that I did, albeit through a bizarre combination of circumstances, is why I am able to share my knowledge with you now. Let me tell you about it…
The car was speeding through the pitch black night, hurtling crazily out of control. I had no way of knowing which direction it was taking. I was very frightened and convinced I was going to die. Moments earlier I had been travelling at high speed on the motorway when suddenly I was forced to swerve violently to avoid a fleeing figure running directly in front of me. It was 1.30 a.m. and there was not even the palest glimmer of moonlight. Why on earth was someone crossing the motorway on foot? Did they intend to kill themselves? How ironic if that were so, as that was precisely what I had been contemplating—a quick end to my life.
As I wrenched the steering wheel to avoid the ghostlike figure, the car skidded and lurched forward into the unknown, deep in the Staffordshire countryside. My headlights no longer picked out the friendly cats’ eyes and I was spinning wildly towards thick undergrowth at the roadside.
I remembered being scared once before when I was a private pilot and wanted to qualify for a licence to fly at night. Unthinkingly I had chosen an extremely busy airport from which to do the two hours’ necessary flying. I was suddenly queueing in line with jumbo jets and getting swirled around in their back-draught. But that experience paled in comparison to my terror now. At least then there had been landing lights, but here, in this horror, there was not even a moon to cast shadows. A jumble of confused thoughts and questions swirled in my mind as I was buffeted from side to side of the car like a limp rag doll. Each jolt sent a dull pain through my body. It was all happening in a few, fleeting moments yet it seemed like an eternity, as if I were watching myself in some ghastly, slow-motion video playback. Not long before I had actually been thinking about killing myself over a broken love affair. Now, in those terrifying moments as the car spun wildly out of control in the darkness, I knew I did not want to die. All I could think of was what would be the result once the car finally came to a halt. Would I be crippled or scarred for life? Would anybody find me so late at night, or would I have to die slowly, badly injured and alone? Had I been selfish? Was this my punishment? Would the nightmare ever end?
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The car shuddered to a halt. Later I learned that it had hit three trees and plunged 30 feet down a ravine. Amazingly, however, I had not hit my head against the windscreen. I can remember sitting there dazed and shaking, yet still being able to think with remarkable clarity. The cassette player was still blasting out disco music, shattering the stillness of the night. Somehow, the windscreen wipers had got switched on during the crash. In my numbed and dazed state I could not remember how to switch them off. I was also alert enough to realize that there might have been a petrol leak and that the car might explode at any moment.
As I slowly and painfully eased myself out of the door, I felt as if I was the star of my very own horror film. The whole thing was so eerie and unreal. I was still trying to work out why my head had not hit the windscreen. I had not been wearing a seatbelt—this was the 1970s and there were still conflicting views about them—and the car had come to a dramatic stop. Later I learned that my head and face were the only parts of my body not to have been injured. It is something I have never been able to figure out to this day. Standing there, staring at my car, the shock of the accident must have distorted my thoughts. To me the car looked undamaged, yet actually it was a write-off. I had no clue as to where I was, I only knew I was somewhere off the M6. I was barefoot. My shoes must have come off in the car. My back felt strange. It was aching, but not too badly. I had heard of people walking after an accident even though they had been seriously injured. I wondered if it were possible to walk with a broken back. I seemed to be at the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by trees and bushes. Somewhere above me I could hear the whine of the occasional car going by. I began to clamber up the steep embankment, forgetting my shoes in my desperate need to get help. Eventually I found myself on the hard shoulder, more through luck than judgement. I probably looked as if I had been attacked; I was completely dishevelled and distraught. A few cars passed and I prayed that I would not pass out on the hard shoulder and be run over by an unsuspecting driver pulling in for a rest. Then, my knight in shining armour came along at the wheel of a large lorry.
He helped me up into his cab. He said he had seen my headlights down off the roadside. He asked me if I had been drinking—I had not—and offered to take me home, even though I lived a hundred miles away in Blackpool. The pain was now so severe that just before I passed out I asked for an ambulance. I woke up in hospital, to be told by a doctor—to my amazement—that I had no bones broken and that he was discharging me. I was battered and bruised in every part of my body except my head but, apparently, hospital cutbacks meant that there was no bed available for me, even though it was now around 3.30 a.m. The policemen who had been called out to the accident called me Cinderella because they found my shoes in the car. No one knew quite what to do with me, but the nurses felt sorry for me and gave me a bed in a corridor until the morning.
Shock does strange things to the system. The thoughts I had had earlier during that fateful drive—the overwork, the broken romance and other traumas that had led me briefly to contemplate suicide—flitted across my mind but only made me feel glad to be alive. They did not seem so important now. Maybe, I pondered, this accident was an escape of sorts after all. Next morning, still in excruciating pain, I took a train back to Blackpool. The friend who picked me up at the station was shocked by my appearance. I was a sorry sight—hunched over, with bedraggled hair, crumpled clothes and a tear-streaked face. It took me a year to recover, enduring six months of severe pain as my spine slowly healed. I regained my health but my income had gone. Previously I had earned a good living as a top sales representative and had also run my own promotional company. But because I still could not bend sufficiently to ease my way into a car, I was unfit to drive. I had to find other ways to earn a living, so I enrolled in a secretarial course to learn typing, shorthand and advanced French. It was only then that I began to realize that the damage I had suffered in the accident was more sinister than I had imagined and was not confined just to physical problems.
At first I thought I was just being slow at picking things up, though that was unusual for me as I had always been a fast learner. I was already a touch typist but I could not even do that properly without making dozens of mistakes. I found I was not able to understand even the simplest things. Worse still, my friends began to notice that the day after an evening out I would have no memory of the night before—nothing to do with alcohol, either. I could not recall people or places. To my enormous embarrassment I was having to ask lifelong friends who they were. I became what others considered ‘eccentric’, constantly losing things, never ready for a date or appointment on time. I also began to dress oddly. When I confided my symptoms and worries to my doctor he told me my head had been shaken up so much in the accident that it would take some time to ‘settle’. He remarked that I had touched the Pearly Gates and was very lucky still to be alive.
Another 12 months went by and my memory had not improved one jot, so I went back to my doctor. He suggested the problem was probably trauma-based. He suggested I find a doctor who was also a hypnotherapist, but warned me that it would not be easy to find a good one. No one knew the nightmare I was going through because outwardly I looked fine. But I could not perform even the simplest tasks, such as filing. I was a totally disruptive influence to those I worked with. I would start a job and move on to something else, forgetting to finish the first task. I had begun to drive again but I would lose my car keys, go to look for them in my handbag and then forget, when I had found my handbag, what I had wanted it for. I would even forget that I was supposed to be going out at all. I would spend hours looking for things, totally absorbed in the search and unaware of the passage of time. I lost all my money. I could not keep a job because I was unemployable. I tried writing down a list of things to do each day but it was useless—I would simply forget I had made a list!
I suffered two-and-a-half years of this mental fog, during which I got little help or sympathy from anyone except close friends. My father refused even to believe it, thinking I was just being flippant. It was only when my mother suffered a fall and was taken unconscious to hospital that he realized how serious my condition was—because I forgot all about my mother’s accident and went to a party rather than visit her in hospital. My son would be left outside my house on weekend breaks from boarding school while I was off