PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up

We have a picture in our family album of me sitting in my first little red wheelchair wearing a Brownie uniform, with little knobbly knees and wearing some dodgy trainers. The picture was taken not long after I started using a wheelchair and we were on a Brownie ‘pack holiday’ in Swansea.

The strange thing about this picture is that I am trying to skip. It looks funny, as all the other Brownies are behind me (all non-disabled), skipping away with different levels of ability.

The reason that this picture is really important to me is that it shows that no one ever told me that I shouldn’t skip, and no one ever told me that I shouldn’t try. It confirms that, as I was growing up, my parents never told me there were things I couldn’t do solely because I was a wheelchair user. There were plenty of times that I was told off for doing something (possibly naughty), but I was never told off simply for trying.

If my parents had been different, if they had had low expectations for me, I could have grown up thinking very differently. But for me it was about having the chance to try, and seeing what I might achieve. If someone had told me that I couldn’t skip I might have found this out a little sooner than I did, but then I might have spent the next five years thinking ‘what if’. My parents were both only children, and had quite restricted upbringings, and I think this is part of the reason why they always encouraged us to go out and try things.

The reason that I became a wheelchair user has never been particularly important to me. I was born with a condition called Spina Bifida, and to begin with my disablement wasn’t obvious. I had a tiny lump on my back. After spending a short time in an incubator I was sent home and everything seemed OK. My elder sister Sian, who is eighteen months older than me, hadn’t had an easy time of it. She was born with a heart condition that was fixed with some fairly major surgery (these days it is through a key-hole procedure near the groin). It was then found that she had been born with dislocated hips, which resulted in eighteen months in a frog plaster, and after only a couple of days out of that, she fell and broke her leg. My parents certainly had their hands full for a couple of years!

I could walk till about the age of five or six (I don’t remember exactly). But as I grew, my legs couldn’t support the increase in my body weight, because of my condition, and I slowly became paralysed. So I didn’t, unlike others, have to suffer some dramatic accident, or spend months on end in a spinal unit. For me, becoming a wheelchair user wasn’t an awful experience. Although I had stopped walking I didn’t feel that something had been taken away. Having said this, the last few months when I was walking were pretty tough – this was the only time in my life that I have felt really disabled. I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do – like run away from my mum!

Having a wheelchair gave me a renewed sense of freedom. Because many people think that the life of a wheelchair user is pretty miserable, they make judgements about it. But the wheelchair allowed me once again to do the things that I wanted to do, such as trying to run away from my mother, chasing after my older sister, and being with my friends.

I was born on 26th July 1969, and had the good fortune to be born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. My sister Sian and I were brought up in the house my dad grew up in. Mum is also a Cardiff girl and Cardiff, a great city, is very much my home town. I’m very proud of being Welsh and that I’ve been voted Welsh Sports Personality of the Year on three occasions.

Dad is an architect; he’s a very organized person, who likes to know what he is doing and when. I hope some of this has rubbed off on me, but in temperament I’m more like Mum – if we decide that we want to do something, then we want to do it right now! I have a tendency to think quickly about what I want to do, sometimes making rash decisions as a result.

Sian was a great sister to grow up with; she wasn’t that interested in taking part in sport when she was young, although she watched a lot, and has always been incredibly supportive, often travelling with me to events and helping to pay for stuff (as did my parents).

She’s not as competitive as me, but then very few people are! I always knew that I wanted to do sport, and that I had to compete as hard as I could.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really get to know my grandparents, also all from Cardiff, who died before I was old enough to remember them well. My dad’s father was a very good motorbike rider, who competed in the TT races. He was unable to turn professional, though, and had to get a real job.

My primary school was really inclusive in terms of letting me take part in PE lessons. It was different in secondary school because the rules were different. There were a number of disabled children in the school and it was felt that we should do our PE at the special school next door. It wasn’t that I didn’t really want to go to the special school, but I didn’t know anyone there. I had some good PE teachers who let me join in with my friends as much as possible.

To be honest, I didn’t really know what Spina Bifida was until I was about ten years old. I didn’t actively try to find out because it didn’t matter to me what had stopped me walking. I just knew that I couldn’t walk, and that there was nothing I could do to change that, so I just had to get on with it. This wasn’t a conscious decision. There were simply lots of things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to spend my time doing them, not sitting around thinking about what I couldn’t do.

Many people who become wheelchair users don’t feel this way, and I know that some of them find my attitude challenging. For many young people, a tragic accident – which is sometimes their fault, sometimes someone else’s – means that they can no longer do things the way that they used to. For them, it means learning everything again from scratch, from dressing themselves to driving. But my rehab all took place while I was slowly losing the use of my legs, so it never really felt like ‘rehab’. It felt normal.

Spina Bifida isn’t anyone’s fault, although over the years I have learnt that it can have many causes – previous family illnesses, poor diet, living near coal mines, for instance. These days it is accepted that folic acid does make a difference (and lack of it could have caused my condition), so every pregnant women or a woman thinking of having a baby is advised to take it. But the cause never really bothered me. It could have been the man on the moon who caused my impairment, and this would certainly have made a more exciting story!

Some people find it hard to believe that I have honestly never spent any time thinking about what I didn’t have. But the last couple of years when I was trying to walk were hard, and I don’t really remember a time when walking was easy. So I didn’t have a great deal to compare my situation with. All I knew at the time was that occasionally I had to go for hospital checkups, where I was prodded and poked around, and then I came home.

My parents had a lot more to cope with than I did, because they had more idea what was going on. They had to make decisions about my mobility, what treatment I would or wouldn’t have, and they had more knowledge than I did about what my long-term expectations might be. In fact, they kept me blissfully unaware of these expectations until I was in my thirties.

But if I was unconcerned about my impairment, how did – or do – other people deal with it?

My mother always said that she had too many things to worry about and that she didn’t have time to feel sorry for anyone, let alone herself – life was just too busy.

Some people, however, seem to think that wheelchair users are somehow different from ordinary people, and that we don’t deserve privacy in the same way. These people think they have an automatic right to ask wheelchair users any question they like. If I had a pound for every person who has stopped me in the street and said ‘So, what’s wrong with you, then?’ I would be a rich woman! Another favourite is, ‘So, are you confined to your wheelchair, then’, to which I have replied, ‘Yes, I usually sleep in it!’ My humour is not always appreciated. But what most people want to know is how I came to be a wheelchair user. Most tend to assume that something a lot more dramatic than a congenital birth defect must have caused it. It almost feels as if they would like the cause to be something more romantic.

Some of these people are just plain nosey, but there are others who seem to think that a disabled person doesn’t have any feelings, and is obliged to answer questions from complete strangers. These encounters have never made me feel particularly uncomfortable, but I haven’t always answered the questions.

If I had had a different upbringing – if I had not had positive people around me, not fought to go into mainstream school – I don’t think I would have been able to deal with my situation so well.

If people have low expectations for disabled people – in fact, if they have low expectations for any young people – this has an effect on what the young people are able to do later on in life. Some youngsters manage to rise above it, but too many young people with disabilities grow up believing that they cannot achieve, because the people around them don’t believe it.

I remember at school one careers teacher told me that I should go to secretarial college and learn to type, because people in wheelchairs became receptionists! I didn’t listen to that – when I told him that I wanted to go to university he told me that I was probably wasting my time as it wouldn’t help me get a job!

If there was one thing that I could change, then it would be for young disabled people to naturally assume that they have a right to do everything their non-disabled counterparts are doing. Not, as is so often the case now, to assume that there is a whole pile of things that they will never do.

In the UK we like to attach labels to people, and more often than not we define and judge people by the job that they do, or the level they reach within that job. Because of this, disabled people lose out. Many people look at impairment and the first thing they think of is what cannot be achieved. If we consider that a person with a disability has no status, because they are limited in what they can do, this can set the tone for the relationship.

As an athlete I have spent the best part of the last twenty years trying to be the best that I can. Being an athlete has been what I have wanted to do for almost as long as I can remember, but there are many other labels that people could attach to me. I could be a mother, an athlete, a woman, a graduate – many things. But there was one thing that I was sure about when I was growing up – I didn’t want to be labelled as disabled.