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The True Story of An Exceptional Life
Foreword
by Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson DBE
I first met Mel in the mid-1980s, when we were both competing in South Wales. Right from the start, it felt as though I had known her for years. She is one of the very few people I’ve ever met who can talk more than me! She is always positive, no matter what may be happening in her own life, and it really seems that nothing will stand in her way, mostly because Mel just won’t let it. She always shows an infectious optimism, confidence and gritty determination, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. It is that incredible stubbornness that is evident in everything she does and makes everyone around her think that they should be doing more.
For some, this book may be an uncomfortable read at times. Melanie certainly pulls no punches in describing in detail the everyday problems encountered by many wheelchair users. It is also an uplifting experience, a bit like meeting Melanie herself. It takes twenty years and a lot of heartache until she feels she has control of her life when she launches the TREAT Trust charity.
Time and again throughout the book you will find yourself wondering what else fate can throw at Melanie, and although she has had to deal with more than most, there are parts that made me laugh out loud as a fellow wheelchair user because I understand some of the experience. And what could be better than a fairytale ending to rival that of any Mills & Boon romance?
Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson DBE
November 2008
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Foreword
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Three
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Copyright
About the Publisher
chapter 1
I don’t know how long it was before I fully woke up, but when I did everything felt different. My eyes opened and for a moment it seemed that I must have been hit on the head. There was no pain at all but a face loomed above me. A manly face. Rugged. Unfamiliar. Concerned. I wanted him to save me, but straight away I noticed that there was worry in his expression and sadness in his eyes. He asked me a question but I didn’t really hear it. I felt terrified. Why was he looking at me that way? Then he asked me again, and this time I did hear: ‘Can you move your feet for me, sweetheart?’ I had no choice but to answer with a question of my own, because I didn’t understand what was happening. Where were they? Where were my feet and my legs? Where was the rest of my body?
He was far too old to be my boyfriend. Not only that, he was too short as well. More seriously, though, he was also too wild. He’d been in trouble with the police, he was long-term unemployed and he was unquestionably Not Good Enough for me. In summary, he was all the things that inflame anxious parents when their naïve and impressionable fourteen-year-old daughters get involved with unsuitable nineteen-year-old boys. But I was fifteen by now, and I knew better.
I was also a very good actress, as my drama teacher had often commented upon. I was good in my role as a tough biker’s girlfriend, without any need for the sort of parental concern that might impede my swaggering exterior. Yes, I loved my mum and dad—cherished them more than anything else in the world, truth be known—but to show my devotion just wouldn’t have been cool.
And my parents knew just how to deal with me. They’d been through all the stages wise parents go through and opted for what seemed the most sensible option. Having voiced their opinions and found me less than receptive, they did what was probably the best thing to do: apart from ensuring we were chaperoned wherever possible, they kept their disapproval on a non-confrontational level and simply waited for me to do what they trusted I would. Grow out of it—out of him—if left to do so.
And they’d been right to feel confident. We’d been together almost a year. I was fifteen now, and through a combination of both time and circumstance I was beginning to do exactly that. Not for any of the reasons my parents had cited. Just because I was beginning to feel the first real stirrings of…well, of not needing him any more, I suppose.
Which, in hindsight, is often the way these things work. Older guy takes younger girl under his wing, gives her attention and confidence and a proper sense of self, and so, by whichever law governs such things, makes himself redundant in the process.
But for the moment, at least, we were still together. Still a couple, despite my knowing, even then, that this state of affairs wasn’t permanent. Something testified by a still livid scar across my biceps—the result of the removal of a DIY tattoo, which my parents had organised at hideous expense.
The tattoo had read ‘Aldo’. He’d be here in half an hour. I’d better hurry up and get ready.
Lots of things happened on 10 May 1980. It being a Saturday, various matches were won and lost. In London, Trevor Brooking led West Ham to a 1-0 defeat of Arsenal, and over in the States the Houston Astros beat the Atlanta Braves at baseball. Most notably, however, an irritable Mount St Helens was having a bit of a tantrum and limbering up for what, a week later, would end 130 long years of peace and quiet and become the worst volcanic disaster in the history of the United States.
None of these, however, would have been uppermost in my mind, even had I known they were happening. All I knew—all that mattered—was that today was Saturday, which meant no school, no hassle and a trip out on the back of Aldo’s bike, a 750cc Honda. A group of us—Aldo and I, plus his friend John and my best friend Juli—were off to Porthcawl for the day.
I checked the time, spent some minutes carefully applying make-up, then scrutinised myself in the mirror. My hair was freshly washed and my face newly painted. I looked, I decided, not too bad. Not something I’d much been accustomed to thinking; unlikely as it might seem for a girl of my height (just under six feet), I was altogether more used to feeling bad about myself, the legacy of years of relentless bullying, and the accompanying stress of a change of school and thus friends. But a great deal had changed in a very short time. Much as Aldo had been key to my growing self-confidence, it had been a fashion show at school that had really inspired me. I was tall. I was slim. I had loved my moment in the spotlight. And though I wasn’t so naïve as to think that the world was my catwalk, I had begun to feel at last that I had choices.
But that was for the future. Right now, I had nothing more pressing to think about than what to wear. I grabbed jeans, a stripy T-shirt and my suede stiletto boots. I yanked them on and skipped down the stairs.
Dad was in the living room, reading the paper. I joined Mum in the kitchen. She looked up. Then up and down. Then she sighed. ‘I do wish you weren’t going out on that bike today, Mel.’
‘I’ll be fine, Mum,’ I answered, as I habitually did. She sniffed.
‘Well, your dad and I don’t like it.’
‘I know,’ I said again. ‘But I’ll be fine. Stop worrying.’
‘Just be very careful, okay?’
I thought I could hear Aldo pulling up outside. Good, I thought, kissing her cheek. No more nagging. My parents were, and have always been, amazing people: deeply loving, supportive, the very best in the whole world. But like any other teenager, I was deaf to my mother’s fears. Unaware of how often her words would chillingly revisit me, I grabbed my leather jacket from the newel post and helmet from by the door. Then I yelled a goodbye and went to greet Aldo.
Back in the early eighties, the seaside towns of Porthcawl and Port Talbot, where we lived, couldn’t have been more different. Port Talbot was dull. It felt dull, at any rate, to me and my friends. Though it nestled prettily beneath the green and brown bulk of the Emroch and Dinas mountains, Port Talbot’s equally dramatic southern skyline was a towering jungle of concrete and metal; a line of huge blast furnaces, steel gantries and grey buildings that filled the foreground of the view across Swansea Bay. The steelworks dominated the town. From the red dust that settled on every sort of surface, from windowsills to car roofs to optimistically hung washing, to the unspoken assumption that to my mind seemed universal, that being destined for the ‘works’ was the norm. I didn’t want that. I wanted more. I wanted better.
Porthcawl was better. It was different. Exciting. Though it was only a few miles east down the coast, being at Porthcawl always seemed to feel a little like being on holiday. As a child, it had been one of my favourite destinations. It was a good-time place where the sun always shone and there was always ice-cream to eat. A place where I could play on the rocks and swim in the rock pools that were left, warm and magical, by the retreating tide. It had mystery, too, in the stories of shipwrecks, and the brave derring-do of the lifeboat crew. Porthcawl had a heart that was beating, whereas Port Talbot always seemed a little like my poor dad’s chest—one big, sprawling, unhealthy wheeze.
Not that Port Talbot didn’t have a seafront of its own, but ours, Aberavon, though briefly lively during warm summer weekends, could boast little in the way of excitement. Our own funfair, Miami Beach, had always felt just like what it was—a somewhat down-at-heel reminder of a time, now long gone, when people’s expectations of holidays were much simpler. By the time I was in my teens it had been all but pulled down. In the winter months, the beach was a desolate sort of place, which skulked in the shadows of the steelworks.
Porthcawl just didn’t feel like that. Indeed, by this time it was thriving. Its own funfair, Coney Beach, was a big draw for everyone and in the summer months it was filled with throngs of day trippers, and was held in particular regard by the biking fraternity. It suited me, too. At my height, I could almost always get served in the pubs. I felt the familiar stirrings of excited anticipation in my stomach. Volcanoes could do what they liked across the globe. All that was on my young mind that Saturday morning was what a great day I had ahead.
Funny how the brain works. It hadn’t been a particularly memorable sort of day, but set against what was to follow, the rather ordinary details are still pin-sharp in my memory. We drove to the Knight’s Arms, our favourite biker pub in Porthcawl, to find it quiet—it was still early in the season. We chatted, we had some lunch, and the boys went to sit outside, while Juli and I went into the back to play pool.
Juli had been my best friend ever since my change of school had reunited us the previous year. We’d clicked before, when we were younger, and now we clicked again. Even so, we made an odd sort of pair. Where I was a jeans-and-leather-jacketed patchouli-scented rocker, Juli had embraced everything punk. She was wild about Siouxsie & the Banshees and the Sex Pistols, had hair that often looked like a multi-coloured fright wig, and augmented her wardrobe with her granny’s old frocks, which she accessorised with crazy bits of jewellery. In deference to the bike ride, I supposed, she was wearing something quite demure for her tastes—a black boiler suit—but, typically, finished off with pink shoes.
After our game of pool we went outside and sat on the guys’ bikes, while they continued to chat in the sunshine. In such undramatic and, to my older self, seemingly empty ways are whole chunks of teenage life gladly swallowed up. We’d had fun, but decided to head home when it was gone four. If Juli wasn’t home by five-thirty at the latest, she’d be for it. Her parents didn’t even know she was out on a bike. Just with me—a bad influence anyway.
‘You want to swap?’ Juli asked me as we waited for the guys.
‘Dunno,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why, do you?’
She shrugged. ‘I just thought that now I’ve tried John’s Suzuki it might be fun to take a ride on the Honda.’ She smiled at me, and suddenly I realised that she might have another agenda. Perhaps this was more about me than her. More specifically, about me and John. Though he was way out of bounds—he had a very scary girlfriend—Juli knew how much I fancied him. She also knew that despite his going steady, in private he’d intimated that he was interested in me. Was this a manoeuvre to organise things so we could spend a bit of time alone together?
But I felt—and very strongly—that that wasn’t what should happen. I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave things as they are.’ The most significant ‘no’ of my life, as it turned out, and even now I’m not sure why I’d felt the way I did. Later I’d come to find solace in that. However much I might have wished that what happened hadn’t happened, I was infinitely more grateful it hadn’t happened to my friend.
Aldo always rode fast. He didn’t seem to have an off switch. When we were out on our own he drove reasonably sensibly, but put him in the middle of a big group of bikers—on big bikes—and the testosterone kicked in. He went for it, always. There was never any point in telling him to slow down, let alone pointing out that with one ban for speeding already behind him they’d throw the book at him if he was caught. I tried it once, early on, and soon learned. He would simply growl at me and go faster.
But this wasn’t—hadn’t been—that sort of day. Just the four of us, two bikes, and an uneventful ride home in prospect. Why should it be otherwise? The route back was undemanding enough and the roads were, more often that not, quiet. I knew those roads well; the places where he’d let out the throttle and gun it, the corners and the straights, the scenic stretches through the burrows, the odd glimpse of sea, and the sweep of mountains that loomed to our right. Today’s journey to Porthcawl had been largely uneventful, and I had no reason to suppose the ride home would be any different.
But fate, it seemed, had other plans. Aldo lived with his parents, two brothers and dog on Golden Avenue, a part of the Aberavon beachfront. We were driving towards it now, along Princess Margaret Way, when that absolute no-no, a smaller bike, passed us. Before I’d even thought, irritably, that he probably would do so, Aldo had already given chase. The road seemed to shimmer and dance beneath the wheels. I felt the force of rushing air trying to push me backwards and gripped hard; one hand clenched around the seat strap beneath me, the other, behind me, clutching tightly to the bar. I remember feeling a bolt of proper fear now, as the road curved away into a sharp right-hand bend that took it inland, away from the seafront. This wasn’t just any old bend—it was Jeff’s bend, named after a biker who had died trying to get round it some years before. I felt the bike dip beneath me and automatically leaned with it. How bloody ridiculous, I recall myself thinking. So close to home and he has to get involved in this. Not for the first time, I silently cursed his childish male pride.
But the curse must have died on my lips at that moment because suddenly I was no longer riding pillion behind Aldo but airborne, and moving at speed. And then nothing. Only absolute silence and blackness. No thought. No sensation. Just nothing.
I don’t know how long I was out, but it soon became obvious that my blackout was only momentary, because the next thing I remember was a sound. Wherever I was—and I didn’t have a clue—there was something approaching. Something loud, something low. Pushing through the fog in my head with increasing insistence. A low rumbling sound. Getting louder.
Conscious again now, I opened my eyes, but the visor on my helmet was down so all I could see was smudged and dirty plastic. Like trying to see through a pair of grubby glasses, all I could focus on was the smudge. But the noise kept on coming. I turned my head towards it and the smudge became an outline, and then, almost as if propelled by some malevolent deity, I saw the bike, on its side, bare of driver and pillion, barrelling towards me headlight first. I heard a girl screaming. That’s not me, I remember thinking, as it hit me. That’s not me doing that. I passed out again.
In my head I went home then. At least, close to home. I was sitting beside Dad, in his ancient Morris Minor. He’d usually finished work by the end of my school day, so after the long walk to school, then home for lunch and then back, my treat was to have a lift home at the end of the day. I loved the Morris Minor. Loved sitting up front with Dad. Loved its feel, loved its warmth, loved its fusty pungent odour.
They say smell is the most strongly evocative of the senses, and, coming to again, I realised where the memory had come from. That same smell was pricking in my nostrils now.
Full consciousness returned in a rush of realisation. I touched the grass I was lying on. It was damp. There was no car. No Dad. Just the screaming. And the ground all around me soaked in—yes, that was it, that was what I could smell—it was petrol. And something else. There was a man. I squinted at him. He was waving his arms. He was wearing a brown coat and a cap and in his mouth—I gasped as I realised—was a lit cigarette. I tried to shout and felt a sudden warm wetness in my mouth. Oh God, no, I thought, watching him walking towards me. I’m going to burn—Oh, God, don’t let me burn.
But I obviously wasn’t the only one who’d seen it. The man—I didn’t know him—was quickly intercepted, and suddenly it seemed there were people all around me. But they melted away as fast as they’d arrived, as the blackness came and swallowed me again.
This time I went nowhere, and all too soon I was back on the cold ground with strangers staring down at me. The only warmth was in my mouth, but then also in my heart, as Juli’s face suddenly appeared. For a moment I felt calmer. She was here. She would help me. But she was crying and telling me to try not to move and saying sorry and holding onto my hand. I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault but when I spoke a red mist sprayed all over my visor. Now everybody seemed to be shouting at once. ‘Internal bleeding!’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Where’s the ambulance got to?’ But almost immediately I realised what had happened. I’d bitten the tip off my tongue, and the warmth in my mouth was my blood.
I was grateful when the blackness claimed me this time and so, evidently, was my body, because I must have been unconscious for some time. When I next came round it was to the sound of approaching sirens. That was all I could hear now. No other sound at all. I’d retreated into a safe house somewhere in my brain, shutting the door on the horror. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it out for long, but I chose to remain there, hiding, and praying. Our Father, I chanted desperately in my head, who art in Heaven…
chapter 2
I was about to die, I decided. That was it. My body had been chopped in half in the accident and I was going to die at any moment. I don’t recall quite what I did with those thoughts at the time, but one thing became suddenly clear. That if I didn’t, I was going to get the mother of all rows off Mum and Dad. They’d been right. I’d been wrong. Whatever happened now—life or imminent death—I’d never felt more scared.
The man who had asked me to move my missing legs and feet reappeared. He was talking again. ‘Be still,’ he kept saying. ‘Try to keep very still. And don’t worry.’
I didn’t answer because by now my tongue had become swollen. I could feel a flap of it hanging free. So much blood in my mouth. I didn’t want to swallow my own blood. Someone then said something about how clever we’d been about the helmet. Juli and I had not let anyone take off my helmet. Someone—I didn’t have a clue who—had tried, but we’d both of us, ironically, been insistent about it; we’d done neck injuries in biology class the previous week. Something useful to know, but not the sort of thing I’d ever dreamt would apply to me.
Another face loomed. Another man. Another smile. ‘Hiya,’ he said. ‘We’re taking you to Neath General Hospital.’ He moved down and seemed to be feeling my legs—or at least, the place where my legs should have been. The terror flooded in again, and with it revulsion. I couldn’t see. Was he picking up bits of severed limb? But if that was the case, why wasn’t he looking disgusted? Why wasn’t everyone around me throwing up?
I tried to keep focused on what I was seeing and hearing, but the velvety blackness kept rising to engulf me, cloaking all sensation, all thought. I seemed to be almost floating above my own body, riding turbulent air, surveying my situation and, strangely, finding clarity in distance; in one single precious moment almost all became clear. This was real. It had happened. I was badly, badly damaged. My life as I’d known it was over.
The kind voice intruded and I was back in my broken body and lying on the sodden turf. He had yet another question. A strange one, to my mind. ‘Melanie,’ he was saying. ‘What’s your date of birth, love? What’s your age?’
‘I’m fifteen,’ I told him finally, my voice thick and strange. How did he know who I was?
Neath General Hospital was situated about a mile to the south of the town centre, on a steeply sloping hillside, facing west. The journey from Aberavon beachfront would, under normal circumstances, take about a quarter of an hour. What happens in the first ‘golden’ hour following an injury can have huge consequences on the outcome so it’s an important chunk of time for an accident victim.
But nobody seemed in much of a hurry. I must have blacked out again at this point because I have no memory of being loaded into the ambulance. But somehow I was in one. And so was Juli. I hadn’t a clue where Aldo and John might be—only that Juli had told me Aldo was OK.
I could hear someone talking on what must have been the radio. ‘We’re bringing in a teenager with a serious injury…’ Juli became agitated. If that was the case, then why were we travelling so slowly? No speed, no sirens, no nothing.
‘Because with a spinal injury,’ they told her when she asked, ‘smoothness is of the essence. We have to go slowly so we don’t do more damage.’ The atmosphere was tense, their words hanging heavily on the air. They seemed all too aware they had two terrified teenagers on board, and the fate of one young life in their hands.
By the time the ambulance had entered the outskirts of Neath, almost a whole hour had apparently passed. I’d spent much of it drifting in and out of sleep. I dreamed turbulent dreams. I dreamed about the princess in Arabian Nights, who’d defied her parents and fallen in love with a poor boy, with whom, despite their anger, she’d walk the beach at night. She’d been cursed by a sorcerer. He told her that if she continued to defy her parents, he’d turn the sand on the beach to knives beneath her feet. She didn’t believe him but it happened even so. Her life had been ruined. Had my life as well? Had my stubborn refusal to stop seeing Aldo brought a sorcerer’s curse upon me?