Out On A Limb
In the first of a new column for Able magazine, Harry Wade shares his life experiences as an amputee.
IT’S A BEACH
The first time I remember my foot falling off was on summer holidays in Brittany. I must have been eight or nine; I was running after the ball on a beach and I fell flat on my face. I assumed I had stepped in a hole, but in fact the foot had come clean off and was dangling from my sock!
Breton beach resorts in the late 1960s were ill-equipped to deal with prosthetic repairs and we ended up taking the leg to the local blacksmith. He put a crude Frankenstein-style bolt through the whole thing, which then looked a bit like Ben Hur’s chariot.
Beaches are problematic places for artificial limb users. I love to swim in the sea and the salt water is very good for the everyday sores and abrasions on the stump that don’t normally see the light of day. Hopping to the water can be tricky though; a flat beach with the tide out and the sand in picturesque wrinkles is like having your instep beaten with a stick, not to mention exhausting hopping over a long distance. Slippery seaweed is a nightmare, as are sharp shells and stones. When you’ve hopped back over all these, past the inquisitive tourists, your leg is full of sand and rubs like sandpaper.
Having one leg on a beach is probably like having big breasts. It is not given quite the same “fwor! factor” by the tabloids, but people do find it really hard not to stare. I find myself eyeballing them thinking: “Keep those eyes up to mine. Don’t drop the stare,” but – inevitably – the eyes flicker down, which you notice even though they think they got away with it. Some people in celebrity life enjoy being stared at, but I don’t; it makes me self-conscious. I completely understand curiosity and, if I’m in the mood, I’m OK with straight questions, but I don’t like the furtive flickers.
Beaches really are the place I feel most disadvantaged with only one leg. You can’t snorkel properly because you’ve only got one flipper; the pedalos are fearfully hard work and go round in circles; and I’m sad to miss out on the spontaneous paddle. Even without the prospect of a scarlet-faced doctor complaining about wasting NHS resources, salt water rots and rusts artificial legs; so it’s no paddling – unless, of course, you’ve brought your ‘sea-leg’, the slightly ill-fitting spare.
In Brittany that year, I only had the one artificial leg – I was growing so fast that the old one simply didn’t fit – but nowadays I do have my ‘sea leg’. It was really important to me, as a dad with young children, to be able to play with them actively on a beach. An extra leg may take up a lot of space in a suitcase, and the metal core looks like a rifle on the X-ray machine at the airport, but the freedom to be a beach biped is brilliant. Just be prepared for the odd foot to fall off!
From Harry Wade’s as yet unpublished autobiography: Out On A Limb