Читать книгу Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink - Sandra Parton - Страница 12

Headley Court was a military establishment, where they all wore uniform and you needed a pass to get through the gates. The furniture in the day rooms was standard issue, exactly the same as they put in the married persons’ accommodation. The staff all seemed very nice, though, and I thought the facilities were excellent.

It was our eighth wedding anniversary, 5 November 1991, when Allen was admitted there. The first thing they did was run a series of psychometric tests to establish his brain capacity at the time. I remember one of the tests was to see whether he could put some cards into a particular sequence. The doctors told me that he would start to do it, then forget what he was doing and have to ask them to remind him. That was a bad sign, they said. It would have been better if he had laid the cards out and maybe got the sequence slightly wrong, because that would have shown that at least he understood and remembered the instruction.

They showed him a card with a shape on it and asked him what it would look like if you turned it through 90 degrees. He had no idea. They also asked him questions such as, ‘If you were in a shop paying for something that cost fifty pence and you handed over a pound, how much change would you get?’ And he didn’t have a clue. Not a clue. I was horrified when they told me. What on earth had happened to him? Liam could have answered some of the questions he was getting wrong. They got him into intensive physio to try and deal with the twitches and loss of leg control, and speech therapy to deal with his stuttering and difficulty in forming words, but what were they going to do about his loss of cognitive powers, I wondered? How could they ever fix that? Sometimes the brain can heal, but I was aware that brain injuries can also get worse over time as more brain tissue dies off.

The extent of his brain damage sank in gradually over weeks and months, rather than straight away. When he came home for weekends, I watched him like a hawk, straining to find any glimpses of the old Allen and the relationship we used to have, hoping and praying that any day now he would snap out of it and get back to normal.

‘Do you want to watch TV?’ I’d ask. ‘That programme you like is on.’

‘OK.’ He’d shrug, and we’d sit down to watch it together, but when I glanced at his face it would be blank and I could tell he wasn’t following it at all. He didn’t laugh at funny moments, or react in any way to what was happening on the screen.

When I referred to things we’d done together in the past, or places we’d been, there was a similar blankness. One day I pointed out our wedding photograph on the wall.

‘You remember our wedding day, don’t you?’ There was no recognition on Allen’s face. ‘In Wilton?’ I continued, tears coming to my eyes. ‘It was Guy Fawkes Night. Your friend Kevin was best man. Look, there he is.’ I pointed to the photo again.

Allen shook his head. ‘Don’t remember.’

‘Do you remember how we met?’ I persisted. He paused and then shook his head.

There had been plenty of clues before but it was then I finally realized that he didn’t remember me at all from before the accident. I burst out crying, covered my face and ran upstairs. I threw myself on the bed, sobbing my heart out. I suppose I must have known already, but I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. I wished I hadn’t pushed him. It had been easier not knowing because now I had to think about all the implications of it. If he didn’t remember me, did I really still have a husband?

That first day when I picked him up from Haslar he hadn’t had a clue who I was. The staff had told him I was his wife, so he knew that much but no more. What if they’d made a mistake? He would probably have gone off with anyone if they told him to. The wrong woman could easily have claimed him.

It made me feel grief-stricken and terribly lonely. It was like a particularly cruel type of bereavement because I no longer had a partner who loved me although someone who looked exactly the same as him was sitting downstairs. Not four months before we’d had a lovely, romantic time visiting the sights of Penang and Singapore – the temples, the markets, the huge Buddha statues, the beaches – and we’d been a proper couple who loved each other. And now I’d lost that love and I didn’t know when – or if – I would ever get it back again. Meanwhile I was burdened with someone with whom I couldn’t even have a logical conversation, who needed me to be a nurse and carer and had nothing to offer in return.

He arrived on Friday evenings, sat down on a chair in the corner and hardly moved until it was time to go back on the Sunday. I tried to chat to him about what had happened during the week, about the news on TV, about the children, but I got monosyllabic responses. He only spoke when he wanted something from me: food or drink, or for the children to stop being so noisy.

It was very hard to explain to them why their daddy was so different from the fun, playful daddy they remembered. I just kept the story simple: he’d had an accident and hurt his head; he needed peace and quiet for it to get better again; they had to be careful not to bother him. They seemed to take it at face value. He was still their daddy, even if he was a bit grumpy and didn’t get down on the floor to play Lego as he used to.

Every now and again I would try to set up a game that we could all play together, but Allen had no interest. He wasn’t really capable of much.

‘Do you want to play ball with us?’ I asked once, thinking that he might be able to do throwing and catching with the kids without too much effort while sitting in a chair – but I soon realized that was another skill he had lost. When I threw the ball, he didn’t have the instinct to raise his arms and catch it so it bounced off his chest. I was throwing it at him instead of to him.

After a while the children tended to give him a wide berth in case he shouted at them, or tried to grab them for a hug and squeezed too hard, misjudging his own strength.

There wasn’t a big community of naval wives round our way. Army wives all live together on the base and entire regiments are moved at the same time so they are very close and able to support each other in times of trouble. In the Navy, families live off the base and are moved around one by one so you don’t get to know each other in the same way. However, my wonderful next-door neighbours Julie and Heather or another friend Judy would have the children any time I asked and that was a godsend.

I called Allen’s mum, of course, and his sister Suzanne, but they had their own lives to lead and couldn’t be much help with his care. I later found out that his mum was struggling with the early stages of MS round about the time Allen was first back in hospital in the UK, so that might explain why she didn’t often come to visit him. Maybe the drive would have been too much for her. I was the one who had to take responsibility, along with the staff at Headley Court, and that’s just the way it was.

Even though I didn’t have a job I was rushing around at full stretch, looking after the children during the week, running the house and buying in food so that everything was calm and ordered when Allen got back at the weekend. He didn’t like to see mess or disorder.

I remember I watched news footage of uninjured soldiers returning from the Gulf with smiles from ear to ear, kissing their wives and picking up their children, and I wondered if their lives would go back to normal. I was yearning for my husband and my old life but at the same time I was beginning to lose hope that things would ever go back to the way they used to be.

About two months after the accident, I found out that Allen’s salary had been stopped. I didn’t realize at first because it was paid into his personal bank account, then a direct debit came across to my account to pay for household bills, rent, food and so forth. Most naval wives operate this way. You can’t have joint accounts in case a situation arises where you need a joint signature for something while your husband is away at sea for months. When his income was stopped, the direct debit kept coming but I found out from statements that his account was getting seriously overdrawn.

I rang Collingwood naval base to request his pay slips and found that he had only been paid for the first two weeks of August. His income had been stopped on the 16th, the day he was injured, because when he went into hospital he wasn’t attached to a ship or a base so he wasn’t clocked as being at work. It seemed intolerable that on top of my anxiety about Allen’s injury I had to worry about money as well. I ranted and raved to the authorities at Collingwood until eventually, a couple of months after the accident, they sorted out the problems and got him back on the payroll, although minus the extra supplement he had been getting for being at sea. It was stressful but in a way I was glad to have something practical to keep me occupied since it seemed there was nothing I could do for Allen at the time. Everywhere I turned, I hit a brick wall.

Those early weeks and months are like a thick fog and I didn’t feel I was coping at all. I was frightened and vulnerable but I was angry as well and I suppose that drove me. First of all I was determined to find out exactly what had happened to Allen and see if there would be any kind of compensation for the injuries he’d suffered to help us pay for his care in the future. I consulted a lawyer, who wrote to the captain of Allen’s ship.

A reply came on 1 November and it was only then I found out how the accident had happened and that he hadn’t been on some unauthorized ‘jolly’, as had been implied at first.

Ex-pats who lived in the countries bordering the Gulf liked to entertain service personnel when they pulled into port. I remember Allen mentioning this before. He’d said that none of them were especially keen on those evenings, when conversation could be an effort, but it was considered good PR to go along. On 16 August his ship was moored in Muscat in the Gulf of Oman. Some ex-pats issued an invitation for two men to come to dinner and I’m not sure whether Allen was volunteered in his absence or if he just didn’t step back quickly enough to avoid it, but he ended up being press-ganged into it, along with another Chief Petty Officer.

The ex-pats picked them up from the ship in a four-wheel drive. The captain didn’t know precisely what happened, but it seems that there was an accident, the car overturned and Allen’s head slammed at high speed into the roof. He said that after the accident the driver had made every effort to make sure Allen was all right and had taken him back to the ship, from where he was transferred to hospital. However, he said, no one could recall the names or address of the ex-pats he had been visiting so we couldn’t contact them to try and claim compensation through their insurance company.