by Melanie Reid
To see sexual images for me, post-paralysis, was to see stories of a different human tribe: the ones who were still sexually viable, who wielded sexual power. I had no interest or curiosity in them. They were different to me. I felt like an anthropologist. By losing physical sensation, cut off from critical engagement, I had also disengaged mentally. Loss of sexuality hollowed me out as a woman, the memories too sad to stir. No more Roy Orbison or Bruce Springsteen singing about driving all night to be with a lover. I switched off films when they got sexy, if I was watching on my own; if in company, I drifted casually off to another room. They just made me feel empty. I had stopped reading fiction altogether, perhaps for the same reason. The other day I tried to remember what an orgasm felt like. I couldn’t. Imagine that. Maybe lots of women feel this when they grow old. No skin in the game – both disinterested and uninterested. Somehow I doubt it. I don’t think we ever lose our urge to be sexually attractive. However old you are, you can still feel young inside, still remember the tingle of being noticed. I’m certain that even at ninety, if someone flirts with you, the years melt away, the inner teenager stirs, the silly, potent daydream returns. No matter how wistful or how trapped by age you are, you’re still susceptible to that mutual spark. The number of marriages in care homes supports this theory. But not for me. For me the magic of desire and of being desired – the sheer bliss of being found attractive – has been switched off.
There you have it – the core of loss. The stone heart of longing, envy and emotional shut-down which is a woman’s self-defence against disability. Because you aren’t fanciable and you won’t be, can’t be and never will be. Because the great game of sex, in all its hurts and joys and sleaziness and beauty, is no longer one you can play. That baton, that glorious burden of sexual attraction, has been passed on. Those rules that govern human chemistry, the language of wanting and being wanted, however crudely or elegantly expressed – they don’t apply to you any more. The brutal truth about the mechanics of sex for paralysed and disabled people is that you’ve got to find someone who fancies you to do it with. Those people aren’t so easy to find, especially if you’re a woman looking for a man. Disabled men have a much better strike rate copping off with their carers, probably because women put compassion and romantic love before sex. My husband wasn’t like that. He loved me but he simply didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t fancy me any more. He was blunt about that.
Loss of sexual identity was akin to bereavement. With it, unwelcome, also came jealousy, the nasty green eyed-monster, the scythe of betrayal – and yet also the basic dilemma born of fair play. Should our partners be condemned to sexual loss, just because we are? Does sexual infidelity count under these circumstances? Or is there space, and is there forgiveness? As Jack Nicholson once said to Angelica Houston, excusing his unfaithfulness: ‘Toots, darling, it was a mercy fuck.’ Perhaps it’s something disabled people and their partners have to spend the rest of their lives working out.
Through disability, you learn other wisdom about being a woman. It’s estimated that one schoolgirl in ten has an eating disorder. In some parts of the country, three in ten little girls are obese. The vast majority of the young female population spends an unhealthy amount of time in front of the mirror criticising themselves. An exceptionally beautiful professional woman I know, now nearing forty, admitted to me once that every single day she fretted about how unhappy she was with her body. Yet she had looks to die for. What a tragedy this is. Millions of lovely kids storing up a lifetime of unhappiness with their own bodies, bodies which are fit, mobile, creative, expressive. Bodies which are beautiful because they work. You struggle to square what you can see – a wrecked body, forcibly removed from the demands of being physically attractive – with the plight of healthy yet desperately dissatisfied young women.
So this is what you don’t learn until it is too late. One is that a woman’s relationship with her own body image tends to take the form of a totally unnecessary, destructive war. I used to be one of those teenagers too, negative about my appearance, yearning to be this, that and the other – slimmer thighs, curvier waist. We all know the drill, the drip, drip, drip corroding our self-esteem. Even before the advent of the internet, and Instagram, and the selfie, I wasted a spectacular amount of time and energy in thirty years of low-key yo-yo dieting, self-criticism, and worrying about how other people viewed me – and it’s only now I realise what I’ve lost. If I could reclaim even half of that time, how much more creatively I would have spent it – dancing, running, learning, travelling, kissing, talking, laughing, reading, playing sport. Instead of trying to be thinner and sexier, I should have striven to be freer; braver; not to give a damn how others thought I looked; to relish every single second I had with a fit, healthy body. Had I known that I would end up with a spinal injury I would not have wasted a nanosecond on the width of my thighs, because these things, I now know, are infinitely irrelevant.
Hindsight is a cruel companion. How, from my disabled vantage point, do I bridge that chasm of wisdom? How to tell today’s young women, so many of them psychologically crippled by the tyranny of aspiring to a sexy body image, what really matters? Instead of rejoicing in their health and opportunities, and the possession of a body which works, little girls are being schooled by their mothers, their peers, the internet and the media to find faults in themselves. More and more beautiful girls are being screwed up by the pressure to look like celebrities when they should be exploring the freedom to be themselves. Oh sisters, daughters, please turn off the soundtrack of self-loathing and get out there and live. Because the most sexy thing in the world is being alive, confident, active and interesting. That’s what attracts other people to you, whatever their gender. When your body doesn’t work any more, and you are sexually hors de combat, the concept of an ideal body image becomes as blackly funny as it is possible to be. So, too, does the idea of cosmetic surgery to put right wrongs which exist only in your own eyes. Physical imperfection is in fact lovely; we’re all imperfect.
Without meaning to sound like a preacherwoman, disability has taught me to celebrate life and possibility. All that separates me from healthy, active people are the brutal seconds of my fall. Now, as a spectator, I find that I love watching bodies that work. I now perceive dizzying beauty in the simple movement of ordinary people. Sliding on and off stools on coffee bars, side-stepping, throwing out that first impatient stride when the green man flashes up at the junction. I feed off amusing, tender cameos: a few years ago, having received an honorary degree from Stirling University, I sat on the graduation stage and watched hundreds of young women totter across in front of me for their certificates, ninety-nine per cent of them on vertiginous heels, stumbling like endearing kid goats, but happy, happy, happy because they were going to look good in the pictures later. These girls brought tears to my eyes, because they were like kids raking in the dressing-up box for adulthood, one last time, a final rite of passage, before it was for real. They were more sexy and beautiful than they could possibly know, but not because of the shoes.
In the absence of any sexual future, my thoughts inevitably swayed towards to an earlier, much less complicated kind of affair of the heart. Horses.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Of String Girths and Running Martingales
High up on the long hill they called the Saddle Back, behind the ranch and the county road, the boy sat on his horse, facing east, his eyes dazzled by the rising sun.
Mary O’Hara, My Friend Flicka
Ever since I could remember, I had been in love with horses – and I mean love. An all-encompassing devotion, which bewildered my parents, who had no interest in horses and were far too serious-minded and austere to contemplate indulging their children. They had been born in the Edwardian age, met while serving on the team developing radar in the Second World War, and decided to carry on being Edwardians. Once the war was over, it seemed as if they transferred their battle to all forms of waste or extravagance instead. We lived in north London, in a
tall, austere house with a big garden, where I lay and made nests in the long velvety grass and my father distilled spirit from fermented pears off the big tree. My earliest memories were of horse-riding on the back of a vast decrepit old sofa with a skipping rope for reins. Or roping my amiable big sister round the waist, so I could drive her up and down and around the garden. The afflicted will share these universal memories.
There were real live animals to base the fantasies on. At my grandmother’s house in Northern Ireland, where we spent every summer, lived a donkey and my older cousin’s pony, Polly. I fed her apple cores and, if I was good, I was allowed to ride her very, very occasionally. During the long days in between, I would stand at the door of the tack room, a walk-in cupboard, sucking in great breaths of warm, sweet, saddle-soap-soggy air, looking but not daring to touch, memorising the different components, the bits and accessories. That was what love smelt of. Hours were spent gazing longingly up at the forbidden treasures – martingales, bits, reins, double bridles, cruppers, crops, side reins.
At Granny’s house, if it had four legs I was in heaven. Neddy the donkey …
… Polly the pony (with my cousin Ann) …
… and even a rocking horse. Wishing Ann (left) would get off so I could have it all to myself.
Growing up horse-devout but horseless, in an era when riding was reserved for a cultivated elite, was hard. How I yearned to belong to that mysterious, unobtainable world. By way of compensation, I used to memorise equine body parts and by ten I knew as much about the conformation of the horse as your average vet student. And I read voraciously, cantering a thousand vicarious horses across the pages: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, the horsey sagas by the three Pullein-Thompson sisters. Novels about little girls with ponies by Sheila Chapman, long forgotten now, the pages brown with compulsive re-reading, the corners of the covers quite worn away. My imagination thronged with legendary famous horse riders with splendidly exotic names – Pat Koechlin-Smythe, Lucinda Prior-Palmer, Anneli Drummond-Hay, Ted Edgar, Colonel Llewellyn and his great horse Foxhunter, a young Harvey Smith and David Broome. I borrowed their biographies from the local library and absorbed every detail of their starry lives.
Back at home after the County Down holidays were over, I drew my dreams compulsively on the backs of unwanted engineering drawings my father brought home. ‘Daddy’s got you more paper,’ my mother would announce, and sure enough, there would be the fat, sharp-edged sheaves of A3, stapled into bunches, smudged blue diagrams of worm gearing, run off an early duplicating machine. More paper felt like Christmas every time it arrived, because when you turned the paper over – so the staples were in the top right corner – there were endless acres of fresh crisp whiteness waiting to be populated with horses: galloping, jumping, racing, rearing. I drew maps of fields and stable yards and filled them with different equines, like the cast of a dynastic novel – my fantasy pets, the black stallion who won every competition, the chestnut mare who was his best friend, their offspring who would win the next Olympics. I have a clear memory – we were still in London, so I must have been no more than five – of my teenage sister exhorting me to draw a horse for her friend. I was delighted to show off my prowess, proudly including the details I had studied in my cousin Patsy’s tack room, and in the books I borrowed from the library. A carefully drawn snaffle bit. A plain noseband. My sister started giggling. ‘Look,’ she said to her friend, ‘she’s even given you a string girth.’ These were all the rage in horsey circles in the early 1960s. I knew my stuff. I was slightly indignant that they found it funny.
Then there were my plastic horses, a herd of model animals and riders which, in the days before television, let alone tablets or electronic games, were my nightly playthings. They had names, backstories and lives that were utterly real to me. Blackie, Brownie, Whitey, Zebra (though his stripes wore off and I chewed one of his front legs badly), Sheriff, Thunder, Lightning. Ridden mostly by bandy-legged models called Pat Smythe and Colonel Brown. As an occasional treat, my herd was allowed to expand. I would go to Woolworths and buy a new one, eyeing up the others on the shelf, planning which I would get the next time, and the time after that. As we drove to my grandparents’ house in Harpenden, we passed a shop, a rare equestrian outfitters, which had jodhpurs in the window display: I remember being on the back seat, pressing my face against the car window, peering through the raindrops and the dim street lights for a glimpse of them. They were jodhpurs like Colonel Brown had, with big flaps on the outside of the thighs.
My father, although wary of this strange madness, grudgingly fashioned a hobby horse for me, a plywood head attached to a broom handle, and my mother covered it with leather from an old armchair. It was immediately and inevitably christened Polly. We cantered everywhere together. With her, I felt complete; fulfilled; fused into a centaur which would paw the ground, neigh and prance and canter everywhere. Perhaps it is just as well I did not grow up today, an age of choice and gender fluidity for children, because for at least seven years I wanted to be a horse.
Indeed I was a horse most of the time, cantering, snorting, shying around the dinner table. When you live inside your imagination, all things are possible. On family journeys, one escaped from the boredom of the back seat of the car or the train to gallop across country alongside, soaring over huge hedges and ditches for endless miles. Every horse-mad little girl I know did the same. Horses set you free. When Polly disintegrated from wear and tear, I moved on to imaginary steeds. Now I was bounded only by my imagination. In there I created a vast stable of animals: blacks, bays, greys and chestnuts, my plastic horses come alive. All shared the ability to jump over the moon, for hours on end. Inspired by Pat Smythe’s career, I created Olympic courses in the garden – spreads, oxers and triples built from flowerpots, dustbins, broom handles, canes, hoes, shovels, upturned buckets. Hours were spent competing against myself on different horses; I can’t remember when I stopped, but it may, tragically, have been into my early teens. And that was only because I fell in love with Marc Bolan.
With my brother and sister and Polly the hobby horse, Barnet 1962.
I wrote a long, illustrated story about a family called the Riderds: calling them the Riders seemed much too obvious. My mother, unable to assuage my longings, but a kindly soul, would buy me an occasional copy of Riding magazine. I never thought she had had any connection with horses but decades later, after her death, I found pictures of her in the late 1920s, sitting on a blood horse, pigtailed, hatless, languid; her friend Sheila Denton alongside on another elegant hack. I saw a picture too, of my grandmother in a riding habit, looking effortlessly regal. Maybe my mother understood a little bit of my longing.
Once it became apparent that my parents considered riding lessons far too expensive, I had to resort to my own devices. Granny in Ireland used to send me a pound note every Christmas and birthday; I worked out that if a pony cost £50, I would get one eventually – but I worried about the cost of the farrier. All the books said they were very expensive. I laid more store on the Kellogg’s Cornflakes Win a Pony art competition and put in two entries, convinced I would win. Meantime, while striving for my ultimate goal, I had other, more lowly dreams. Like a bike. Everyone else had a bike. You have to understand that all this was internalised: in my family, no child demanded anything. And because I was a surprise late baby, I was cotton-woolled. One morning, aged about eight, sitting on the downstairs loo, where I was banished every morning after breakfast to do a poo whether I needed to go or not, because it was good Edwardian child-rearing, I overheard my father talking to my mother.
‘Shall I buy one with a crossbar?’ he said.
And she said, ‘Probably better with one.’
And I went off to school, fizzing inside with joy because I just knew he was talking about what type of bicycle to buy for me, and she knew I wanted a boys’ bike with a crossbar because girls’ bikes were wet. I was utterly desperate to be like my friends. We had set up a gang of b
ike-riding vigilantes, copied from the Q-Bikes in The Beano, but my membership was always on a shaky peg because I usually had to run after them on foot. I was just desperate to belong, to escape the reputation of my relatively elderly, old-fashioned parents, 1930s aliens washed up in the swinging sixties. But disappointment waited. After a few days, when nothing materialised, I plucked up the courage to sound out my mother about the time schedule on the bike. She was amused. ‘Oh no, dear,’ she said. ‘We needed coat hangers and Daddy was discussing what kind to buy.’ No bike arrived until I was ten and soon to go to grammar school, by which time it was a bit too late for my street cred. With hindsight, I see the old man was overprotective of me: he didn’t want me falling off a bicycle and hurting myself. Any time I did fall, he reacted with such fury that I had to conceal my injuries, and hope he wouldn’t notice the scratches on the bike. The old bugger always did, though. Just as well he was dead long before 2010.
The horse thing mirrored the bike thing, only deeper, a current of yearning to escape, to go fast, which flowed with me through life. It never left me and persists, darkened with the manifest irony of its consequences, to this day. I was eventually allowed the occasional riding lesson when I was about eleven and rode a friend’s pony once in a blue moon as a teenager. The consequences were inevitable, I suppose, like any bad case of arrested development. Overprotected children tend to overreact when they gain freedom in young adulthood. Even having a boyfriend and a career didn’t cure me: when I started my first job as a graduate trainee on a newspaper, immediately after leaving university, I went out and bought myself a horse with my first proper salary. A palomino mare, no less, flashy as you like, who I called Indiana.
‘I’ll take that sorrel filly of Rocket’s; the one with the cream tail and mane,’ said Ken. ‘I’ve named her Flicka.’