The last word belonged to Kevin Mintern. He and his wife were desperate, he said, and if they were refused the extension they would have to sell the business that represented their life savings, and move.
“We’ve lost our son,” he said. “My wife has lost her career. If we lose our business we might just as well give up.”
Times and Chronicle, 19 Sept 1991
There was further comment in the same newspaper.
Only those with the hardest of hearts can fail to have been moved by the plight of the Mintern family of Snaith in their courageous efforts to provide the best upbringing for their paralysed and brain-damaged son Matthew.
The family’s appeal to be allowed to build a ground-floor extension to accommodate their 17-year-old son, on land they already own, has been publicized in this and other newspapers, as well as on radio and television.
To support their contention that Snaith people are, in fact, more concerned about the welfare of Matthew Mintern than the loss of just 4 parking spaces, the couple handed to the council on Monday a petition signed by 1520 local people calling for a reconsideration of the compulsory purchase order.
The Minterns have an overwhelming need for sympathetic and humane consideration. Is it too much to ask Boothferry councillors to listen to them?
The petition, the media coverage and Matty in his wheelchair failed to move the council. The appeal was turned down. We turned to our MP, David Davies, who took up the case.
HUMANITARIAN DECISION ON PARENTS’ PLEA
Parents fighting for permission to build a special home extension to care for their brain-damaged son have won a major battle against their local council.
And the couple at the centre of the row have praised more than 1500 people who signed a petition in their support.
Mr and Mrs Mintern said they were certain that the weight of public opinion had influenced a Government decision in their favour. The Secretary of State for the Environment, Mr Michael Heseltine, has decided not to allow Boothferry Borough Council to use compulsory purchase powers to buy a small patch of land at the rear of the couple’s pub at Snaith.
Mr and Mrs Mintern had earmarked the site to build a ground-floor extension in which to look after their 17-year-old son, who was critically injured in a road accident.
An independent inspector suggested that Boothferry’s compulsory purchase order should be confirmed.
But Mr Heseltine overturned the recommendation.
He said he had reached the decision on ‘humanitarian’ grounds to override the planning merits of the order.
Hull Daily Mail, 2 Oct 1991
Finally we could go ahead. The council were quick to pass the plans for the bungalow extension after this, and work started early in 1992. It felt like a triumph of sorts because the alternative had been so dreadful, but none of us felt celebratory. Time and again, as we tried to cope with the transformation of Matty, we also had to cope with all this other stuff that went with it. I could never understand how people could have so little compassion towards him and us.
In April I finally passed my driving test – on my fourth attempt. I bought a silver Toyota Starlet for £500 with money I’d saved from my bar wages, which our customers called the Silver Bullet, and as the bungalow was being built I would reverse it into a pile of bricks on a fairly regular basis.
I spent most of my free time hanging around with our customers. I played in the dominoes team on Tuesday nights, the ladies’ darts team on Wednesdays, and in the mixed darts league on Monday nights, where I was often the only woman on either side who got a game. Thursdays was men’s darts night, and we had two teams. My dad played with the A team and I’d usually go along with the B team. Dad would give me money so that I could fulfil the landlordly duty of getting the first round in. It felt good to pitch up at a pub in one of the neighbouring villages and head straight to the bar in front of eight men.
By summer, the extension was finished. Mum, Dad and Matty had a big bedroom to share, with an enormous bathroom to accommodate Matty’s shower trolley. All the doors were wide enough for him to be wheeled around in the hoist, and we set up a team of carers and had regular visits from a physiotherapist. There wasn’t a room for me in the bungalow, but I moved into Matty’s bedroom above the pub, which was nearest to it. I liked being in Matty’s room; it made me feel close to him. I mingled my possessions with his, wore his clothes and cut his jeans, several inches too long for me, into denim shorts. It was odd being both next to but separated from my family, literally under a different roof. Lots of my friends were envious of my freedom and would sometimes exclaim about how lucky I was, before remembering what was at the root of having all this space at my disposal.
All I had to do to rejoin the family was walk down the back stairs and through a communicating door we’d put in. This took me straight from the back kitchen of the pub into the big bedroom. Mum had a small office area in the corner of the room so she could do all the cashing-up and paperwork and keep an eye on Matty at the same time. We got a new safe, and the one built into the wall upstairs was no longer used. I had a few nightmares that burglars would break in and threaten to burn the place down if I wouldn’t give them the code, not believing that the safe was empty. Outside we had a little paved area and a small garden, which meant we could wheel Matty out to sit in the sun without anyone seeing. It made me think of the poem ‘Futility’ by Wilfred Owen:
Move him into the sun – Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
As time passed, fewer and fewer people asked about Matty because they knew there would be no progress to report. Within the pub everything was OK because we were the pub people and could get on with serving the drinks. It was outside the protection of our walls, when people saw us as individuals, that we became tainted. My dad said people would cross the road to avoid feeling that they had to ask him for news. I worked Saturday nights in the pub and before my shift would often go to buy cigarettes in the shop across the road, where I’d run into people who had been drinking away all afternoon.
‘How’s your kid?’ they’d say. ‘I don’t like to ask your mum and dad.’
I couldn’t work this out, the bit about not liking to ask my parents. Did they think I didn’t matter; that I was less upset than they were? Maybe it was simply that their inhibitions were loosened enough to ask. They’d had a few pints, they were picking up fags or lottery tickets on the way home to their families and woozily decided to do the decent thing and ask the question.
I can remember how much I hated that question, but I can’t remember how I answered it. How many ways can you say that there has been no change? How many ways can you say that there is no news?
I still sat with Matty every day. I cuddled him and talked to him, though I’d run through all of our memories a million times and didn’t have anything new to say. I brushed his hair gently over his scars. I squeezed the blackheads on his nose because I knew he’d have hated them. I’d inherited our father’s acne-prone skin and Matty, like our mother, had hardly had a spot in his life until the accident. Now he was covered in them.
Once I was gently easing out the blackheads with a tissue and then wiping his nose with an Oxy pad when a single tear ran down his cheek. We never knew whether his occasional tears – never very many – had any kind of emotional backdrop or not. I wondered if the Oxy pad had made his eye water. Either way, I was distressed to think I’d hur
t him. The old Matty would have hated the thought of blackheads, but probably wouldn’t have liked me squeezing them either. Did this new Matty care? Didn’t he have more to worry about than a few blackheads on his nose? I couldn’t unravel all this in my head, couldn’t work out what version of him might have wanted what at what time, but I never did it again.
Often I’d look deep into his eyes, looking for awareness. Sometimes, but I was never sure if I’d imagined it, I thought I saw a fleeting grimace, a flash of his old self realizing where and who he was. I wondered where his essence was, his soul.
THE NUT HOUSE
Somehow I got decent grades at A level and applied to the five nearest universities to study French and English. I didn’t have much enthusiasm for it, but I could just about remember that this was what my pre-accident self had wanted to do. When the offers came in, I decided on Leeds. The university was just up the road from the infirmary. I wanted to stay at home, but my parents encouraged me to get a room in halls. They would visit me once a week, they promised, and I could come home at weekends.
I didn’t know I was common until I went to university. I’d grown up being teased for having a posh voice and being too clever for my own good and had got used to being feted, spoiled and treated like an heiress in the pub, so it came as a bit of a shock.
I learned that ‘Where did you go to school?’ was not a question about geography but an attempt to pin me down and categorize me. When my new best friend Sophie introduced me to some of her other friends, they treated me like a curious pet.
‘Isn’t she well spoken,’ one of them drawled at another, ‘for someone who went to a comprehensive?’
I didn’t mind any of this and thought it was quite funny. I’d read lots of books – from Anne of the Island to Philip Larkin’s Jill to Brideshead Revisited – about going to university and meeting other, posher, people, so I felt well prepared. I knew from books that the worst thing was to pretend to be other than you are, so I never wasted time on lying or being ashamed about my background, which I saw some students do. I was still bemused that some people seemed to genuinely think they were better than others due to birth or going to particular schools.
Sophie was the first person I met when I arrived at Lupton Flats, a university block in Headingley where, the gossip went, the Yorkshire Ripper had found one of his victims. She had brought six green wine glasses, given to her by her mother. I had never seen coloured glass before and found the notion of being given wine glasses by a parent incredibly glamorous. She’d spent the summer Interrailing, had played lacrosse on the beach in Portugal and then used her lacrosse stick to steal bread from the open-topped van parked behind tall gates at the bakery. She had her own backgammon set, her father was a surgeon, she’d been to boarding school. She was like someone out of a book and I drank her in.
On one of the very first nights I told her about Matty and she took it in her stride. Her mum had had a stroke years ago when Sophie was fourteen and had difficulties with walking and speaking. Sophie knew what it felt like to be apart from everyone else. We’d stay up all night drinking, chatting, playing Scrabble, smoking. I graduated from the Embassy or Regal I’d grown up with to Marlboro Lights, with their classy white and gold packets, and I started saying lunch instead of dinner, and dinner instead of tea.
I liked spending time with Sophie and her family, who always took me out with them when they came to visit. Her father had subscribed her to all sorts of interesting magazines, so I got used to reading Private Eye and the Spectator, and he sent us lots of the gifts given to him by grateful patients. I discovered a taste for smoked salmon and Parma ham, neither of which I’d ever eaten before.
My favourite places on campus were the Brotherton Library and the stationery shop. I bought lots of disposable fountain pens and wrote all my essays in purple ink. Sophie and I bought some silver spray paint and she stencilled stars onto our Doc Martens, hers were black, mine were green.
I didn’t know how to describe myself to the new people I met. In our village I was used to being the sister of Coma Boy, the girl from the Bell and Crown, Forearms’ daughter. Everyone knew everything about us. Now, out in the wider world, faced with questions from fellow students and their parents about how I’d spent my gap year, I tied myself in knots. I felt like I came from a different planet from all these innocent, undamaged people.
I tried a variety of answers to the question about whether I had any brothers and sisters:
What to say ‘I have a brother.’
Pros It’s truthful.
Cons They will ask a follow up, like ‘What does he do?’, to which ‘Not much, really’ is not an appropriate response. (It is a bit funny, though, isn’t it? If you really want to see it?)
Conclusion Not worth it. You’ll have to explain in the end.
What to say ‘No.’
Pros It’s short. It doesn’t bring down the mood.
Cons It’s a lie. It will make you feel really bad in a biblical ‘denying your God’ sort of way.
Conclusion Not worth it. You’ll feel rotten and, if you get to know the person better, the lie will sit poisonously between you until you have to ’fess up. Sometime someone will say ‘I thought you had the air of an only child about you’, and you will have no idea what to do or how to continue the conversation.
What to say ‘I have a brother. He’s in a permanent vegetative state after being knocked down by a car.’
Pros It’s truthful.
Cons Too much. Too depressing. Doesn’t even stop the conversation as people will want to ask questions about PVS. They will also want to know the prognosis. You will give answers that range from optimistically deluded to numbly unsure to misanthropically resigned. No one will know how to cope with you.
Conclusion Avoid.
What to say ‘I have a brother but he’s poorly after an accident.’
Pros It’s truthful. Gives the questioner enough information to know the landscape without making everyone too sad, and allows them to say ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ and then move on to another subject.
Cons They might ask more but that’s up to them.
Conclusion Best course of action.
There was the considerable problem that no one knew what PVS meant, and it was difficult to explain. If I said coma, people would think of a not-unpleasant Sleeping Beauty state from which it’s possible to wake up fully at any time. ‘Vegetative’ was the key word, but a horrible word, with the hideous ‘cabbage’, a word I never used, lurking in the background.
If I was talking to a grown-up rather than a fellow student, once I’d negotiated all this territory and finally choked out some version of the truth to whoever was asking, they’d usually say, ‘Your poor parents.’ I used to ponder this. Now I realize that person will have been a parent. What they were actually thinking was, ‘Thank God that didn’t happen to my child.’
Most weekends I went back to the pub, often with Sophie. I ‘introduced’ her to Matty and she sat and held his hand. I thought how different things would be if she was meeting him as he used to be, imagined the jokes, the laughter, all of us going out for a drink together.
We would work behind the bar, and the customers loved Sophie and how posh she was. When a football match was on the telly and a customer asked Sophie what the half-time score was, she replied, glancing up at the screen, ‘Two Love,’ to everyone’s great amusement. They had never seen anyone quite like her, certainly not pulling them pints.
Another Christmas came and went, our fourth in the pub.
1993 got off to a slow, cold start.
One evening we were watching the news on telly in the bungalow. A young man called Tony Bland was in a coma after being crushed in the Hillsborough disaster four years before, and his doctors, with the support of his parents, were bringing a case that he should be allowed to die by withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration. The basic argument was that feeding someone through a tube should be considered medical treatment, just like
giving antibiotics, or resuscitating someone after a heart attack. This meant that in certain cases the courts could decide that this particular medical treatment should not be given.
We’d been aware of this case but had never thought of it as having anything to do with us. We’d assumed Tony Bland was in a full coma, without periods of sleep and wake. But this report had footage of him and he looked just like Matty; it could have been a film of Matty. He was about the same age, with dark hair, wrists bent over with spasticity, the same kind of tube hanging from his nostril. He was in a hospital room and there were photos of him around his bed, just like the photos of the pre-accident Matty we had put everywhere. We looked from the boy on the screen to the boy on our sofa and the resemblance was undeniable. The only difference was that Tony looked as if he had a bit more awareness than Matty – his eyes moved around a bit more.
In the past when Matty had had a big fit or when he had been readmitted to hospital with an infection, we had been asked by medical staff whether we wanted him treated. We had always said yes, without hesitation. Our customers were always bringing in clippings of stories in the press like ‘Man wakes up from coma after 10 years’, and we still believed it could happen for us. Anyway we loved Matty, regardless of his progress. We didn’t want him to die.
And so we became experts at shutting out what we didn’t want to hear, ignoring any evidence that indicated there was no hope.
A doctor’s report from the previous July had said:
There has not been any significant improvement in his unconscious vegetative state since the injury, except that his eyes are now open.
His condition is unlikely to alter one year after injury.
‘Unlikely,’ we said then. ‘Not impossible.’
We had always refused to accept there was no hope. We felt Matty was special; he was worth fighting for. If any man was going to wake up from a coma after years, it was this one.
The Last Act of Love Page 7
