“Oh these! Well, that’s just in case I get a bit peckish, dear girl.”
Harry Potter blasted me into twenty-first-century celebdom. Now I’m often asked to give talks at primary schools about fame (as opposed to being short). The great thing about this is that the kids learn there are lots of little people out there and, apart from our size, we’re just like everybody else. I also hope I might inspire a physically disadvantaged child by showing them that if they believe in themselves they can achieve anything.
When I’m in the supermarket, kids sometimes can’t help but point and blurt out, “What’s that, Mummy?” Mum usually blushes and tries to look busy. If the child persists, they’re dragged away and told off, even when I try to intervene. Then they look at me like it’s my fault – they’re turned against little people for life.
I’m passionate about changing these attitudes, and one day I was suddenly presented with an unprecedented opportunity to do so – from a wholly unexpected quarter.
Before that, however, Sam had some rather amazing news.
“You need to sit down, Warwick,” she said as I walked in through the front door.
a I had my own agent, independent of Willow Management, and would only audition for roles that he sent me – that way I couldn’t be accused of nabbing all the plum roles that came into our office.
Chapter Nineteen
Luck of the Irish
Sam, Annabelle, and poorly Harrison.
Harrison being tube-fed by Sam.
Harrison had an extremely tough start to life.
Harrison in his “bubble,” watching me watching him.
The doctor gave me the look I didn’t want to see. The “I’ve-got-some-bad-news-for-you” look.
Nurses, doctors, patients, and orderlies hurried past us in a blur of white coats, scrubs, clipboards, suits, and trolleys.
“Warwick,” she said quietly, “we’re doing everything possible but your son is ill.” She paused and looked down for a moment before meeting my eyes once more. “He is very poorly.”
My heart shattered into a million tiny pieces. I knew only too well what those two dreaded words meant. I couldn’t believe it. For a dizzying few seconds, I was at a loss, speechless; I’d been so certain Harrison would make it.
I’d been reluctant to try for another baby after all we’d been through, but Sam was quite adamant. She wanted Annabelle to have a baby brother or sister. “Just get me pregnant, Warwick, and I’ll do the rest,” she said.
“Oh well, that’s romantic,” I replied, but I had to admit I liked the idea and I inevitably succumbed to Sam’s advances.
The next month she was pregnant.
“Goodness, you just have to look at your wife to get her pregnant, don’t you, Mr. Davis?” Professor Rodeck said with a grin.
While I turned bright red Professor Rodeck said he would repeat the same amniotic tests that he’d performed for Annabelle. We were pretty worried but the softly spoken Prof was as calm, confident, and reassuring as ever. “We’ve made even more advances since Annabelle was born. Try not to worry too much.”
Once again we had to wait for two torturous weeks until he called. “Good news, the achondroplasia gene isn’t present!”
Which meant our baby didn’t have the lethal double-dominant combination of both of our genes.
Sam sagged with relief. “Excellent.”
“Would you like to know if it’s a boy or a girl? I’m guessing if it were a boy then it would make everything just perfect.”
“I don’t want to know!” Sam said, but I think the Prof had blown the surprise in his excitement.
Sam grew steadily and had another wonderful pregnancy, rapidly reaching gigantic proportions, until eventually all she could do was eat and sleep. As her due date approached, she was again scheduled for a Caesarean section, this time performed by Ms. Steele, who – like Mr. Hackman – wouldn’t let me in her operating room.
Sam was knocked out and, after a lightning-fast operation, Harrison, who was also little, was whisked away – almost the very moment Ms. Steele lifted him out and cut him free.
I watched, still not having seen my son, as Dr. Yong and the obstetric team scrambled past me with Harrison, headed down the corridor in the direction of the intensive care unit. He wasn’t breathing, there was a problem with his lungs. I chased after them with a Polaroid camera, squeezed my way into a gap around the incubator, and leaned over the side to take a quick snap.
I stopped. Harrison was so tiny, so helpless.
But then so was I. There was nothing I could do; my son’s future was out of my hands. I came to my senses, took the picture, tried to learn what I could from the doctors and, flapping the photo dry, I rushed back to Sam. I explained that Harrison was alive but very sick.
Sam was in terrible pain and clicked the morphine doser when I showed her the picture.
“He’s just like Lloyd,” she said. “I messed up. It’s my fault.”
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “Look, I’ll try and find out more, okay?”
Sam sighed, nodded, and passed out.
And then, five minutes later, there I was, receiving the compassionate doctor’s “we’re-doing-all-we-can” speech – the speech with the two words no parent should ever have to hear.
Very poorly.
I forced myself to focus. Harrison was struggling because his lungs were simply too tiny. That meant his blood wasn’t being oxygenated and if his oxygen levels fell too low he’d suffer brain damage or die.
My mum, meanwhile, was waiting anxiously outside with six-year-old Annabelle, who was extremely excited about having a little brother and desperately eager to see him.
Unfortunately for Annabelle, with spectacularly bad timing, she’d just developed chickenpox, so she wasn’t allowed anywhere near the hospital. Luckily, the unit was on the ground floor so, with her nana holding her up to the window and me pointing wildly toward Harrison’s incubator, she was able to see her baby brother for the first time.
The joy, love, and amazement on her face was overwhelming – and heartbreaking, as I didn’t know whether her little brother was here to stay.
Sam, meanwhile, despite being drugged to the eyeballs and almost sawn in half by Ms. Steele, was back on her feet only twelve hours after giving birth. Together, we could only watch as Harrison fought through the night, and listen as the doctors explained how they were battling to keep him breathing. He remained dangerously ill. The doctors thought he was dying. Each time we came back into the unit all they could say was, “He’s still here.”
Five days later, he was still hanging in there and they decided to transfer him to another specialist unit, in Nottingham. He was unable to drink and so was fed milk by a syringe via a tube that went straight into his stomach.
Gradually, the days went by. Five days became a week, then ten days, then two weeks. As time went on, he was moved from Nottingham to Leicester and then back to Peterborough for different treatments. Harrison showed very slight signs of improvement but progress was agonizingly slow; we were warned that it could all change at any moment. The only way for Sam and me to cope at this time was to try and remain positive. Eventually, although he remained pretty poorly and needed to stay in the hospital, it seemed as though he’d almost managed to fight his way into the world.
Although our lives were pretty much on hold at this time, one or two things inevitably cropped up to demand our time and attention. Once Sam was discharged, they wouldn’t let us stay overnight in the hospital, so we returned home to bare cupboards – time for a trip to the supermarket.
We do a lot of online shopping these days but I still visit the supermarket and it’s nearly always an adventure for me. Successful shopping requires a large degree of resourcefulness and innovation; solutions always need to be found, often at short notice.
Correct trolley selection is vital. I can’t use one of the large deep trolleys because I can’t get my shopping out once I’ve put it in and I don’t like
having a professional bag-packer rooting around in my stuff. I think you’re able to judge a person by their shopping and I’m always fascinated by what people have in their trolleys. It sometimes raises intriguing questions. Why does that woman need ten gallons of milk? Why does that man have twenty bottles of bleach, half a dozen bottles of cleaning fluid, ten rolls of plastic wrap, foil, and a large box of Cook’s matches?
It feels like a minor violation to have someone handling my meat and veg, so to avoid this I always make sure I select one of the shallow ones.
One very obvious and unavoidable problem is that some items are beyond my reach. When I was younger, I used to scale the shelves like a ladder but every now and again I’d be halfway up the shelf, one hand on the Corn Flakes, when a voice would come from behind me: “Can I help you, sir?” I was threatened with banishment on grounds of health and safety so many times that I was eventually forced to abandon that method.
These days I head straight for the household goods aisle and select a mop or broom handle. As long as what I need isn’t breakable, I simply poke it off the shelf. It’s taken me years of practice but I can now pretty much get anything I want to land the right way up and in the right position in my trolley.
For breakables, I rely upon the direct method, which is to ask people. This is more problematic than it sounds. Whenever I approach someone in this situation, I’m not sure what it is, whether they’re flattered, flustered, or intrigued, but they very often pass me everything but the item I want, so I end up having to instruct them: It’s a bit like playing one of those “teddy-picker” machines you find in an amusement arcade. “No, to your right, now left, one shelf up, no, down again . . . no, the red one, yes, that’s it! No, now you’ve gone past it, go back to where you were before.”
It’s not just me; Sam has experienced exactly the same thing. Whenever she asks for the jar with the red lid she always ends up with the jar with the green lid and by the time you’ve got it in your hands it’s too late to say, “Er, actually I wanted the one with the red lid.” Then they look at you as if you’re the idiot.
As I whizzed around the store, keen to get back to Sam, I spotted a young mother with a boy of about seven, a good few inches taller than me, at the other end of the aisle. We made eye contact. “Here we go,” I thought.
He immediately turned to his mum, pointed, and loudly blurted out, “What’s that, Mummy?”
Mummy looked up and turned red. She then started studying a tin of beans a bit too closely, ignoring her offspring. Her son grabbed hold of her leg and repeated the question, this time more loudly.
Now, I don’t mind curious kids at all. It’s quite logical for them to react this way and sometimes I’ll end up having a really great chat with both child and parent. What annoys the hell out of me is when the parent’s reaction is either to stare like their child and not say anything, or to move away as quickly and as silently as possible.
And that’s what happened here – as the child persisted the mother practically dragged the poor boy away and I heard her telling her now tearful son off. “That’s rude!” I heard her hiss, “you shouldn’t point.”
A bit later, when we passed each other in the biscuit aisle, the boy looked at me like the telling-off was my fault. Even if I try to smooth things over, it’s already too late; they’ve been turned against little people for life.
“What a day,” I muttered to myself as I returned to the hospital, parked, and headed for the entrance.
More was yet to come.
I saw them, well, heard them first, a large Irish family, sharing a smoke and a chat right by the front doors. Their conversation tailed off as I walked past. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that they were staring at me, eyes wide, whispering urgently to one another.
Oh God, not again, I thought.
Thanks to some crazy superstition, some Irish people (a distinct minority but still more than enough for me) have a tendency to want to touch me (well, a “leprechaun,” anyway) for good luck.
I’ve had similar problems in Japan, and with Japanese tourists in London, who seem to consider little people lucky; they’re especially keen on being photographed with us. Going out for a walk on my own in Tokyo is simply impossible.
I picked up speed and jogged for the safety of the hospital lift. Once I found Sam I leaned over and whispered, “Watch out, there’s some, er, Irish people downstairs.”
Sam nodded. “Yes,” she whispered back. “I know, they’ve already been after Annabelle.”
The shorter the luckier, it would seem.
Later that day, I had to pop out again. The Irish people were still there. Choosing my moment carefully, I jogged alongside a deliveryman wheeling a trolley full of boxes and escaped. When I finally got outside there was a parking ticket, bang in the middle of my windscreen, impossible to reach – the ultimate insult.
Upon my return, I snuck past the Irish family once more and slipped with relief through the closing doors of the lift. A woman was already inside. “Oh, hello there!” she exclaimed in an Irish accent.
Trapped in the lift, it was impossible for me to stop her from getting more than her fair share of luck that morning.
Harrison battled his way into the world but remained in the hospital for three months before I asked the doctors if we could take him home. They weren’t sure at first, but I argued that I knew his condition as well as they did. Harrison still required a fair amount of care, but it wasn’t anything Sam and I couldn’t provide.
I knew that with the right equipment, Sam and I would be able to watch Harrison twenty-four hours a day at home. Sam and I were delighted when the doctors agreed.
We returned home with our tiny baby son and about five tons of equipment, including a dozen oxygen tanks, an oxygen maker, and a SAT monitor. Suddenly, our home looked like a mini-hospital. It was only after I got all the gear set up and switched on that we discovered the thing was as noisy as a milk-bottle factory and made the whole house rattle. It was as if a never-ending goods train was rumbling past. Sam and I had to yell at each other to make ourselves heard whenever it was on. People could hear us from the street and thought we were having an almighty row, when all we were doing was discussing what to have for dinner.
Once we were free of the doctors and nurses, the responsibility really hit home. It was just us and Harrison, now. We couldn’t just turn around and ask for help, we were on our own.
Having said that, we were delighted to have our son home and once again our house was full of laughter.
One day, not long after we’d brought Harrison home, the doorbell rang.
“Avon call– . . . oh!”
“Yes”? I said. A middle-aged woman stood before me, cradling a basket of perfumes and other toiletries in her arms.
“Um. Yes.”
I sighed. This always happened. Whenever a door-to-door salesperson called they were usually so surprised by our appearance that they instantly forgot what it was they were supposed to be selling.
“You rang my doorbell, did you not?”
“Um. Yeeeas,” the woman said uncertainly in a strong Welsh accent.
“Well?”
“Oh right, yes, sorry. I’m in the area recruiting Avon ladies, I wonder if this would be something that your wife would enjoy doing?” Thank goodness it was me who answered the door. If it had been Sam, we would have ended up with a house full of Avon supplies.
“No thanks, she wouldn’t be able to reach the doorbells.” I shut the door, leaving her dumbfounded.
Sam had been hiding in the hallway. She looked at me in disbelief and mortification. “What on earth did you say that for?”
“Well, it’s true though, isn’t it?” She couldn’t argue with that and we both collapsed into fits of giggles.
When I look back at photos of Harrison now, I’m amazed we were allowed to take him home when we did. I can truly understand our doctor’s reluctance. It’s given me a real jolt to see just how sick our son looked. I genuinely didn
’t realize the amount of responsibility Sam and I were taking on.
Poor Annabelle. She’d been so excited to have her baby brother home at last and now suddenly found herself a bit left out, as everything revolved around us constantly checking Harrison’s blood saturation levels. The ideal is around 98 percent, but Harrison’s sometimes fell to the low seventies.
Feeding was a job and a half; I used a tiny syringe to very slowly push formula milk down a tube that went into his stomach. Harrison hated it; he got into the almost reflexive habit of tearing the tube out, which meant another trip to the hospital to have it reinserted.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 22
