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  My mum is a strong woman. She takes everything in her stride. She decided very early on that I shouldn’t just sit around, feeling sorry for myself. She says she could always sense something was not quite right when she was carrying me. But in the 1970s, pregnant women didn’t get all the usual ultrasound scans that are commonplace today. The doctors only did that if they thought there was something wrong. And no one did – so my mum just took their word for it and carried on. The only time the medics clocked there might be a problem was when she went into labour. She had been pushing for hours but nothing was happening. She kept telling the nurses something was wrong but they were too junior to make a decision. They just wouldn’t listen. My mum knew that no matter how hard she pushed I wasn’t coming out. She was terrified and thought both of us would die there and then in the ward. Eventually she started making a proper scene and a senior sister came to see her. She checked the bump and realised there was in fact a serious, serious problem and before my mum knew what was going on she had been whisked into theatre for an emergency Caesarean.

  I was born on 5 June 1979 at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Sutton. But while my mother and father, Jackie and David, were relieved and happy, it had been a horrible experience and it was clear there were still major problems to deal with. Although the delivery was eventually a success the doctors discovered that the tops of my thighs were broken and badly misshapen. I also had club feet, or talipes, a condition where the feet are so twisted that the toes actually face each other. It’s quite common and can be treated easily by putting a baby’s legs in heavy plaster but it was obviously a very nasty shock for everyone.

  It turns out that instead of my head pointing down in the engaged position, I was folded in half and sitting across the width of my mum’s belly, with my bottom on the left-hand side and my head on the right. After I was born, you could see the creases in my legs – like a line in a folded piece of paper. And because my head was in the wrong position, when they cut through the lining of my mum’s stomach it wasn’t where they expected it to be. They had to quickly move my mum’s bowels and bladder out the way to get to me in time. It was very touch and go.

  For the first few days after my arrival my mum was in agony. She couldn’t even talk, her stomach hurt so much. But again, being the tough woman she is, she refused to lie around in bed and after a few days climbed out of bed to wash herself, put on some make-up and prove she could get back on her feet. The nurses gave her a round of applause. There was no way she should have been out of bed at that point but it told everyone, especially my worried dad, that she was going to be OK.

  After a few more days’ rest the doctors sent us home with my legs all plastered up, but it was another two weeks before the alarm bells really started ringing. My mum had a friend whose little girl had also been born with club feet. Mum popped around to her house to see her daughter and compare notes but noticed that underneath those plasters her feet and legs were still wriggling and moving. From day one, mine didn’t move.

  She rushed home crying and, in a blind panic, called the hospital. A nurse told her to calm down and reassured her that nothing was wrong. But from that moment she knew. She tells me she just had a feeling I would never be able to walk. She wishes she had listened to her intuition during the pregnancy but all the medical staff, the nurses and midwives, dismissed her concerns. And if they were sure it was all right, well, it was all right. Wasn’t it?

  Over the next few weeks my little body was subjected to test after test. I was taken to Queen Mary’s Hospital, not too far from where we lived, and then eventually up to Great Ormond Street. Here, the doctors put my broken legs in traction and they discovered I had a condition known as spinal cord transection. It meant that the two nerves in my spine which give the lower half of my body movement and feeling had been impaired or damaged beyond repair. I was about six weeks old and completely oblivious to the bombshell, which the specialists had just delivered to my mum and dad. I would never walk, they said. The best I could hope for was to be able to bend down from a wheelchair and pick up objects from the ground.

  My mum cried all the way home on the bus. When she got back to the estate she spotted another little boy who lived near to us who has spina bifida. That’s often confused with my condition but it’s different as it has a clear cause – a hole in the spine. There was nothing like that in my case, there were no clues or explanation as to why I couldn’t move my legs. When my mum saw this little boy she says she had a moment of clarity. She stopped crying and said to herself that she wasn’t going to accept the situation. From that moment on she wasn’t going to be beaten and was determined to treat me as normally as possible.

  In the weeks ahead the doctors became more and more puzzled about my case. What was strange was that while I wasn’t able to move my legs I had feeling in them. This was extremely unusual as normally victims of spinal cord transection are paralysed from the waist down. If they can’t move, they can’t feel. But I could. My mum used to tickle my legs and I would react. At one point the doctors were so convinced that I couldn’t have feeling without movement that they threatened to pull one of my toenails out without any anaesthetic. My dad went mad and stepped in, telling them they had to stop. Eventually they believed him. But it just tells you how unusual my case is. I was in nappies until the age of seven but from very early on it was obvious I was in control of my bladder and could pee like anyone else. Most paralysed people need to wear a bag for their whole lives, but I can tell when I need to go. It gives me a great sense of independence and means I am able to live a pretty normal life with no one clearing up after me.

  Lots of people said my parents should have sued the hospital. At one stage they thought maybe my spine had been broken during the delivery but no one could prove it, so what was the point? Maybe it was just one of those things. That was their attitude and as time went on and I grew older it rubbed off on me.

  There is one strange story, though, which might offer an explanation. My mum tells me that when I started talking I used to freak her out by pointing to the clouds and saying I had another mummy and daddy who were killed and that I had been shot in the back and fallen off a horse into water. Apparently I used to repeat this little story again and again without any prompting. I was only two or three so you can imagine how weird this must have sounded. Maybe I had come back into this world too soon. Who knows? I am not a spiritual person at all (I don’t believe in God because if there is a God how can you explain why people are born disabled?) but my mum is not as cynical as me. She has often retold that story, saying that it might explain why I am disabled. Perhaps it’s just one of those little tales parents tell you to give you something to cling to.

  My dad, nicknamed Sammy, is the strong, silent type. He was born in Northern Ireland, so perhaps living through the Troubles and then serving in the Irish Guards for so many years he just got used to getting on with things. But my elder brothers Alan, Paul and Tony found the fact I would never walk extremely hard to take. Alan, who is now fifty and lives in Western Australia, and my third brother Tony were both very good boxers. Paul is mentally impaired and still lives close to us on the estate, so my mum can keep an eye on him. Although they have a different dad to me, we are close and they are very protective of their younger brother.

  For a long time it was difficult for my family and the doctors to assess just how badly impaired I was going to be. Until I started to try to walk there was no way of knowing what we were dealing with. Like any baby, as I got older I started to crawl. According to my mum and dad I had movement from the hips down – again, this was highly unusual for someone with my condition – and I could move the top of my knees. So that was how I first started moving around. I was so determined that I would just drag my legs behind me. For a while my parents must have had the faint hope that the doctors had got their diagnosis wrong. But once I was ready to walk it became clear that I was not going to miraculously recover. So instead I was trained to use these fierce-looking su
pports called callipers. They were made of metal with leather straps which went over my knees and the top of my thighs and then over my ankle. At the end of the calliper was a metal socket, which then sat inside the special hospital shoes I had to wear. In the early years I didn’t mind them too much – even the shoes, which were really hideous. But as I got older and more streetwise I started to hate the way they looked. They made me stand out and so I used to adapt pairs of trainers so I fitted in. You know what kids are like at school with trainers. As long as you didn’t go for the really fancy Nike Air brands with the bubbles in the soles then you could cut the bottoms off and make them work. That made me feel a lot better and gave me street cred with the older kids, who I wanted to impress. The callipers were also good for keeping my legs and feet straight, which you obviously can’t do in a wheelchair, and I stayed in them until I was eleven or twelve. I can’t say I looked after them very much. We were always up the hospital picking up replacements. I was forever jumping out of trees or throwing myself about. I didn’t care that they were made of steel and I developed a way of moving on them really fast by planting them down and swinging through the middle. It wasn’t what most people did but even in those early days it was obvious I was prepared to adapt whatever support I was given in the search for speed.

  I grew up on the Roundshaw Estate in Wallington. Built in the mid-1960s, it’s the usual mix of high-rise flats and prefab houses. We were in one of the houses, although we called them decks because they were all linked together by an upper walkway. They were really maisonettes built around an internal ring road. You were physically shielded from the outside world and it created a great sense of community and togetherness. It was fantastic for the initial wave of tenants when they were first built. It’s had quite a spruce-up in the last ten years or so but by the time I was born it had become quite badly run down. It had actually been built on part of the land which formed the old Croydon Airport in the 1930s. But in the years after the war it had become a wasteland and so was developed in the 1960s for social housing. Tell most people you live in Wallington and they will have images of the leafy Surrey stockbroker belt. But Roundshaw was different, a sort of no man’s land sandwiched uneasily between Croydon’s outer London urban sprawl and the comfy, middle-class suburbia of Sutton. Even today it has a bad reputation – mainly for drugs and gangs of kids causing trouble. They pulled the high-rise flats down shortly after 2000 and that has improved the place a lot. It had become very shabby and the police were always around, stopping people and asking questions.

  Because it had no main roads running through it, it always felt very secure to me. Yes, there were some hard people living there. But for me it’s always felt safe and I still live there to this day. Even Paul is able to look after himself in his own flat just around the corner.

  My mum moved to Roundshaw from Pimlico with her first husband, Derek, a technician for the London Electricity Board, in 1970. Alan and Paul had already come along and by then my mum was carrying Tony. The flat they had in Pimlico was in a brilliant location. It was on a huge estate called Churchill Gardens, right next to the River Thames, close to Victoria and the West End. But, as was quite common in those days, it was in the name of her mum, and my gran, Gladys. For years my gran worked for the Treasury Solicitors’ office, which was nearby. But now, with two kids and a third on the way, the flat was way too small.

  It was Derek’s mother who first made the move out to Wallington. She had heard about the new estate being built and had managed to secure one of the maisonettes. She urged Mum to do the same but at first my mum was a bit reluctant. She had been told there was an airport nearby and she didn’t fancy the noise of planes taking off and landing. She didn’t realise the airport had been shut for years. Once they saw it, they thought it was perfect for raising a growing family. So they put their name down with the council for a move.

  But the change of scene and the arrival of Tony wasn’t enough to keep my mum and Derek together, and after fifteen years they split up. My mum says it was because they got together and had kids too young. It seems they just drifted apart. He still lives in the area and they are good friends. Soon afterwards my mum was introduced to David, my dad. His nickname, Sammy, had stuck from his army days – apparently there were so many people called David in his regiment that they needed to find a name to distinguish him from all the others. He joined up when he was seventeen. He was sent on tours all around the world and used to tell me stories of fascinating places like Belize and China. I never imagined that when I was older I would serve my country in my own way.

  Judging by some of his stories, my dad must have been super-fit during his time in the army. One day, during his tour to Belize, he was getting pissed in a bar with some of his mates. It had been a long, boozy session and they were totally out of it when the drill sergeant burst in and told them to run a mile there and then. My dad says he was so drunk he could hardly walk and the heat was suffocating. But he had no choice. So he ran the mile. When he came back the sergeant checked his heart rate. It was basically normal. The sergeant refused to believe he had run anywhere. So he made him run it again. Afterwards he took his heart rate again and the same thing happened. It was as if he hadn’t run anywhere. It must be in my genes because I have exactly the same ability to recover – no matter how gruelling the race.

  After the army he became a builder and Mum worked full time for Philips, the electronics company, which was based in Croydon. She used to arrange for technicians to go out to people’s houses and fix their washing machines. She worked all the time up until her retirement. She was so determined to give all of us the best chance in life and I am so grateful for her and Dad’s support. It can’t have been easy with a son in a wheelchair trying to conquer the world.

  From the start, though, it was clear it was going to be hard going. They never accepted people telling me I couldn’t do things and that has been such a major influence on the way I perceive the world. The first time I was taken to the local play centre, the woman who ran it (she’s still there today, incidentally) refused to let me join in at first because she insisted I would endanger myself and others. My mum went nuts and told her exactly what she thought of that. She, rightly, pointed out that it was no different if I fell off a climbing frame and had to go to hospital than if an able-bodied child did the same thing. After a while the woman backed down and let me join in. I spent most of my summers down there and in the end it was like that standoff had never happened. But it was an important lesson very early on that I was going to meet plenty of hardened attitudes and hurdles along the way in life.

  But in those days I simply didn’t feel different and in many ways I’m exactly the same now. As far as I was concerned then, I was just like any other kid. And all I wanted to do was copy my friends – run around, kick a football, ride a bike. I wasn’t going to let my disability hold me back.

  To make sure I didn’t feel left out, my parents had a special bike made for me. It was a clunky three-wheeler which I could pedal with my hands. It worked just like a normal bike except the pedals were where the handlebars were and the crank and chain ran down to the front wheel, which drove the machine forward. I remember it had a red frame with one wheel at the front and two big white wheels at the back with massive mudguards. It was so big you could probably have fitted two people on the back. Once I got that, whoosh, I was off, charging around with my mates, who all had the latest BMXs. I didn’t care, it just made me feel part of the gang.

  We would set up ramps using old sheets of wood and bricks lying around in the woods near the old airfield strip at the back of the estate. I would always be the first one to try them out. I had absolutely no fear of coming off. Mind you, most of the time I wasn’t going very fast. My trike was so heavy that my mates had to push me to get me going. Once, though, when I was about ten, we got the courage to go a bit further than usual. We constructed this really big jump at the bottom of a hill. My heart was pounding in my chest as I got ready to go for
it. I look at the hill now and think it’s just a little bump but at the time it felt like a mountain.

  My friends gave me a shove to get me started.

  ‘I’ve bitten off too much here,’ I thought as my three wheels began to gather pace, heading towards this rickety-looking ramp we had built at the bottom. I slammed into the plank and took off. It felt like I was flying for ages before I crashed down to earth with a hell of a bump. I wobbled from side to side before getting my balance again, just managing to wrestle back control in time to avoid the trunk of a massive old tree. All my mates cheered.

  If I wasn’t on my bike, then I would be on my skateboard. I would just sit on it and use my hands to propel me forward. I loved it. The only problem was I used to get blisters on my hands from pushing against the hard ground – a sign of things to come.

  Football was really my dream and I didn’t want anything to stop me. We had a patch of grass just around the back of the house and that’s where we played all the time. I would go in goal, sit on the floor and use my callipers to try and block the ball. I became quite a good keeper although the imaginary crossbar between the two jumpers was set a bit lower for me because the other kids knew that I couldn’t stand or jump around. They used to smash the ball at me as if I was just like the rest of the kids. I liked that. I just wanted to get on with things. Deep down, though, I envied that they were able to run around and kick the ball, dribble and score goals. That was all I dreamed of and I used to spend a lot of time watching my team, Arsenal, on the TV, imagining myself doing the things all the top players could do.

  We didn’t go on many holidays as a family when I was a kid. Maybe it was because my parents didn’t have loads of money or perhaps it was just too much hassle transporting a disabled kid everywhere. But the one that sticks in my mind was a trip to Cornwall when I was about seven. We must have stayed at a holiday camp because there were all these redcoats around. The car journey in our white Mini Metro seemed to go on for ages; it was the furthest I had ever been. I think my mum was worried her car would burn out. Once we were there I had a fantastic time, especially when I went swimming with my dad. He was a good swimmer and he could do the butterfly, which I was so impressed by. I could already swim a bit but it was so magical being taught to swim by my dad properly, being shown how to do the front crawl. I can still feel the chlorine from that pool stinging my eyes. We spent so much time in there. In fact, my parents had to buy me some eyewash to help my eyes – they were so red. The weather was scorching hot and we went to the beach a lot. My dad bought me a tiny dinghy. He would pull me out on the string and I would float around. It was such a fantastic holiday – maybe all the more memorable because we didn’t do it very often. We never went abroad because my mum hates flying. A lot of my summer holidays were spent on Roundshaw.