I am not as seriously disabled as Mel, but I have partial paralysis of my left leg, arm and hand and have had to go through, in a minor way, some of the tribulations that she has faced. Her description of the move from the warm cocoon of intensive care into the tougher rehabilitation wards of hospital, a place where the gym, bathroom, functional electrical stimulation and playdough all have a special meaning, returned me immediately to the wards in which I recovered from my stroke almost six years ago. She writes brilliantly about the characters of the different forms of nursing and medical staff, and the way black humour and grim solidarity knits together recovering patients still bemused about what has happened to their lives. (Though when this happens in Glasgow rather than London, the quality of humour is much, much higher.)
For tetraplegics, the road must be particularly rough. The rule she says is adapt or die: ‘A rehab ward in a spinal unit is like an under-strength factory floor: too few staff battling to a relentless timetable of feeding, medicating, washing, toileting, dressing and hoisting dozens of helpless carcasses into wheelchairs to get them to the gym.’ And then, if you’re doing well, come other multiple terrors and challenges of returning home and rebuilding life. Melanie Reid writes sensibly and well about thoughts of suicide, about depression, about the frustration of media-hyped ‘medical breakthroughs’ that never quite translate into helping you yourself; and unsparingly about the daily frustrations and humiliations of disabled life. For what it’s worth, I too have found myself screaming with rage from time to time having dropped yet another utensil on the kitchen floor.
So in that sense, these are really ‘Notes from the Underground’; and why would you want to read that? The answer is not only that you might find yourself in just the same place, but that Melanie is such a good guide in how to survive it. She knows that although the subject of disability might seem depressing and offputting, the courage it requires is exciting and inspiring. What she has gone through requires no less physical courage and determination than being imprisoned in a wartime prison camp – a parallel that hovers at times through the writing, but is no hyperbole. She rightly quotes the great English vicar-philosopher Sydney Smith on the importance of taking a short view of life: ‘Are you happy now?’ She understands the absolute importance of shunning the lethal beckoning poison-fairy of self-pity. As she says: ‘you learn, very slowly, to rediscover joy’.
On that journey, here, you’ll find some of the funniest and darkest comic scenes you have ever read, from a surreal encounter between the author in her wheelchair and a group of special needs adults, all of them on days out at a bowling alley, while they work out who is lowest on the pecking order. And then there is the scene in the hairdresser’s with the colostomy bag … But I will leave you to discover that for yourself. For what I think has saved Mel, apart from the love of strong people around her, is that she is such a natural and gifted writer. Early on she says, while still in the entrails of intensive care, ‘My sanity was … to make sense of it to myself … it was good copy.’ And so it bloody well was. The real reason we read is to get an injection of empathy; to help ourselves break out of the shell of our own experiences, and enter other human lives, so that we can understand this business of being alive just a little bit better. To do that we need really good writers on really big subjects. No, this is not probably a good book. It really is one, and reading it will change you.
It was a cold, blustery Sunday in late March, ordinary in the way days always are before extraordinary things happen. We had slept late and it was mid-afternoon before we headed to the nearby village for provisions. By then, the sky looked unkind. As we reached the point where our farm track joins the public road, we glimpsed a tall man in hiking gear, carrying a large pack, striding purposefully away from civilisation towards the forests and hills. There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on, that made me notice him. He had a pleasant face but he looked – what? Anxious? Embarrassed? In a hurry?
‘Bit late in the day to be going that way,’ I remarked to Dave. Or maybe I just thought it. I can’t remember now.
Dropping down into the village, we passed a neighbour out inspecting his hedgerow. A non-gardener, wearing smart trousers and a ski anorak, poking suspiciously at the unforthcoming soil. We slowed to say hallo, holding the car on the brake, not committed enough to put the engine in neutral.
‘Just spoke to some crazy foreigner,’ he said. ‘Lost his way off the West Highland Way. I told him, I said, you’re miles off, and he wanted to know what he should do, but I just told him, you’ll need to head back the way you’ve come. Some people, eh?’
I waited in the car while Dave was in the shop. Rain started to blur the windscreen and I felt troubled. For the record, I’m no Mother Teresa. I don’t make a habit of picking up lame ducks and I’m ever so slightly impatient with those who do. But there’s something about travellers stranded on roadsides by breakdowns, or people who look lost, or in distress, that always makes me falter. Some primitive instinct, which I rarely act upon, makes me want to stop and offer help. Usually I dither, fail to act in case I look stupid, drive by and then regret it: the infinite frozen impulse, the wasted generosity, of the shy. The almost-nearly good Samaritan. Which, if you ask me, is more irritating than someone who lacks the impulse in the first place.
Being truly honest, I was still haunted by an incident from decades ago, when I was inside a tube station in London’s West End, rushing for the last train after a show. There was a young man slumped against the wall at the bottom on the stairs, causing people to crush and crowd in their haste to get past. He had a bloodied stump, one leg freshly amputated at the knee, and he looked utterly desperate. He held a piece of cardboard which said: ‘Please help me get back to Scotland’. And as I slowed, appalled, wanting to help, my companions grabbed me by the arms and hustled me onto a train. ‘C’mon! We haven’t time.’ And for thirty years I’ve regretted not stopping to help that boy, often wondering what his story was. Did he ever get home?
This time, though, was different. I knew that road back over the hills was long and exposed and I felt emboldened.
When Dave got back in the car, I said: ‘I think we should go and offer that guy a lift.’
‘What guy?’
‘The walker. The crazy foreigner.’
‘You are kidding.’ He turned to look at me as if I had sprouted two heads.
‘Why?’ He wanted to sit by the fire and read the Sunday papers.
‘Because it will be pitch-dark long before he gets back to where he started, let alone where he was supposed to be going. It’s pouring now and he’s ten miles off course in the middle of nowhere.’
‘He could be anyone. He could be some Eastern European axe-murderer.’
‘Imagine if it was you, or us.’
So we ignored our turning for home and carried on the hill road. We caught up with him toiling into the dusk, a dark figure on a lonely ribbon of tarmac, just before he began the ascent to the moor. He didn’t look like an axe-murderer.
We picked him up at the bottom of the hill on the Moor Road.
‘Would you like a lift?’ we said. ‘We heard you were lost.’ Speaking slowly and clearly so he could understand.
He smiled and put his sodden pack in the boot and climbed into the back seat, dripping. He seemed profoundly grateful and he expressed it in English. Excellent English, in fact. Our crazy foreigner was a Canadian university philosophy lecturer, a handsome, intelligent man in his thirties with a gentle manner. He’d flown over to attend a conference at Aberdeen University on, and I think I remember this rightly, Thomas Reid, a little-remembered Scottish