder and keep getting better. The people around me thought Dad was being a bit too hard on me, especially after what Dr Cummins had said when I had left Frenchay – that pushing me too hard might deter my progress. Vranch ran a clinic once a month so all the children could be seen by a paediatrician called Dr Trip. I did not like him very much at all. He had words

with my dad because of how hard I was being pushed outside of school. I do not think Dad and Dr Trip saw eye to eye, but my dad new best as always. Every week, Auntie Sal used to visit Grandma and Grandad’s house to do arts and crafts with me. I used to greet her and say in my robotic manner, ‘Right, now today I thought we would do this.’ I remember making something that Mark Curry made on Blue Peter the night before. It consisted of two makeup mirrors held upright at adjacent angles to each other with a circular picture underneath; as you spun the picture, the reflection in the mirror made a pattern. It was simple but effective. We used an empty Liquorice Allsorts box as the base and attached a piece of a wine cork with slits in it to hold the mirrors up right. Underneath we held the picture disc in place with a butterfly paper fastener. Arts and crafts was so much fun. I liked to make things and build constructions with my Lego. Once for my birthday, I had a party at a restaurant in Exeter called the Turks Head. It was a Beefeater restaurant, and the attraction of going there was The Mr. Men kids menu they had. I must have been seven on that birthday. I had a few friends join me, but it was mostly family. At the Beefeater, one of my favourite desserts was a big ice cream that came in a tall sundae glass, and you could choose a sticky syrup sauce to go on top of it and you could also have crushed nuts sprinkled on top! Doctors at the hospital told my mum that she was unlikely to be able to ever have any more children. Both of my parents were, as you can imagine, very distraught by the death of my sister, Katie, and would have loved to have another little girl to fill the void. It did not sound as if it was meant to be though. At the moment, my rehabilitation was the main concern. Dad still continued to blow three times on my head at bedtime and say, ‘Go away, naughty brain; come back, good brain.’ Grandma used to read me a bedtime story too; she read lots of Famous Five stories and also The Wishing-Chair. I liked that one. One day, Dad even drew out a brain map for me using different coloured pens to differentiate between good brain and naughty brain. He was so headstrong, pushing me to work as hard as I possibly could to get better, encouraging me to lift my leg up as high as I could to get it over the bar and to balance by the aga. The whole family was so overwhelmed by and impressed with my progress that the local newspaper got in on the remarkable story of my success – a feel-good story to go in amongst all the doom and gloom of normal everyday life. The reporter came to visit us at Grandma and Granddad’s house and to take pictures of me posing with some of my soft toys whilst giving a cheeky grin. I sat on my big stuffed dog that we had called Frenchay because some friends had given him to me in the hospital. I also had some knitted teddies of Worzel Gummidge

and Aunt Sally, who were my favourites. I enjoyed watching Worzel Gummidge, the talking and living scarecrow who lived in a field, before Black Beauty the horse came on on a Sunday morning. Returning to Vranch House on a Monday morning was always nice; a large majority of the children who went there came in by private minibus. There was a residential care home for those children who did not live locally and were unable to travel from home each day. Grandma and Grandad’s house was not very far away, so I did not go on the minibus, which had a lift platform on the back for wheelchairs and big electric scooters, the type I never had. When we did go in the minibus for trips and outings, I never got to use the lift though because I could walk by myself now. Mum and Dad had organised a carer for me, and she came and helped me day to day. She was called Lisa, and we got on really well. My nan used to call her Leeza though; it really bugged me, as it was, Lisa, not Leeza. Lisa helped me with the simple things in life, which were the things I found most difficult, things like putting my socks on after swimming and getting dressed in the morning and putting my splint on. Lisa taught me a clever trick to help when putting my socks on after swimming. She turned them inside out and put them over her hand; then she grabbing my toes and rolled the sock back up my foot, turning it the right way out again. Lisa came into the classroom with me sometimes too and helped me with whatever it was I was stuck with. Mum fell pregnant. It was a miracle that was to be kept hush-hush to begin with, but I found it hard to keep a secret. I was out shopping with my nan one day, and we had stopped for coffee in a small little café called Coffee Plus. I had a strawberry milkshake – the café did not offer Ribena, obviously – and in between gulps, I was desperate to tell my nan the great news that Mum was pregnant. When I did, she was elated. Over the next nine months, Mum became extremely big. I did not know it was possible to get that big. Everyone was shocked. All of her scans showed a healthy baby. It was fantastic news. Mum and Dad so wanted it to be a little girl. And since their prayers to bring me off the life support machine had been answered and they had been granted the miracle of getting pregnant again after doctors said it was unlikely to happen, surely this was going to be a little girl. At Vranch House, I was continuing to make steady progress, but the biggest thing I was struggling with was balance. To try and improve this, the physio put me on a tricycle. I liked riding the bike so much that, at home, I got a BMX of my own that had special stabilisers and foot plates with straps to keep my feet

on the peddles so that I could ride it round the block. In certain packets of breakfast cereals, they were giving away reflectors that clipped on to your spokes. Least to say, I had quite a few of those on my wheels. I used to ride up to the park across the road from Grandma’s house and have a go on the roundabout and seesaw. There were horses in the fields around the park area back in those days; now the fields have given way to housing. We used to take the horses some sugar lumps. Grandma would also bring Mindie for a walk. On other trips out, I would get taken to see the donkey’s at the Donkey Sanctuary. On other weekends, we’d go to Dawlish Warren, and I’d do some brass rubbings at the bird viewing station hut. Back then, we did a lot more outdoor activities than we do today. As I sit here thinking about it, I realize we do not go out half as much as we used to. We’d go on picnics, and I’d try to fly a kite, but I could never get it to stay up in the sky for very long. I went on quite a lot of trips with Vranch House. One I very much liked was up to London to the Horse of The Year Show at Olympia. It was nearing Christmas time, and back at school before we all left on the trip, we were each given autograph books to collect signatures at a celebrity preshow party held by Sir Jimmy Savil’s brother. I liked Jim’ll Fix It, and I knew who Jimmy Savill was. I got quite a lot of autographs, even though I did not know who a lot of the people at the party were. The show was great, and seeing all the beautiful horses in the arena was wonderful. We all enjoyed it very much; towards the end of the show, they played Christmas music and Santa came out in an old-fashioned car like in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and pretend snow came down from the roof. The following day in London, we got taken to see some of the royal carriages the queen and other members of royalty used. We were very honoured to be shown these so up close, as it was in private grounds to which most people are not permitted entry. On the last day of term as it was Christmas, Santa came to school and gave us all a present. I got a modelling kit; he obviously knew I liked to be creative. In the evening, we had a carol concert, and all of my family came in support of me. Most of the children who were more seriously ill than myself were unable to control themselves enough to be able to sing, so they would rattle tambourines and shake sticks with bells on. When we left and walked out to the car, it snowed. It was just like a proper Christmas scene, like from a snow globe. Grandma had bought me a snow globe with Santa on his sleigh and a reindeer inside; when you shook, it the white stuff inside made it look like it was snowing.

On Blue Peter, Yvette Fielding showed you how to make your own snow globe, using a jam jar and some Plasticine, plus some glitter for the snow. You made a snowman out of the Plasticine and stuck it on the inside of the lid. Then you filled the jar up with water and put some glycerine in it to help the glitter swish about. When you turned it over and shook it, you had a perfect snow storm in a jar. For Christmas, we had gone away to stay at a nice hotel. On Christmas Eve in the hotel, I could not sleep very much because I was worried that Santa was not going to know I was not at home and here in this hotel. I woke up very early to go to the toilet, and I wanted to see if he had been here and left me any presents in my sack that I had left at the bottom of the bed. He had been, and I had a super big present. I was so excited, and I could hardly wait until the morning. I opened my biggest present first. It was a Scalextric set. We set it up in the hotel’s lobby and raced cars around the figure of eight track all day long. I do not think we got in the way too much. One of my many smaller presents was a miniature stained-glass window kit. It came in a little box about the size of a matchbox, and inside was a metal outline of a picture. There were lots of little, different-coloured crystal granules that you carefully put in the frame using little plastic tweezers; then you baked it in the oven, and all the granules melted down, and you were left with a little stained-glass picture. After the Christmas break it was back to school, but I did not realise that people were starting to feel that I could not remain at Vranch House for much longer and were of the impression that I was ready to go out in to the real world. Dad and Mum were looking for a suitable school for me to go to. It was not until we were sitting outside of Nurse Penny’s room at Vranch House waiting to go in for clinic to see Dr Trip again that I could see just how big Mum was. I thought her tummy was going to pop. I really did not like going to see Dr Trip because I did not understand why he would have me lie on the couch and tap on certain points of my body with a stick that had a thing on the end that looked like a conker. He tapped one point and said that he should have hit a reflex, which should have reacted, but it did not. I was not too bothered and just wanted to get out of the clinic. The Devon County Show had come to Exeter, and we had a trip there to see the animals. We also got a chance to look inside a proper fire engine. It was all very exciting. Some of us were going to go up in a hot air balloon, but the wind was bad so we could not. Maybe one day I will because I still have never gone up in one.

On 17 February 1987, my mum was taken into hospital to give birth. We were all hoping she would have a girl, and we waited patiently for my dad to call from the hospital with any news. Was it a girl or was it a boy? My mum gave birth to a little baby boy. He was rushed away from her, as he had been starved of oxygen. Five minutes later, all the doctors and nurses ran back into see my mum with a sense of urgency. Mum was panic stricken and wanted to know what was wrong. ‘We think you are having another baby!’ Seven minutes after having given birth to a baby boy, Mum gave birth to another baby boy. It was such an unexpected shock. The news was overwhelming. Not a girl, but two boys. The babies were so small that they were dressed in dolls clothing until they fitted into regular baby clothes. It was big news, and when I went to see my baby brothers in incubators, we had a family picture taken for the local newspaper. It was all a lot to take in at the time as you can imagine.

Chapter 3 Crippled and living with a witch.

My rehabilitation had gone as far as it could at Vranch House, and it was time for someone else to come to this amazing rehabilitation school. So my family had looked for a ‘normal’ school for me attend. Life was going to take another step back towards some kind normality. They’d found a suitable school not too far from Exeter, near my nan and grandfather’s house and also extremely close to where our new home was being built. So for a short period in between when I finished at Vranch House and started school in West Hill and until our new house was ready, we moved in with my dad’s parents. Penny, my physiotherapist from Vranch, came out with her dogs in tow to have a look at the small, family-run school, and it was perfect – small, not over crowded, wouldn’t require a lot of walking around, friendly, and warm. It was ideal. Nan and Grandfather’s house was much bigger than Grandma and Grandad’s bungalow. They had a big garden. Grandfather was growing tomatoes in his greenhouse, and he also had a little fish pond with goldfish in. Nan and grandfather were very interested in their gardening and tried to get me involved in it too, but I was not going to get my fingers dirty or do anyone’s weeding; I do not like to get dirt under my nails or feel unclean. Nan had a cleaning lady called Vera who used to come two mornings a week. One week, she forgot to take the bins out, so the next time she came, I told her not to forget the bins. I got told off for being cheeky, but I never understood how I was being cheeky because I was just telling her how to do her job and being helpful as she’d messed up last time. There was also another time that, whilst cleaning the stove, she must have accidentally turned on one of the rings; the plastic electric kettle on top of the ring melted and really smelt bad. I only noticed it whilst I was doing some colouring trying to stay within the lines and create a masterpiece. I coloured in the rumpus room, which was next to the kitchen. I thought the whole place was going to burn down and we would all die. Yes, I can be quite a dramatic person at times! Vera bought me Superman, the first movie in the series, on video for my birthday, so she obviously had not taken any offence from me telling her how to do her job and take the bins out. In the rumpus room were two sofas opposite one another, and I would practice walking back and forth between them. I wanted to succeed, and Nan told me

that, one day, I would walk normally again. My bedroom was upstairs, and to get up the stairs, I could only manage one step up at a time. Walking back down though was trickier, and if I’d lost my balance, I would have fallen down the stairs, so I sat on my bottom and bumped down the steps. I said to my nan once, ‘Nanny, am I disabled?’ She looked at me with a smile and said, ‘At the moment, my darling, yes, you are.’ Nan helped me learn to spell. She taught me about words ending in ‘ight,’ like light and right. She asked my grandfather to ask me to spell something with ‘ight’ in, and he asked me how to spell kite. I said, “K-i-g-h-t.” Obviously ‘ight’ and ‘ite’ sound the same when spoken, and Grandfather did not know which one Nan had meant. I still had a long way to go with my spelling. My nan always seemed to be right about things all the time. I asked her if she was a witch. Even till this day, I sometimes call her a witch. Not a witch like Grotbags or anything but a nice witch. Out in her utility room where the washing machine was, there was a bin and shelves stacked to the rafters with tins and packets of food, most of which was out of date because she never threw any of it out. I think it got on Grandfather’s nerves a bit. Grandfather kept the garden beautiful, with flowers always trimmed back and a perfectly manicured lawn to match. Gregory used to come over, and we would play hide-and-seek. Once, we were playing hide-and-seek, and I hid behind the front door that went into the garden. He walked in and out of the house for hours unable to find me. I was giggling so hard, as he kept walking past the door and I was only behind it. He looked in the sheds, of which there were two. He checked in and around the carport and all over the garden. He looked, and I was behind the front door, which he kept walking past in and out of the house. I wet myself with laughter. One Sunday afternoon, as a family, we put up badminton net on the bottom lawn by the greenhouse. All the family played but I got so frustrated that I could not hit the damn shuttlecock over the net I locked myself in the bathroom and cried with frustration and did not come out for ages. Mum got upset because she did not like seeing me like this. My new twin baby brothers slept and cried most of the time in their Moses baskets. Lisa now helped looked after them too. Their bottle sterilising tank was constantly in use and left out on the work top in the kitchen. They required feeding every few hours, and the demand for powdered baby milk was high during those years; sales of nappies must have been up as well. Bendarroch School was a small family home that had been turned into a school; it had only two classrooms and took children from the ages of six to thirteen.

Starting to get back into society was hard and still is. Although the school was perfect for me, it was still hard work and took a lot of getting used to. The ‘little class,’ as it was known, was a large room that would have been a dining room if it had still been a family home. It had patio doors at the end of the long, wide room that led out onto the garden, which was equipped with a climbing frame and a set of swings. Over in one corner was a sand pit made from a big tractor tyre. It sure was a nice place to be, and at playtime, I loved to go on the seesaw swing. I could work that one on my own without needing to be pushed, unlike on the rope swings, which I could not gather momentum on by myself. My teacher was a lady called Mrs Twigg. She was nice and friendly. The class had several little wooden desks, enough for twelve or so children, and down at the far end of the room was a square rugged area to sit and read or play games. To the side of that, shelves with games and toys lined the wall. On the top shelf was a television. Opposite that wall, the teacher had her desk. At the opposite end to the patio doors that led out into the garden was a big blackboard, and in behind that was a cupboard where we all hung our coats up and put our packed lunchboxes. Being a very disabled child such as I was back then and trying to interact and grow up alongside fully able bodied children sounds tough, and it was. It all does seem like a lifetime ago to me now, but I still went through it. Other children struggled I think to understand me, and it came across as bullying or name calling. It was petty to start with, but as I have grown up, so has ‘school bullying.’ I found it hard to keep up with others, and I got left out sometimes, opting to sit inside and read or play a card game or make paper aeroplanes. I was learning to do everything again. The books we started learning to read with were from a series about the people who lived in, ‘The Village with Three Corners.’ They were always so colourful with great illustrations and the characters. There was Jennifer Yellow Hat – she was my favourite – Johnny Yellow Hat, Billy Blue Hat, Percy Green Hat, and Rip the dog, just to name a few. I struggled with my reading, and writing was hard too. Well everything was hard and still is. In religious education lessons, we had workbooks to go through with the local vicar. His two daughters, Marigold and Harriet, were also at the school. I became quite good friends with his eldest daughter, Harriet. In one of the lessons, I drew a picture in my RE book of myself holding a sceptre over my sister’s grave and a yellow bolt of lightning coming from it into the grave and making my sister come alive again. Oh, to be a child again.

I struggled with mathematics, having to relearn all of my times tables again. With the type of brain injury I sustained, I suffer with short-term memory loss. It made everything to do with learning that extra little bit harder. I was held back a year in my schooling in order to allow me to try and catch up. Something I struggled with immensely was copying off of the blackboard. I would look up to see what the teacher had written, and by the time I got pen to paper, I had forgotten, so it took me three times as long to copy something down. My writing was slow and messy. My teacher deserved a gold star just for being able to read my work. Mum used to stand behind me for homework and hold the pen in my hand and do the writing so I could form the letters more steadily and get the flow of letter formation. Nan and Grandfather had gone on a big trip around the Far East, and Nan used to send a postcard from all of the different places they went to so, at school, we could follow their progress on the map. We put little marker pins on a map on the wall. I liked doing that, and I also liked geography. I was never very good at it, but I found it interesting and still do. Some days, we would watch television, and there were lots of programmes back in the late 80’s aimed at school children. I liked the one that had the magic torch that formed letters in the air so you could follow it. It was the same principle as the marble track contraption at Vranch House. Writing was really hard. Putting pen to paper and forming the letters was a slow process. I pushed too hard on the pen and dragged the ink, and because I pushed so hard, all of the shakes and wobbles from my hand were visible in the print. Whenever you got stuck or needed help in a lesson, you had to go up to Mrs Twigg at her desk and stand in a line and wait your turn to see her. This was OK until, one day, somebody said I kept peeing all over the seat in the toilet, and I said it was not me. To get to the bottom of this, Mrs. Twigg came to check the condition of the toilet before I used it. I thought that was strange; surely she should come in after I had finished. When this period of toilet checking was necessary, I’d have to jump the line to say, ‘Mrs Twigg, I want the toilet.’ It was a bit embarrassing. Getting momentum on the swings at break time was difficult, and I could not get very high, which frustrated me. But some kids helped me, and I did start to make a few friends. We would sit on the swings and twist the ropes round and round so it would spin really, really fast. More often, I opted to go on the seesaw swing or to play in the sand pit instead. The grounds of Bendarroch

School also had a lot of trees and good hiding places. Around at the front of the house was another lawn. The ‘little class’ was at the back of the house, but around at the front of the house where the ‘big class’ was, was another big lawn. A big tree with lots of ferns and bushes growing around it stood at the bottom of the lawn. Beside the tree at the foot of the front lawn were lots of fur trees, and in behind them, it was like a fortress of branches and logs that became one of the top play areas. It was known as ‘the big tree.’ Further down the long driveway from the house was another play area under a canopy of trees. A tire swing on a rope suspended from one of the many high branches. The school day started at nine in the morning, but I used to wake up very early. By the time nine o’clock came, it felt like half the day had passed already. Each morning, Lisa helped me get into my school uniform – a red collared shirt under a navy blue sweatshirt embroidered with Bendarroch School in red over the left breast area. I wore charcoal grey trousers, but Mum put a Velcro fastening on them to make it easier for me to get them on and off. I remember being in a shop with Mum. We were getting me a pair of new school trousers, but the shop did not have a pair large enough for me. Just how big was my waist measurement back then? I think if I can remember correctly, those trousers were forty-two inches. Tying shoe laces was impossible, so I had slip on shoes that I could manage. I had my splint too, which I did not like, but it helped with my walking. Every morning we had show and tell. I liked taking in my latest toy or thing to talk about and play with. I got what I wanted most of the time, when I was younger. I was really into ThunderCats and had Lion-O, the main character’s, action figure. He came complete with a little plastic sword of Omens, and a battery-operated button in his back that you could push to make his eyes light up red. It was so cool. For my birthday, Lisa bought me the WilyKit and WilyKat figures – WilyKit and WilyKat were Thundercat’s children – and when I went shopping with Grandma, she bought me the figure of Mumm-Ra who was the evil villain in the show. He also came with a button that made his eyes light up. I took all my things into show and tell. I brought something to school every day. We had a morning break time at 11.15 for fifteen minutes, and lunch break was at 13.00 for an hour. I couldn’t wait until it was time to go home at 15.30. The big class didn’t finish until 16.00, Ha ha! I thought. We did arts and crafts with Gail, the headmaster’s wife, mostly modelling with clay. We made a real mess, and we had plastic aprons to protect our uniforms. One particular afternoon we were modelling with a new type of polymer called

Fimo. I made a pot – all rainbow colours – by rolling out different colours of Fimo into worms, curling them around a circular base, and building it up. Fimo could be hardened and baked in the oven; Gail baked all our creations in the oven. My pot creation was the start of my new Fimo craze. I liked modelling with it so much that I got lots of Fimo at home and made lots of things sitting at the table in the rumpus room. I’d ask Mum to bake them in Nan’s grease stained oven. You could get varnish to glaze your pieces with and all sorts of kits and tools and instruction books giving you ideas of what to make. I was asked to be a page boy at one of my nan’s friend’s daughter’s weddings. I had to wear a straw boater hat and a smart suit. Harriet from school was a bridesmaid. It was nice having her in the wedding procession. I wanted to make my own wedding party out of Fimo. My nan and I sat at the table for days making little people and baking them in the oven. I made a little hat to sit on my character’s head as well. We varnished and glossed the collection and wrapped it all up in tissue paper and put it in a shoebox to take to the wedding. Some afternoons at school, instead of having lessons, we would watch a video in the family’s kitchen, living, and dining room. A little guy called Edward brought in The Little Mermaid to watch; it was just such a good film I thought at the time. Another more serious video we watched was the televised play version of the Charles Dickens classic Nicholas Nickleby. What an excellent piece of drama. I did not really understand it but the acting was marvellous. The character Smike had a funny face. The wind changed directions whilst he was pulling funny faces, and now he was stuck like that; that’s what my grandma used to say to me, that if the wind changes when you are making a funny face, it will get stuck like that forever. How did the actor manage to hold his face like that for the whole play? I was interested in acting and drama. I was not very academic because of my struggles with copying and writing and short-term memory loss. At the end of term in the summer, we put on a play, and I got a part in the chorus as a man selling pots and pans. I did not have many lines, but I had to do a solo. That was the first of a few plays I was in at that school. At Christmas time, we put on a nativity play and sang carols in the local church. We all walked up the aisle in a line holding candles singing “In the Bleak Midwinter” as we made our entrance. We watched The Snowman one afternoon. A girl called Emma performed the film’s theme song as a solo one year at our school Christmas carol service. I used to think I was really good at singing and wanted to do it. In my head, I thought I sounded normal, but hearing myself on tape, I could hear just how slow and irregular my speech was. Internally my speech and movements felt and seemed normal, but externally they were clearly not.

We had a very good music teacher called Mrs. Reynolds; I really enjoyed music lessons and music in general. Mrs. Reynolds wrote songs for us to sing, and one year for the local television stations charity, Telefon, the whole school, along with students from another school, gathered in a field and sang a song. We went to a proper recording studio to record it and everything. Some fortunate people got to go on the telly and sing the song in the Telefon studios. I was really upset that I was not chosen to go on the telly. When I saw it sat at home and my mum pointed it out, saying, ‘Oh look it’s your school on telly,’ I was most upset and cried. I did get to meet Ulrika Johnson though when we were singing in the field at Escot House. By this stage, I had moved up from the little class to the big class. The headmaster was the teacher in this class; we all called him Sir. Every morning before lessons, he would read us a story. He did different voices for each character in the book. I used to enjoy being told a story. The book I remember him reading most was Goodnight Mister Tom. It was such a brilliant story, and Sir read it really well. He also read Watership Down, which was another good story, and in music class, we sang the film version’s theme song. It was nice being in the big class, but our school day was a bit longer than in the other class. They finished before we did, and out of the window, you could see all the parents coming to get their children from the little class. I was jealous. Once during a geography quiz, in which Sir pointed to different places on the world map and we put our hands up to answer, I did not really remember where places were. Someone told me the place being pointed to and I put my hand up. When Sir came to me to get the answer, I said what I had been told, and the whole class laughed. Over the course of my school life, I was often humiliated and bullied this way. I have learnt it is something I just had to live with. Sir split the class up into two teams – the ‘Bens’ and the ‘Darrochs.’ I was on the Bens side. A points tally was kept between each side and we could win points in PE or in class tasks; there was not really any prize at the end of it all, but it was just a game. We used to play rounders for our games and PE classes sometimes. I thought fielding was so boring. I just stood around the field. When it got to my turn to bat, because I could not run very well, I was allowed to just walk around the bases instead of running around the field. When I eventually – by some divine miracle – hit the damned ball and got around the base a number of times, I helped my team win. At break times, the new hot commodity was a Game Boy; they had just come out and were the coolest thing to own. I had one with the Super Mario Bros. Game. It kept me amused for ages. Lots of people in school had them, and we would see who could get to the furthest stage in the game. Tetris was another popular game. Back then, I found it the most boring game ever, but nowadays, I simply love it. I used to and still do get bored very easily.

For packed lunches, we wanted Pot Noodles, which had recently started to appear in supermarkets. Yes, they are pretend food, but to kids, they were great, they came in so many flavours. Beef and tomato was one of the first flavours, and it came with a small sachet of tomato ketchup. They soon progressed to Pot Rice. I loved the chicken supreme, which came with basil sprinkles in the sachet. We all brought Pot Noodles to school, and at lunchtime, we would hassle Sir and Gail to make them for us in the kitchen. Gail would stir them and then leave them to stand for a minute on the sideboard. Hot packed lunches were the way forward in the early 90’s, and Mum bought me a He-Man lunchbox. The box came with a thermos flask, and I used to have hot things in it like my classic tinned macaroni cheese or baked beans with little sausages or meatballs in gravy. Just typing that makes my stomach turn. Some afternoons, we played games like charades or that game where you look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary and then invent multiple choice definitions between which the rest of the class has to guess. Most of the people knew that my dad worked in scaffolding, so one of my multiple choices was always, ‘Is it a type of scaffold fitting or a type of scaffolding?’ It normally threw the class off, and I’d win another point for the Bens, yay! In addition to playing in ‘the big tree’ or staying inside and tapping on Game Boys, a new trend started – skate boarding. We didn’t stand up on the skateboards; well, some did because they could. I couldn’t, so I was one of those who sat on the boards and raced down the long drive, which had two speed bumps. It was fun, and I really wanted a skateboard of my own. For my birthday, Auntie Debbie got me one; it was bright yellow and had a tattoo picture of a python on the bottom. It was only a one-bearing board though, so it did not go that fast, which was probably a good thing. We used to race down the drive and go over the bumps; my knuckles sometimes got a grazing from holding on to the sides of the board and hitting against the tarmac. Sir set us little fun tasks on occasions. One I loved was dropping an egg from a great height without cracking it using only a piece of cardboard and some newspaper. Lisa and I thought about this, and we just made a box and cushioned the egg with the newspaper. I thought about a parachute thing, but Lisa did not know how we could do that. The day of the event came, and I was gutted when my egg broke and even more gutted when a boy called Sam had made a parachute and his egg did not break. Sam only knew how because his brother who had done it the year before told him. One of our other tasks was to make a vehicle that would self propel and carry an egg over a distance of one meter. I made a wooden lorry propelled by the stretch of an elastic band; it did cross the finish line, and I was pleased with myself. One boy, also called James, made a battery-operated car with a rocket on top. When he turned the motor on, the

rocket went off like a firework. It hit Cathryn in the face. It was awful. She got badly burned. I felt so bad for her. I got badly burned once at home. There was no hot water, and I wanted a bath. Dad poured in water from the kettle, and it hit my foot. It was an accident, but the water burnt my foot quite badly and I had to go to Accident and Emergency. Each week on a Monday, we would have cross country running. The run circled around the wood up at the top of the hill from school. I wanted to have a go, and I did get round the course in the end, but I walked. On Fridays, we went swimming at the swimming baths in Exmouth. We’d go on a bus, and we’d all fight to sit on the back seat that went across the whole width of the bus. I did not really enjoy going swimming because I found getting changed too much of an effort. I always tried to get a sick note from Mum, but she always said it was good exercise for me. The swimming instructor was quite bossy; she was also on the large side. Sir did not come in the water but stood around poolside and watched, the people who did not come in swimming and just sat around the pool were given blue plastic covers to go over their shoes. There was a big clock at the end of the pool that went round in sixty seconds making up a minute. I never understood the point of that. The people who were lucky enough to get excused from swimming still had to come to the swimming baths but got to sit out in the café area and play with their Game Boys and eat sweets from the vending machine, which always took a hammering on a Friday when we all descended on the place. I liked getting the Sherbet dip and also the popping candy that fizzed in your mouth. Sir joined a book club, and each month, we got a little catalogue of books we could buy. We’d order them and they’d come to the school. Mum used to read me the books at bedtime, and she’d bring me up a cup of hot chocolate when she came to put my night splint on. Our new house in West Hill was finally ready to move into. Arriving at our new home and seeing the packing boxes arrive with all of our possessions that had been in storage for so long was unbelievable. The things I wanted most were my toys – the penguin rollers coaster toy I used to love so much and I had not touched since I was five years old, where was it in all of these boxes of stuff? Vranch House had one of the toys. It had little penguins that went up the steps of the rollercoaster and then rolled down the track to start again; to encourage the children to do things, you had to push a button to make the spring that carried the penguins up to the top move. I never found my toy, but I had so many other things, I did not miss it.

The house was designed as a bungalow. It had so much roof space that my parents turned the space into a massive playroom. At the far end, there were lots of cupboards and on top of them a nice big surface where I quickly constructed a bustling city out of Lego. I was very pleased with the city, which was complete with a monorail that went to the airport, hotels on the beach, petrol stations, and everything. Nan bought me the Octagon branded petrol station when we went to Toys “R” Us in Plymouth on the way back from seeing the stage version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. (I loved that story. I read lots of Dahl’s books when I was younger.) Nanny and Grandfather bought me the monorail for my birthday, and Grandma and Grandad got me the new airport. I had a great set-up, but as my brothers grew older, I was constantly in a state of dread that they would destroy it all. The house had a sunken lounge, and above that, a huge hallway that looked down into it. Off of the hall was my parents bedroom, and next to that a little bedroom that I had a computer in. The computer had been a Christmas present one year. It was an Amiga, and I was so thrilled with it that I cried because I did not think that I was going to get it. Down a narrowing stretch of the hallway were two more bedrooms. I had the bedroom on the right. It had bright red carpet, as that was my favourite colour at the time. The room opposite was where the twins slept. In between the two rooms was a bathroom, which had bright green carpet and gray fixtures. Mum got pregnant yet again, still wanting a girl. We had gone on a family weekend to Blackpool to see the lights, and during our visit, Mum went to see a fortune-telling gypsy woman who told her that her next child would be a girl. On hearing this, Mum soon became pregnant. Lisa finished working for us, and Mum found a replacement called Elaine. I never understood why Lisa left. I really missed her. We went on holiday once to the villa of a friend of Nan’s in France. Lisa and I would swim under the water together, and I sat on her back as she swam a length under the water. Elaine was not warm like Lisa was, and I did not like her. Dad and Grandfather had bought a caravan home in the South of France through the scaffolding company they had successfully built up together. The company was going well. We would go down to the caravan for school holidays. Sometimes, we would all go as a family. I would sleep in this little tiny room with a bunk bed; there was no room for anything else, just a bunk bed. Auntie Sal and Uncle Nick would stay with us too, and Auntie Sal used to come in and give me a good night kiss. She would say, ‘Night night, darling. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

Every night she said that I would have a nightmare. When she’d come in to kiss me good night, I would be thinking, Please, no don’t say the part about the bedbugs. But it was usually too late. We would suffer with the high winds in that part of France called the Mistral; it was a very high wind that normally came with a storm – thunder and lightning. I learnt some basic French through those years of going to France on holiday. I got a taste for soupe de poissons with crunchy croutons, which I always had when we went down to the local port, and platted sugared doughnuts from the pâtisserie. I saw my first frog out whilst Grandfather was cooking steaks on the barbeque. One year we went to the caravan, and Elaine and her boyfriend came too. We were going to play a card game and she made me sit on the floor whilst she and her boyfriend sat at the table. She was not very nice and always argued with me about things; this would always occur, though, when nobody else was around. She was really awful at times. Back at home, I pestered my parents to let me have a hamster. When I got one, I called her Harriet. My hamster would go in one of those plastic balls and run around and roll all over the house. A few times, Harriet escaped and went behind the sofa in our version of the rumpus room, the family room. Mum had done sponge print painting on the walls, and we had grey-flecked sofas and a chimney breast that separated the family room from the kitchen. Harriet got sick. We took her in a box to the vet, and he said she had Wet Tail and gave us some medicine in a syringe type thing, instructing us to put one drop a day in with her water. I asked Elaine if she could put one drop in the water for me whilst I was at school. When I came home and asked her if she had done this, she said she’d struggled getting a drop out and had put a bit too much in. The following day when I came home from school, Harriet had died. I suspected an overdose was the cause of death. The garden at the back of our new house was not very big, but Dad had his eye on the piece of land over the hedge that belonged to a lady who lived in the house behind ours. Dad and I went round and knocked on her door to ask about buying the land, which was all overgrown anyway. The old woman said she would have to speak to her son, who lived up the country, about it and get back to us. A week later, we were told we could buy the land to extend our back garden. It was not just a small bit of land, and it wasn’t just going to give us a little bit more garden either. Dad had some impressive plans for the plot. He completely transformed the land; diggers moved in and revamped the whole new back

garden. Dad had a swimming pool put in on the lower half of the garden, and on the upper elevation was a grassed area with swings, a slide, and a climbing frame. The pool was shaped like a kidney, and down at the shallow end was a Jacuzzi. Around the pool was a vast area paved out with slabs and ornate lights dotted about. A pool house was constructed to house the pump and machinery to run the pool. The pool house was a changing room and also had an open air kitchen area with a bar and a chip fryer; it truly was like something out of a brochure, but only when the sun shone, which was not very often. We had a lot of good and happy times there. My brothers learnt to swim there, and we had some great parties and barbeques around the pool. The big patio table by the pool had a massive umbrella that stretched the entire length of the table. Mum got lights to clip underneath it, so when it got a bit dark, the lights would come on, which meant we could still stay out. One evening, the family came over for a Barbie, and everything was set up nice – music playing, wine flowing, food cooking. The weather looked dodgy, but we were holding out hope. As fast as we sat up and the cork popped, so too did the sky; the rain came, and the thunder brought with it lightening. Abandoning ship, everybody picked up his or her dinner and scurried inside. The British summer, with its liquid sunshine, was perhaps not best suited to host an outdoor swimming pool. The pool was great. I enjoyed it. It was hard work for my parents, though, when the liner got a hole in and it needed draining. One of the other types of holidays my parents enjoyed was skiing. I went with them on a few skiing holidays and learnt the art of snowploughing and how to fall down eloquently. My dad was a good skier and helped me loads by skiing backward and telling me what to do. I had private lessons and my own all in one ski outfit. Mum and Dad encouraged me to do normal things and to join in, even when I did not want to. I enjoyed skiing to a certain degree; it was a lot of unnecessary hassle though putting layers of clothes on and big cumbersome Moon Boots then changing into uncomfortable ski boots. Our first few skiing holidays to France were enjoyable, and as most of the family are skiing fanatics, it was good fun. My brothers soon got in on the skiing lark. They were growing up so fast, and on the slopes, they ran riots and became quite proficient skiers. At home, we would all go out for the day to a dry ski slope to practice. Auntie Sal and Uncle Nick came too on one occasion and brought my new little cousin, Oliver, who used to sit on my lap as a baby so I could give him his bottle whilst watching Fireman Sam or Postman Pat. He grew up quickly as well. Everybody loved skiing. I started to feel I was not doing very well or progressing with the

sport as well as my brothers; my weak left side and poor balance meant it was hard for me to turn or change directions. The more I went on skiing holidays with the family (and more specifically, with all the boys), the more frustrated I would get. It was just becoming too much. I felt as if I was trying to compete to keep up with my fully able brothers and cousin. I was not at their level; nor was I able to be. And they were younger than me. During one ski trip in Austria – Nan and Grandfather had come too – it snowed so much, and skiing was a real effort. I decided skiing was not for me, and I have not been since. As with everything, I had given it a good go, but it was just not right for me. My parents still go and my brothers do too, but I would rather go on a summer holiday than on a winter holiday that involves wearing uncomfortable boots and being cold and damp. Another one of the family hobbies was golf; what a slow game that is. My nan is an avid golfing enthusiast, along with my grandfather. They were always remarking that I should take up golf. If it was not golf this, it was golf that. They tried to get me on the golf bandwagon by practicing chipping in the garden; oh how dull that was. I was often told what to do, how to do it, and what would be good for me, and I still am today. I, in turn, always tried to pacify everybody and go along with the suggestions. I do not know how the trait began. Although I am starting to change, it still continues a bit today, and I am now twenty-eight years old. I was never interested in golf, yet I still had my own set of clubs and a bag. I would walk around the golf course my nan played at and mark her card. We would go to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls; it was just such a slow and monotonous activity. We were always going to the golf club for dinners and things. I could not stand those gatherings because the club house had rules about dress – no jeans or trainers. I always thought the club was a bit stuffy about things like that. I was a little boy who lived in jeans and trainers. ‘You cannot wear jeans or trainers in our golfing establishment!’ they would say. I will wear what the heck I want to, I wanted to replay. Nope, golf was not for me. I would sit at home upstairs in my bedroom playing Aladdin the video game on my Mega Drive for hours. Now that was more my thing. I got a Game Gear for a present at Christmas. I’d thought my brothers had gotten all the best presents, and I’d been left with a bunch of cheap selection boxes from Poundland; then I got the Game Gear, and I was so thrilled. The Game Gear was like a handheld version of the Mega Drive. I played Sonic the Hedgehog for the remainder of Christmas Day.

I had all the latest and greatest things I wanted, and I took my Game Gear to school. It soon overruled the Game Boy. My Lego was coming along nicely, and I got the castle and space outpost ice base. I had started calling up and ordering bits of Lego people accessories, hats, and hair directly from the Lego manufacturers. I was making friends in ‘the big class’ at school and mum and dad had organised a maths tutor to come and give me some extra tuition. Life was at a reasonably good place at this time. I went to some friends’ birthday parties and tried my hardest not to lick my lips when biting into a sugary jam doughnut in a party game at one of the parties. I always wanted to win at pass the parcel and musical statues was one of my favourite games to play. I always liked getting the little party bag at the end, with a piece of squashed birthday cake wrapped up in a funky napkin along with a few little cheap, useless plastic toys. During a mid-morning class one day at school, Sir said he had a surprise for us, and he wheeled in a big new computer on a desk. Sir told us that it had been donated to the school, but he never told us who donated it. The computer found a home in the little library room across the corridor from the classroom. There were a few games on it, and at break time, we all crowded around it to try and have a go. I obviously got left out, as I could never fight my way to the front of the crowd. I did get a go sometimes but not that often. Several years after and having left Bendarroch, I found out that my family had donated the computer to show their appreciation for how well I had been looked after and was doing. Every morning, we had 10-a-Day. This was a book that had ten questions that we’d been sent home with the previous night for homework. In the little class, we’d had 9-a-Day. Back at home, my bedroom had moved from downstairs to upstairs next to the playroom, where my Lego city was now becoming a metropolis. I was a member of the Lego club, and on my birthday, Dad took me and a group of friends to the Lego exhibition in Bournemouth. If you were a member of the Lego club and presented your membership card when you went, you would get into the exhibition for free. My friend, Henry, was a member of the club like I was, and I told him to bring his membership card. I liked the exhibition, and I went to it a few years running. After my friends and I had finished at the exhibition, we went to Pizzaland for pizza. They used to do a drink there called a coke float, which consisted of coke with a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating in it. I liked it back then but would never touch such a concoction nowadays. Caffeine and dairy, no, no, no. One of my other friends, Christopher, had a birthday party, and we went to a Quasar game in Torquay. It was a laser tag game, and you ran around shooting each other with laser guns – the clean version of paintballing. We split into

teams. I guarded our base, as I could not very easily run around in the dimly lit and dry ice-smoked course with disco lighting effects. It was a lot of fun though. I went to lots of parties – Punch and Judy shows, magic shows, discos, all sorts. Dad used to take me to Cub Scouts each week. I made some friends there too, and Cubs was lots of fun. I collected a lot of badges and went on camps, made pancakes on Pancake Day, and learnt to bake a potato over a fire. I even won the Chatterbox contest and went through to the next round with other Cub packs, but I got knocked out in that round. It was all good experience though. On Memorial Day, we had to parade about in the square. It was boring, and I did not like being on my feet for so long prancing about with a flag. At school, I was doing projects and learning lots. A lady would come in once a week and show us a slideshow of fungi and mushrooms, telling us all about them. Why was she teaching teenagers about magic mushrooms? She was a strange character. One night at home, upstairs in my bedroom, I had this overwhelming sense of thanks and appreciation for the world. I do not know what came over me, but it was like a religious thing. In the morning when I had come downstairs, I found that Elaine was looking after me and my young brothers. Mum and Dad had gone to hospital; Mum was having another baby. My weird experience in the night, and now Mum was giving birth; surely the two were not just coincidences. Elaine got a bit power happy being left in charge and was yelling at me about doing my ‘10-a-Day’ homework. Gloria, our cleaner, was there that morning and tried to set Elaine straight, but still she argued and shouted at me. Mum had another boy. The gypsy had been wrong, and so had my Magic 8 ball, which I had gotten for Christmas. I went to the hospital to see another new baby. Dad told me to say thank you to the midwife for delivering my brother. I said thank you, though I didn’t really realise what I was saying thank you for; Mum wanted a girl, and now she had given us another little boy. My twin brothers got christened, and they, of course, screamed the place down when they got water on their heads; they were always screaming. Christened Lloyd and Scott, ‘the boys’ as they became known, were dressed in similar clothing but in either red or blue and had glistening blond hair cut in a basin style. As they grew older, they followed in my footsteps to Bendarroch School, carrying their satchels and Mickey Mouse lunch boxes. How I have seen them change and grow up. Bendarroch had been a good school, and it had helped bring me back into the world from the hard times I had endured. I had nearly come to the end of my time at Bendarroch School. I was now twelve years old and soon turning

thirteen. The next step was out of childhood and the start of the teenage years, and that meant going to a bigger school. I had become friendly with a boy at school called Daniel, and he was going to be leaving Bendarroch around the same time as I was. Daniel was going to Queens College in Taunton. So I wanted to have a look at that school. Unbeknownst to me, my dad had started a court case in an attempt to get some compensation for my injuries; he intended the money to go towards safeguarding my future. I was introduced to a lady who would come and give me IQ tests and set other little tasks for me to do, such as spotting the differences in similar puzzles. I failed to see the point in any of these exercise. She was kind of like a case worker. She suggested that it may be a good idea to send me to a boarding school – the idea being that boarding school would force me to grow up a bit, to be less dependent on my family, and to be my own person. She also battled with my father to get me a laptop computer to use at school. Dad was not really one for computers, and he felt I should learn things the traditional way. We went to have a look at Queens College, I would go there as a weekly boarder. The plans for my future education all looked fine, and I was just going along with the flow of things. Daniel was going to Queens College, so at least I would have a familiar face to call a friend – or so I thought. I had to take an entrance exam to get into Queens. Exams were a big pressure for me, so I was allowed extra time to complete the paper. I sat in Sir’s kitchen to take the test. When I am against the clock, my mind freezes up and I panic. We did maths, English, or verbal reasoning papers in class every month to see how we were all doing. There was always a test all the time, be it tables, spelling, maths, geography or any other subject. I always felt pressured to try and do well, but when the scores were in, mine were never great, which would leave me feeling badly. I passed my entrance exam and got accepted to Queens College. My caseworker lady had organised for me to have someone who lived close to the school come in and help me with my homework each night. Towards the end of my time at Bendarroch, I’d gone into hospital to have an operation on my left leg to try and straighten my foot a bit, as it dropped and turned over when I walked. The procedure involved taking a bit of bone out of my shin and putting it in my foot to try and flatten it over. It was quite a big procedure, and Mum came in with me to sit on the ward when I had returned from the operation. I arrived at the orthopaedic hospital in the morning and had to have a bath in a special cleansing concoction that would kill bacteria before I

made my way to theatre. Mum bought me a pair of Super Mario pyjamas, which had red shorts and a yellow T-shirt with a big print of Mario; the edges around Mario glowed in the dark. My leg was in a plaster, from my toes up to just below my knee, when I returned from the operation. All of my family came to visit me in hospital and brought sweets, magazines, and Thunderbird comics. Dad drew lots of computer game characters on my plaster cast, including Mario and Sonic, and other people wrote around the drawings. I was in the hospital for three weeks, during which I had time off from school. Then I had further time at home recovering and then physio when the plaster came off. We’d thought it was not going to be on for that long. The plaster was ever so uncomfortable, and I had to sit in the shower tray at home with my leg dangling out over the edge to have a wash. I could not wait for the thing to come off. Dad had booked a holiday for us; we were going to Florida to Disney World for two weeks and then to Captiva Island for a week on the beach. I was so looking forward to the holiday, as well as to getting my plaster off. Mum drove me in for a check-up and to see if I could get my plaster taken off; we were going to Florida in a few weeks’ time. I went in, and we had to wait ages to be seen. We went into the plaster room, which kind of reminded me of the room at Vranch House where I used to have casts for splints made up. The nurse got a frightful-looking tool out to cut into my plaster; it had a small, circular blade, which was only half exposed because it had a cover that went into a suction thing to suck up all the dust. The circular blade went round at high speed as she started to cut from the top of my plaster, running the tool down my leg to my toes and cutting the plaster open. A decaying odour started to envelop the surrounding air, a by-product of a mountain of dead and shedding skin that had been unable to escape or be cleaned and washed away whilst under the protective casing of the plaster cast. When my leg, complete with two fresh, raw scars and stitches still intact, was fully revealed, the nurse looked at it and then got the doctor in. I started to pick off dead bits of skin that had gone crispy. Mum told me to stop picking or I might pull out the stitches. Hoping that a new plaster would not have to go on, we waited for the doctor. He came in, and having looked at my leg, said he wanted a new plaster on it, as it was not completely better yet. The nurse came in, and the doctor walked out. ‘But we are going to Florida and were hoping not to have to have a plaster on,’ I told her. The nurse told me that the doctor had told her to put a new cast on my foot. Mum and I cried because it would ruin our holiday. We sobbed, and I cried for the entire time whilst having my wounds cleaned before the bandages went back on and up my leg. The nurse was even kind enough to put on a fibreglass top layer to make it splash proof. I was still not happy.

Mum drove me home, all distraught and upset from having to have to remain in a cast. I told my dad that I would be in plaster for our holiday to Disney World. Dad said that it was ok; he could change the holiday dates if I did not want to go. Grandad and Grandma were due to come with us too, so it was not just me who was affected. I still wanted to go on holiday to Disney World really badly; the show must always go on. I went back to school. My leg was still in a cast, and I hobbled about on a walking frame, as I could not support my weight on crutches. I took part in another school play, this time taking the starring role as King Horris; it was a feel-good show with lots of songs. We adapted the play so that King Horris hobbled around on his walking frame. It was a lot of fun to try and move about on a little stage with a walking frame. At the end of term, I was presented with the Bendarroch cup. The cup was a gift to the school from the parents of one of the pupils who had been there; the school presented it to the pupil who had brought a great contribution to the school each year. That year, Sir could not decide who was going to receive the trophy and have their name engraved next to the names of the pupils who had previously been chosen. That year, the cup got two recipients, myself and a girl named Issy. We were both to share ownership of the cup for a year. Bendarroch days were over.