It was late November and the first cold snap of 2013 as Myfanwy Foster drove her daughter Perdita to school along the narrow, high-banked lanes that surround their home in Wiltshire. One minute they were absorbed in conversation, the next the family Jeep hit a patch of black ice, skidded and swerved up against the bank before rolling over back into the road.
Myfanwy, a 53-year-old mother of four, remembers the crash in a kind of staccato slow motion: the uncontrollable sliding of the car, the thud as it hit the frozen bank, a moment of suspension as it flipped over, and then a slow rocking as it settled on its roof. There was silence followed by a sudden icy blast as Perdita, then 16, managed to prise open her window and climb out unharmed.
Myfanwy was hanging upside down in the driver’s seat, trapped by crushed metal, but convinced that she was unhurt, too. The accident had happened at such a sedate pace. She was aware of a numb feeling sweeping up her legs, but she thought little of it as Perdita, who had called the emergency services, knelt by the car, talking to her mother and reassuring her, while they waited for help. “She was amazingly calm and collected,” Myfanwy says. “Without her, everything would have been so much worse.”
She recalls being cut out of the car and transferred to the air ambulance, but nothing more until she came round several hours later in the intensive care unit at Southampton General. It was then she realised something truly devastating had happened. She lay with her eyes closed, listening to a consultant explain to someone – her mother, perhaps – that the damage was “irreversible”. “It was good to know the truth straight away but it was a long time before I realised the implications,” she says. She later learnt she’d undergone emergency surgery to stabilise her neck – she had fractured vertebra C5 and dislocated C6 and C7, causing severe damage to her spinal cord.
Today, warming herself by the Aga in the kitchen of the family home near Tisbury, Myfanwy admits she has yet to come to terms with her injuries. Her eldest daughter, Georgie, 21, dark-haired and willowy like her mother, makes us a cup of tea and then, turning away from me, discreetly helps Myfanwy to sip hers. “Mum, you’re going to have to move a bit closer to the sofa if you want to have a proper conversation,” she says softly, before going to join her siblings.
“Close the door behind you,” Myfanwy, a former BBC producer, calls after her. Ever since the accident she has struggled with the draughts, she explains, as she manoeuvres around the kitchen, using her wheelchair to push shut the pantry door.
During six months’ rehabilitation at the Duke of Cornwall Spinal Treatment Centre in Salisbury, home to Horatio’s Garden, one of the Telegraph’s 2015 Christmas Charities, Myfanwy learnt how to adapt to her disability – known medically as C5 Asia Complete. “ 'Complete’ is the awful word that patients dread hearing. It means there are no messages getting through to my lower body,” she says.
Myfanwy and her husband of 23 years, Simon, a criminal barrister, moved to Wiltshire from London when Georgie was one, and Myfanwy was still at the BBC. She commuted for a while but when she became pregnant with Perdita, she gave up work. Two sons completed the family, Horatio, now 15, and Bee, 12. She jokingly tells me that she regrets not having more children – her brother trumped her by having six. “They’re just so wonderful,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “They seem to get even more interesting the older they get.”
Their house exudes a bohemian cosiness. Chickens roam the garden and Jester the Jack Russell snores next to me on the sofa. Myfanwy and Simon, who met at a New Year’s Eve ball in Scotland, prioritised their children’s education rather than splashing out on expensive holidays or smart cars. They are also much-loved members of the community. On the short drive to their house from the station my taxi driver tells me that for more than a year after Myfanwy’s accident, a group of neighbours would prepare and drop off meals at the house each day.
Myfanwy is not someone who relishes talking about herself. The kitchen, however, is testimony to the life she once lived. The beautiful landscapes she painted adorn the walls and the Welsh dresser is covered in family photographs: Myfanwy and the children on a bike ride in Norfolk; a crazy picture of her, aged 25, carrying a bike through the waves in Thailand, on an around-the-world cycle trip with her brothers; yet another of her on horseback tackling a cross-country fence. Family life, she says, has always been about being outdoors: in the summer before her accident the family went kayaking in the Inner Hebrides, cycling in Norfolk and walked part of Hadrian’s Wall. Her physical incapacity is hard for her to bear because of the things she can no longer do for her children. “It’s a loss I’ll probably never get over,” she says quietly.
Myfanwy has just enough movement in her arms to control her motorised wheelchair and operate an iPad. The house has been adapted with ramps; there is a new ground-floor bedroom for her and her husband and another bedroom for her live-in carer. In the conservatory there is the specialist gym equipment she needs for physiotherapy.
I ask her if it gets any easier and she repeats the question quietly to herself. The kitchen clock ticks through the silence and then… “In some ways it gets harder as you realise the implications,” she deliberates.
Telegraph
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