At the moment of “the miracle” Ruth Jolly had been in Paris, enjoying a light lunch in the Galeries Lafayette. She had gone there on a four-day trip with her elderly mother, who had never visited the French capital before, and the meal had been a final treat before heading for the Gare du Nord to catch the London-bound Eurostar.
She still recalls the freezing wind that had buffeted them as they headed to the station for a journey that would end in shattering news, followed by unimaginable pain, when she stepped into her North Oxford home.
There had been no premonitions of trouble, no dark forebodings. On the train she had in fact drunk Champagne to celebrate her mother’s birthday. It was also her son Charlie’s 23rd birthday, which he had marked with a flying lesson from Oxford Airport, as part of his training for a private pilot’s licence.
The wind had been blowing strongly in Oxfordshire as well, a 35-knot headwind she would soon discover. Helping her mother out of the taxi, something seemed odd about the cars outside the house.
“Later I realised the oddity was that Charlie’s dilapidated old banger was missing,” she recalled. “But I had no chance to ponder this, since as soon as I lifted my key to the front door it was opened by my husband Peter, who. quite expressionlessly, said, ‘come upstairs’.”
In the sitting room she learnt that Charlie had been cut out of the wreckage of a small plane at Turweston, a small airfield in north Buckinghamshire. The young instructor’s decision to demonstrate the procedure for a recovery from an engine failure after take-off had ended in tragedy. The Cessna had dived to the ground: the instructor was killed and her son, on the side that impacted first, had been taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, with horrendous injuries and rushed into theatre.
Witnesses who saw the plane hit the ground had expected only bodies, but Charlie survived.
A miracle?
Mrs Jolly has come to believe so and had originally planned to call her new book Surviving A Miracle.
For as well as being a detailed record of her son’s long fight to live, it also offers a vivid insight about how the shattering experience transformed her own life.
“How do people ever manage to return to normal after a miracle? I guess that was the question, with which I began,” she said. “What it’s not is a ‘happy ending’ to a parlous tale. Anybody who’s been through one will tell you that. It turns lives inside out and upside down.”
The whole project came about as a result of a diary she had kept, initially just to record what was happening to her son’s broken body, when a week after the crash in February 1999 she scribbled on a sheet of paper: “Major injuries: R lungs punctured and collapsed at scene, L lung collapsed on admission. Multiple rib fractures, L & R arms fractured, jaw fracture, R leg very severely damaged. Surgery to drain chest and stabilise L arm and R leg.”
She said: “That’s all I wrote. At the start I had no intention of keeping a diary. All I was doing was recording the basic facts. I wanted to remember what surgery he had undergone. What they did, when they operated. But then I began writing comments.”
Soon the scruffy ring-bound exercise book began to fill up. Emotionally-charged, bemused, Mrs Jolly found it to be simply too painful to read herself, never mind let other people see it.
The diary describes his time in intensive care and recovery at home. Charlie’s right leg had been trapped under the aircraft dashboard and a large chunk of his shin had been gouged out. At one stage, amputation of his leg seemed likely, possibly his arm as well.
One early entry recalled her mixed feelings when her son’s consultant informed her that Charlie was being prepared for another long spell in the operating theatre.
“In my mind I was unequivocally delighted that Charlie’s consultant considered his hold on life to be sufficiently strong to warrant important repair work on both his arms, and detailed investigative surgery on his right leg. He was still so vulnerable. His breathing was fragile and would have to be supported throughout.
“I was told that time was of the essence when it came to decision-making about future reconstructive possibilities. My brain understood but my gut feelings wouldn’t be subdued. ‘Just keep him breathing for God’s sake,’ I yelled from within. ‘Never mind his leg.’”
But the diary, too, sets out her own remarkable journey over five years. As a trained social worker and probation worker, she was to play a central role in bringing about his eventual recovery.
However, Mrs Jolly now reveals that for all her years of counselling others, the experience of looking after her son was to take heavy toll on her own mental state, as she became a social worker desperately in need of support.
Five years after the accident, she wrote what she thought would be a final fitting entry in the diary. It was February 4, the anniversary of the crash and after undergoing numerous operations at both the John Radcliffe and Radcliffe Infirmary and lengthy treatment at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Charlie was not just walking, he was running.
To show his thanks to those who had looked after him, he had planned a fundraising walk from the crash site to Oxford Airport, the plane’s destination on that tragic day.
“To be honest the diary had almost petered out by then,” said Mrs Jolly. “When I picked up my pen a day or two after his run, I was acutely conscious that I was rounding off the record to close the little book. It was quite emotional.”
Her son’s ambition to become a pilot was, no doubt, in part inspired by his parents’ own links with the RAF. Mrs Jolly had been in the RAF for five years, working as an administrator, while Mr Jolly had been a navigator.
Her continued interest in the armed services has led her to write books such as Military Man, Family Man, which examines the clash of loyalties today facing men in the services with partners and children, and Changing Step, a controversial investigation into how servicemen and women adapt to life after the military.
Mrs Jolly, a mother of three (at 33 Charlie is the youngest of her children), has also run stress management courses and ran a haematology support group at the John Radcliffe, where she became friends with the chaplain, Canon Nick Fennemore, who was to help her in the weeks following the crash.
Now she is running programmes for violent offenders for Thames Valley Probation. Even with such a background in advising others, she readily admits to “losing her balance” just as her youngest son began to regain his.
When he was first allowed to return to the family home, off Woodstock Road, she recalled sitting in his bedroom in his old room with feelings of gloom.
“My beautiful son, sleeping. No longer healthy and strong, no more the carefree young student, but pale scarred and exhausted. He’ll never again play in a football team, never dive for a catch on the boundary. Instead he will suffer indignity and pain. He will lose freedom and choice, and he will be dependent on other people for a long time to come.”
Yet, it was only after Charlie had secured a job in the City of London and rekindled romance with his old flame Melissa (whom he first met at St Edward’s School when they were 16 and to whom he is now married), that Mrs Jolly “lost the plot”.
While recognising that her love and professional social work expertise had been crucial to his recovery, she was left feeling redundant and vulnerable.
“Just as Charlie got himself firmly back on to the beam, I contrived to fall off it,” she remembers.
“I could bask in the reflected happiness of my family, but as for myself, I could see no particular purpose in my continued existence. I realised this was irrational and ungrateful — wicked even — but I could do little about it.
“I functioned at a lowish level, prone to tears and reluctant to plan ahead. But I simply could not seem to inject a sense of purpose back into my life.”
Her Christian belief was certainly strengthened by the experience, and her book, Something Absolute, which is published in October, has a religious dimension, focusing heavily on theological issues, as she seeks to come to terms with what happened to her family.
Reading the New Testament book of Acts, during a Lent visit to Oxford’s Central Library, led her to evaluate “the miracle” of her son’s survival and her diaries in a different light.
Mrs Jolly, a member of the Christ Church Cathedral congregation, writes: “I needed to recount the whole of Charlie’s story in order to seek out the process by which we, as a family, restarted our lives after a joyful but shattering experience.
“For a long time — for a very long time — after a miracle, you flounder.”
As for the diaries, she has already begun the difficult process of throwing them away, but only a few pages so far.
“I’ve thought about throwing them away so many times. But it’s a hard thing to do.”
Charlie, who lives with Melissa and their two children near Henley, now works as a broker in London.
When I interviewed him last year for a piece marking the NHS’s 60th anniversary, he had just learnt about his mother’s plan to write a book.
“I’ve no idea what she is going to put in about me,” he said at the time.
My guess is that he had even less idea about what she would end up putting in about herself.
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