Читать книгу Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink - Sandra Parton - Страница 9

Over the days and weeks after the accident, I realized that I had lost a huge chunk of my memory. Doctors reassured me that it was a common side effect of head injuries and was often just temporary but I sat obsessively trying to work out what I could and couldn’t remember. In particular my entire childhood was a blank, so I asked Sandra to tell me what she knew about it.

She said that when I was a kid I lived in a council house in Haslemere, Surrey, with my mum and my sister Suzanne. Mum and Dad split up when I was two years old and we lost contact with Dad, which must have been really tough for Mum. She struggled to cope financially and we didn’t have lots of toys or fancy bikes, parties or trips to the zoo, but there was always food on the table and clothes on our backs. In my teens, I got a boarding-school place paid for by the council and that helped to ease the burden.

My gran lived in London where she used to work for Sir Samuel Hood, the Sixth Viscount Hood, who came from a family long associated with the Navy. At Christmas time, Lord Hood used to let us come up to London and stay with my gran in his house in Eaton Square while he and the family were out at their estate in the country, and seemingly I was in awe of the place. There were huge oil paintings on the walls, of battleships at Trafalgar and great storms at sea, and all kinds of naval memorabilia like sextants and charts and telescopes. Sandra says I told her I used to love just standing in front of them staring and pretending I was on deck, clinging to the rails as huge waves lashed the sides. Much of his collection is now housed in the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich, I believe. Anyway, I’m sure it was there that I formed my ambition to join the Navy. It must have been an exciting environment for a young boy.

Sir Samuel heard about my plans and offered to send me to Officers’ College, bless him, but I decided I would rather work my way up from the bottom. I suppose I thought the officers’ school would be full of toffs and I wouldn’t fit in. It’s not that I wasn’t ambitious, but I wanted to have hands-on experience at every level. I never wanted to be one of those people who know how to calculate the volume of a biscuit tin but have no idea how to open it.

So I signed up when I was just sixteen years old, did my basic training, where you learn how to march, clean your uniform and all that sort of thing, then I went to HMS Collingwood naval school at Fareham in Hampshire, where I was given technical training in electrics, radar systems and basic mechanics. I joined my first ship, HMS Hermione, at Portland in Dorset and we were thrown straight into war exercises, which is real ‘Boy’s Own’ stuff: they were launching thunder flashes at us, turning on the mains and flooding compartments, setting things on fire – all the things you would never normally be allowed to do on board – and we were forced to deal with it. We had to use our mattresses to plug holes in the side of the ship, and rescue ‘wounded’ civilians, and it was all a huge adventure. If this was meant to be work, I was all for it.

After that I set off on a year’s cruise round the world, following the kind of itinerary you’d pay tens of thousands of pounds for as a tourist. The most vivid early memories I have now are from this tour of duty; there are clear pictures in my mind of many of the places we visited. We went down past Gibraltar, through the Panama Canal, up to San Diego and Vancouver, then across to the Far East, Singapore, and right round the globe. Whenever we docked somewhere, I’d catch a train and go exploring instead of sitting in the nearest pub getting hammered, as some of my shipmates were prone to doing. I went to Disneyland and Las Vegas and all the major tourist attractions, and I met some wonderful people along the way.

I remember sitting in a pub in Gibraltar one sunny afternoon, with the monkeys playing on the Rock above us, and I can tell you exactly what I was drinking and what we talked about. I remember going through the Panama Canal with nothing but dense jungle towering on either side of the ship. I remember flying in a seaplane from Vancouver Island to the mainland and seeing the plane that had gone just before us ditching head-first into the water. And I remember Singapore back in the days when it was rough and ready round the docks, with beggars hustling you and taxi drivers jostling for your custom and all the old buildings that have been knocked down now to make way for pristine glass skyscrapers.

Mum wrote to the captain of my ship to complain that she never heard from me and he called me in for a chat. ‘Send her a postcard from every port,’ he told me. ‘She’s your mother, after all.’ I didn’t want to waste time writing great screeds so I got into the habit of sending a card that just had one word on it: ‘Hi!’ She has a huge collection from all over the world, and all of them just say ‘Hi!’, but that seemed to keep her happy. I got the odd letter from her with news from home, but I didn’t get homesick or miss her, as I know some of the other young lads did. I was having the adventure of a lifetime and I’d left Haslemere way behind me.

It was a bit of a shock when we got back from our trip to be told that we were being sent out to Northern Ireland, which in the late 1970s was a dangerous place to be. The Navy didn’t have to do battle on the streets, but the Army guys we met were all very jumpy. I was based at a transmission station near Belfast called Moscow Camp, where I had to do maintenance schedules for all the weapons systems and check that valves were working and so forth. I never saw any direct violence but I was aware that a lot of the guys I bumped into were virtually in shock about what was happening, living in an environment where bombs were just coming over the walls and there could be a terrorist round any corner. I suppose it was the same as is happening in Afghanistan today. You see guys drinking meths on the streets of London, and when you question them you hear that they were soldiers who came out of Northern Ireland so traumatized that they were never able to readjust to normal civilian life.

I was a bit of a swot, always putting myself up for exams, and before I left HMS Hermione I’d achieved my first promotion. I’d go and sit on the beach with all my reference books and huge carrier bags of notes, and I’d study and study. In Gibraltar I found an old gun emplacement – a pillbox, we call them – and I’d sit there and boff up. Promotion meant rank and more pay, so I always put myself up for any advancement I could, although you had to be a particular age before you could sit some of the exams. Lots of friends I’d joined up with couldn’t be bothered – they were happy just to do the job and weren’t looking to be an officer one day – but it was always an ambition of mine.

Gradually, I was put in charge of other men, and I think I was pretty fair as a boss. I was always willing to give everyone who came up the gangplank a chance, even if I knew he had been kicked off another ship. I’d say, ‘There’s your weapons system, there’re the maintenance schedules, I want you to paint it, clean it, oil it, grease it. If you need help, ask me. It’s your job now, but if it doesn’t work it’s down to you.’ And, by putting my trust in someone like that, I often found I’d get the best-maintained system on the ship. When a guy who’s made a mistake is given a second chance, he’s not going to mess up again.

I made my men work really hard, and the only punishment I used for misdemeanours was making them stick little round hole-strengtheners on all my files. We had huge books of drawings of the wiring of all our different systems, known as BRs (‘books of reference’). This was in the days before microfiches and computers were widely in use, of course. I didn’t want the paper to tear where holes were punched, so if the guys did something wrong I’d sit them down with a huge pile of sticky hole-strengtheners and make them do both sides of each page. I heard the lads called them ‘paper arseholes’, which made me smile.

I was really committed to the job – if there was still work to be done, you’d never find me slipping off to a pub onshore – and I reckon I dealt with it and my men pretty well. I saw the young guys who had gone straight into the officer-training course, usually from comfortable backgrounds where Mummy and Daddy took care of everything, and I knew I’d made the right decision to work my way up the ranks. They didn’t have an iota of experience, and yet they were supposed to be in charge of men who had huge family problems, divorces, sick children, money worries, and they had no idea what to do. It was better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish who was thrown right in at the deep end of the big pond, in my opinion.

I had a fantastic time along the way, on all the different ships I was posted to. The life could be very glamorous. I remember I spent six months in the Great Lakes between America and Canada on the biggest ship that had ever made its way in there. As we approached through the locks, the huge wicker fenders on the ship’s sides caught fire due to the friction, the fit was so tight. We were there as a kind of exhibition ship. Models like Jerry Hall came to do shows on the helicopter flight deck, wearing spindly high heels that tended to get caught in the mesh of the deck covering.

We sailed to Chicago, Milwaukee, Duluth, and everywhere we went there were flash parties with champagne and cocktails. We flew the ship’s helicopter over Niagara Falls, and I remember we stopped in Montreal on the way back up the St Lawrence River. I have a vivid memory of climbing a huge set of wooden steps there, up from a park to a place where there were stunning views right up and down the river for miles and miles. I’ve searched for it in Google Earth and I can find the park but I can’t find those steps, and that drives me crazy because then I start doubting myself and wondering if I’m just imagining them. But I’m sure I’m not.

That was all before I met Sandra. I have no recollection of how we met, where we met, what I said to her that night, or what I thought about her at the time. I don’t remember what we did on our first date, the first time we kissed, jokes we shared, how we fell in love or when I asked her to marry me – none of that stuff remains. I know what she’s told me but I have no first-hand memories at all, which is very distressing for her and just plain weird for me. She’s shown me albums of photos from our wedding and it’s strange to see myself there, happy and smiling and obviously very much in love, but to have no recollection of it at all.

I know that soon after we were married, in 1983, I was posted up to Rosyth in Scotland. We had married quarters that looked out over the Forth Road Bridge and the view was amazing. My job was to maintain the minesweepers and repair any other ships that came in with problems. The regular crew would go on leave and we’d go on board with the books and check all the maintenance and fix up the bits that weren’t working and then hand it back to the crew once they were rested. We were there for a year, I think, and then we were transferred down to Portsmouth where I worked on a guided-missile destroyer.

The kids were born in these years, first Liam in 1985 and then Zoe in ‘86. Apparently, the night Zoe was conceived I was meant to have been at sea, but the ship’s engines broke down so we came back ashore, and she was the result!

After Portsmouth, I was moved to Bath, where I was working for the Director of Engineering Support, basically designing new weaponry systems. There was a vast underground naval complex beneath the city, which was like something out of a Harry Potter novel, and we didn’t see daylight from Monday to Friday. It was dark in the morning when I started and dark when I walked out in the evening, but I loved the challenges of the work I was doing.

I was the only non-commissioned officer there. I’d passed the exams and so forth but I hadn’t actually gone to Dartmouth to get my commission, and I was aware that I was being watched by all the other officers to see whether I fitted in. When we went out socially, the highest of the high were watching my social graces, so I couldn’t make myself a chip butty at table or anything like that. I had to wear a jacket and tie instead of running around with the lads. But I was ready for it. Being an officer would mean that I could provide better for my family.

When the Gulf War started in 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I volunteered straight away. I felt I should be out there on a ship instead of sitting behind a desk in Bath. It was never going to be a naval battle, so it was more about making sure supplies were getting through to our troops, intercepting any shipments of arms to the Iraqis, that kind of thing. We didn’t need thousands of ships there because it was all fairly easy with modern radar equipment, and you can more or less see right across the Gulf anyway.

When we arrived, our ship was given some free fuel from a prince who owned some oilfields in one of the Gulf States and we found we weren’t really needed, so we sailed on to Singapore and Malaysia. I know Sandra came out and joined me there, because she has shown me some stunning pictures of us standing in front of huge Buddhas and going round all the sights. So in fact, when she waved me off to go back to the theatre of war, we were sailing from Malaysia, not the UK. That was the last time she saw the ‘old me’. I’ve got a complete blank about that whole period. I can’t remember a single thing. I’ve no memory of ever being in Malaysia or the Gulf. It’s all gone. Sometimes I think I remember things because I’ve seen a picture of them but I can’t fill in any detail that’s not in the picture.

When I woke up in Haslar military hospital in September 1991, I was determined to get straight back to work. I just needed the doctors to fix me up. I hadn’t had an operation, there weren’t any scars or blood and gore, I hadn’t broken my back or my neck, so why was I having such trouble walking?

‘Your brain is not sending signals to your legs,’ I was told. ‘That’s why they don’t respond effectively. There’s nothing actually wrong with them.’

It was the same with my eyes. There was nothing the matter with them, but because my brain wasn’t working properly it wasn’t picking up signals from the optic nerve as efficiently as it should have been. The squint I’d had as a young child appeared to have come back. And I had no feeling in my right arm and the right side of my body, although I seemed to be able to move them; there were intermittent pins and needles but I couldn’t feel my hand if I dug a nail into it.

I took hope from the fact that there was no physical damage. Surely I just needed a bit of rest and it would all come back again? But why did I seem to have forgotten roughly 50 per cent of my life history? I had no memories of my grandfather, mother, sister, wife or children. Why did I forget basic words like ‘toothpaste’ and ‘bed’ and ‘pyjamas’?

‘You experienced a huge traumatic internal brain injury when your spine was forced up into the brain cavity,’ they said. ‘There’s no treatment we can give you. We just have to wait and see. It could get better, or it could get worse.’

If the doctors ever sounded negative in their prognosis, I thought to myself: They don’t know whom they’re dealing with. Maybe other war veterans would sigh and shrug and accept their disabilities, but I was way too ambitious for that. I was itching to get back to my career. I would work tirelessly at my physiotherapy and speech therapy and any other damn therapy they cared to give me. I would keep exercising until my legs worked properly again; I’d recover my memory and my speech and my eyesight and I’d astonish them all with my miraculous powers of regeneration.

I was so determined that I didn’t listen to anyone who warned me it might not be possible to get back the life I’d had before. They didn’t know me. They didn’t have a clue what I was capable of. As far as I was concerned, they were just plain wrong.