Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  They lose themselves in the simple effort of the task at hand. Gardening is beneficial in many ways – it helps with balance, fine motor skills and confidence – but it also gives these men something more holistic: a connection to nature, the feeling of soil beneath their fingernails, the symphonies of birds overhead, the wind and rain and sun on their backs.

  A tranquility. A healing. Nothing but them and the gardens. No IEDs, no insurgents, no threat, no danger … Just them and the gardens.

  Many patients do several stints in Headley Court. On any admission subsequent to their first, they come to the gardens to see how the work they did last time is looking now. Some of them almost track or judge their own recovery depending on how the garden is.

  ‘Dig for Victory’, the World War Two slogan went. These men dig for victory too. Their triumphs are smaller and often unseen, but no less important for that.

  Even on a cold March day, I feel as though I could stay forever in this bucolic, thoroughly English Eden. But of course I can’t. More to the point, nor can they.

  This is one of the paradoxes of Headley Court, and indeed of any rehabilitation centre worth the name: the better you make it, the more fulfilling and uplifting the experience, the less your patients want to leave. But leave they must.

  They call it the ‘Headley bubble’, and it’s amazing, but it’s not real life. ‘We don’t do happy ever after,’ says Lt Col Rhodri Phillip, Clinical Lead for Complex Trauma Rehabilitation. ‘We do the maximum functional capacity that your injuries will allow.’ All Headley’s myriad programmes are designed not as ends in themselves but with real-world applications in mind.

  Why do you need to be able to squat down and stand up again? So you can pick your child up off the floor.

  Why do you need to be able to swim without legs? So you can go to the beach when you’re on holiday.

  That kind of thing. As normal a life as possible. So even while they’re being treated at Headley, patients are encouraged to interact with the real world as much as possible. Staff will take a bunch of amputees on their artificial legs out on excursions. Guildford High Street’s a favourite, as it has steep cobbled sections and old worn steps without handrails. Or Brighton seafront, all packed with crowds. Maybe Chelsea Flower Show for the horticulturalists, because most people there are too busy gazing at the gardens to look where they’re going, which in turn forces the amputees to be alert and take evasive action (or, as happened to one of them, to react with a smile when an old lady offered him her walking stick).

  Escalators. Buses (especially going up to the top deck and down again). Rollercoasters and theme parks. Go into a shoe shop and ask for a pair of shoes, not least to see how you react to those reacting to you. If you can do all this then you should do all this, goes the thinking, and if you can’t do all this then you should learn to.

  Nor does Headley stop at these everyday requirements. Their aim is to allow people to continue in the services, but they also know that sometimes – as in Simi’s case, for example – this just isn’t possible. And preparing people for life outside the services is very different even from preparing them to carry on within the services in a different, less physically active role than before.

  One of the central tenets of any armed force is that its members are special – that, simply through earning the right to wear the uniform, they’re set apart from the civilian herd. When you wear that uniform you have to believe you’re invincible, otherwise there’s no point in you being there.

  But when you’re given a medical discharge, by definition you’re no longer invincible. And those civilians you were told you were more special than? Well, you’re now one of them. And those civilians have spent years knowing how Civvy Street works while you’ve been told where to be and what to do and when to eat and shit and shower and shave every minute of every day of your life in uniform, so you’d better start catching up fast.

  That’s why Headley organise job placements and work trials, house and vehicle adaptations. They offer life skills: financial advice, legal advice, insurance claims advice, advice on how to deal with dysfunctional families. ‘The guys need this kind of stuff,’ says Lt Col Phillip. ‘A lot of people join the infantry because they have to, they’re not giving up a City job to get there. And if you give them the tools then they’ll respond. Life is 10 per cent what happens to you and 90 per cent how you respond to it. One of the guys who was here is now working as a gamekeeper, something he’d never have done otherwise. He’s loving it. That’s what I want. I’d rather have 20 gamekeepers than one gold medal at the Paralympics.’

  A former patient wrote: ‘Headley Court will always remain lodged in my heart as a force for good: a bottomless well of determination, fortitude and courage that I can dip into when I feel the need. It put me back together physically, healed me mentally, and gave me a cast-iron belief in my own abilities.’

  Headley Court is closing down in 2018: the facility is moving to a new purpose-built centre at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire. The amazing work done here will go on: it will just be in a different place, and it will continue to improve and change. So many extraordinary people have passed through these doors: so many triumphs, so many disasters, so many stories imprinted on the ground through those artificial legs and carried on the wind through the gardens.

  On the way out, I see a photographic exhibition in the main hall. One of the pictures is a black-and-white shot of Group Captain Teresa Griffiths, Headley Court’s commanding officer. Beneath the picture, she has written her own view of the place:

  Headley Court is a place where:

  Science meets magic.

  Dreams can be transformed into reality.

  Patients are central to everything we do.

  Honesty and kindness matters.

  Laughter is a medicine.

  Hope and courage foster new beginnings.

  Expectations are changed.

  Small steps can change lives.

  The definition of normal is challenged and redefined without boundaries.

  Everyone cares.

  Not every soldier is eligible to go to Headley. It’s only for members of the British armed forces, for a start, although they do very occasionally take members of other nations’ forces by special arrangement. But its spirit and its aims are shared by all those who strive to be part of the Invictus Games, no matter where they come from.

  Josh Boggi did go to Headley after returning from Afghanistan. He learned to walk the same way as everyone else did there: held upright in sweat-soaked harnesses, inching along the parallel bars, that glorious first moment when he took his first steps unaided.

  Now he was normal, more or less. He could stand upright to the same height he was before, though everyone tried to get an extra couple of inches when the Blatchford guys were measuring them for prosthetic legs, everyone gave it the ‘Yeah, I was six foot three before’, and the Blatchford guys just laughed because they’d heard it all before.

  Being at Headley had its perks. For four years Josh been on the waiting list to go and see Top Gear being filmed. Now the producers were offering tickets to the guys at Headley. A split second standing on an IED had got him in quicker than four years of being able-bodied. Ah well, that’s how it went. That was life. And Josh wanted more of it – ‘I wanted to kick the arse out of life.’

  In 2013 he saw someone riding a handbike – a recumbent tricycle low to the ground with two wheels at the back, a steerable wheel at the front and hand cranks providing the power through a standard derailleur gearing. He had a go himself. Six weeks later, he cycled from London to Paris as part of the Help for Heroes Big Battlefield Bike Ride. He was the first ever triple amputee to do it, which made him proud, but it was the collective effort which really moved him – ‘Being part of a team was the best part. It replaces some of what you lose when you leave the Army, it was like coming off tour again.’

  He thought the bike ride would be a one-off. For a while he just enjoyed himself – ‘Too ma
ny beers, too much Domino’s.’ But he knew he needed something else to feed the craving.

  It was March 2014. Prince Harry was on TV announcing that the first Invictus Games would be held in September, six months away. Josh looked at himself in the mirror.

  ‘Right, you fat bastard,’ he told his reflection. ‘Time to get in shape.’

  Where Josh Boggi had been given no option with his amputations, both Sarah Rudder and Mike Goody had actively chosen to have the chop. All surgery is inherently risky, no matter how remote that risk, and wilfully electing to have one of your limbs removed is something beyond the imagination of most people (there is a rare psychiatric disorder which causes otherwise healthy people to want to have limbs amputated, but that’s an entirely different issue).

  But when you’re in such unrelenting agony, as both Sarah and Mike were, and when you so desperately want to be active again, the choice isn’t really a choice.

  For both of them, it was the best thing imaginable. ‘If I’d known how much freedom it would give me,’ Sarah said, ‘I’d have done it sooner. I felt like I could challenge myself again.’

  The surgeon pulled her muscles and tendons down and wrapped them around the back of her calf to provide more cushioning around the base of the stump. To start with, when she had some problems with the stump being sore and her prosthetic not fitting properly, ‘there was a time where you feel like you’re not going to be whole again because you’re missing a piece,’ but once she sorted out her prosthetic issues she quickly taught herself how to adapt.

  Nor was she confined to doing things only when she was wearing it. She took up surfing at San Onofre State Beach, for example, with the left leg of her wetsuit neatly tied off beneath her knee. Paddle out, catch a wave, get up on her knees and ride the wave for a few seconds before falling over in gales of laughter – ‘It was like flying.’

  For Mike, the freedom of not having to rely on other people was the biggest immediate change – ‘My confidence shot back up, and suddenly I was full of plans – go back to university, be a paramedic, those kind of things.’ Of course there were sceptics who saw only his artificial leg and not the man above it, but he didn’t care: ‘Being told I can’t do something just motivates me. Because of what happened I no longer think, “I’ll do that tomorrow,” as there might not be a tomorrow. I’ve got to do what I want to do now.’

  There were people who thought he wouldn’t be able to run a 10K race. He ran one. There were those who told him he wouldn’t be able to work for the Ambulance Service. He proved them wrong too, getting a job with the South East Coast Ambulance Service. ‘Once I was carrying an old lady down the stairs to the ambulance, and she suddenly remembered I only had one leg and started freaking out. But I just laughed and said, “I’ve carried plenty of heavier people than you, love.”’

  He narrowly missed out on selection for the Walking with the Wounded race to the South Pole in 2013, where three teams of wounded servicemen and women (one team from the UK, one from the US and the third from Australia and Canada combined) raced on foot across 335 Antarctic kilometres in temperatures of −35°C.

  All these things that Sarah and Mike couldn’t do with two legs, they suddenly found they could do with one. So of course they decided to mark their new-found freedom in their own way.

  Sarah decorated her sprinting prosthetic with a picture of Wonder Woman.

  Mike got a tattoo on the calf of his other leg. It said simply: ‘I miss my friend.’

  As Sarah and Mike’s lives became more active, so they found it easier to keep their post-traumatic stress symptoms manageable, if not completely at bay. Stephan Moreau and Darlene Brown have found the same thing.

  The Chemox incident which triggered Stephan’s symptoms was classified as an operational stress injury. For a while, he thought that he didn’t really deserve comparison with someone who had a ‘proper’ injury: someone who’d stood on an IED in Afghanistan, for example: ‘I was telling myself that my injury was not as severe as theirs, and I was a bit ashamed to share it. But once I did start to share, I realised trauma is trauma. People react differently and we all get affected differently. I had to stop comparing.’

  As well as regular counselling sessions, he began training – ‘When I went out for a nice run, or bike ride or swim, I felt so much better. Not just physically but mentally. It took the pressure off. It decompressed me, made me physically exhausted. I was too tired to be stressed, it helped a lot.’

  He set his sights on doing triathlons: not just any old triathlon, either, but an Ironman. A three-course meal of pure pain: a 2.4-mile swim to start with, a main course of 112 miles on the bike and then a marathon for dessert. That stubbornness, that self-reliance, saw him through it.

  He also found that, like the Navy, triathlon has its own community. The triathlon forums he’d surfed while in the grip of drinking too much he now returned to, clear-eyed and ready to share what he’d gone through – ‘I was open about my addictions. I was contacted by a few people who were struggling and I was able to share my experience with recovery and helped them out. There are so many people, good people, out there. It’s amazing.’

  As for Darlene, that 15-mile drive from her home to the Mates4Mates headquarters was the hardest thing she’d ever done. It was also the best thing she’d ever done. ‘That first drive is massive,’ said Janice Johnston, who was assigned to be Darlene’s psychologist. ‘It’s taking a step toward recovery, it’s choosing not to stay at home.’

  Darlene took a 12-week course under the tutelage of Dr Andrew Khoo, one of Australia’s leading PTSD specialists. He was adamant right from the start that her condition was treatable: ‘If you define cure as removing symptoms and getting people back to functioning fully then, yes, there is a cure.’

  But as with Stephan Moreau, it was physical activity which did as much for Darlene’s recovery as anything else. Mates4Mates were sending some guys to Europe for the Big Battlefield Bike Ride – the same event in which Josh Boggi had become the first ever triple-amputee participant – and they asked Darlene whether she wanted to come too. She hadn’t been on a bike in God knows how long. And only a short time before, even 15 miles across Brisbane, had seemed like a trip across galaxies, so the idea of a 24-hour flight to the other side of the world was clearly ludicrous.

  She said yes, she’d love to go.

  It was hard, the ride. Physically hard, just to do the distance. Socially hard, to be in such a big group when she’d been used to being on her own for so long. And mentally hard too, navigating traffic coming at her from the wrong direction and driven by lunatic Frenchmen rather than the more sedate Australian drivers back home.

  But she kept at it. And somewhere on those backroads of northern France, wheat fields one side and old Gaston put-put-putting in his ancient 2CV the other, she felt her mind being cleansed. The effort, the regularity, the wind, the pace, the peace … it was all balm to her troubled soul.

  She didn’t have to be the best at anything: she was giving it a go, and that in itself made her happy. Soon she found herself laughing and joking with people on the bike and again in the evenings at the hotels. One night, she saw someone she hadn’t seen for 15 years.

  Herself.

  The old Darlene was back.

  Exercise was proving Bart Couprie’s salvation too. In normal circumstances he hated it, but now it gave him a sense of purpose. It went some way towards taking off the weight he’d put on and restoring the muscle mass he’d lost, and most of all it seemed to be more or less keeping the depression at bay.

  With exercise came the urge to proselytise. He thought of the Navy’s core values: courage, comradeship and commitment. He could keep quiet about what he was suffering – it was pretty embarrassing, after all – or he could bite the bullet and try to get the word out. It would take courage, sure. But it would show comradeship to others who might be in the same position, and it would show commitment to actually trying to make things better for people.

  He
thought of a story he’d heard about a Maori man – ‘He’d gone to the doctor, complaining about a problem in the water works. When the doctor stuck his finger up the bloke’s bum, he was so shocked that he pulled up his pants, left the surgery and never went back. The prostate cancer killed him, but actually what he died of was embarrassment.’

  Bart began to spread the word. He didn’t worry if it made him look personally foolish, as long as it did some good for other people. He called his twin brother, Boudewijn, and told him to get himself checked out. Boudewijn had no symptoms, but it turned out he had early-stage prostate cancer too: so early, in fact, that it was easily cured with surgical removal.

  One good deed ticked off, many more to go.

  Bart climbed Auckland’s Sky Tower in full firefighting gear for charity and told his story to TV shows and magazines. He dealt with people’s discomfort head-on: ‘I can guarantee you there are quite a few men out there who can’t get over the fact that I’ve had fingers and implements shoved up my bum and are wondering how I can talk about it so openly. Well, it’s blindingly simple: undiagnosed prostate cancer is a lot worse for you than the temporary insertion of fingers and implements. People have got to, excuse the pun, take their head out of their arse about this.’

  The more he talked about it, the more he felt comfortable talking about it. The aggressive treatment of his own cancer was paying dividends too. His PSA began to fall and his odds of full remission began to rise: ‘Looks like touch wood, I’ll come back to normal, or as normal as I’ve ever been. You see, a funny thing happened on my way to misery: I never got there. I am instead, honestly, openly and exceedingly happy.’

  Mary Wilson was happy too. On an August day in 2014, she reached the summit of An Gearanach. It was both just another one of the 282 Munros and yet a special one too: for it was the 282nd one she’d climbed.

  She’d done it.