We had driven down to our house in Somerset from Cheshire one Sunday evening at the end of May 2000 with full intentions of spending the following week cleaning and redecorating it. Our former tenant, an elderly man who had died in the house a few weeks previously, had let it go to rack and ruin and we were trying to make up our minds as to whether we should rent it out once again or sell it and invest the profit some other way. Life was being particularly good to us at that time. Mo and I lived in an 18th Century stately home, where we were employed as the Custodians, both of us earning good money that was handsomely augmented by my Army pension supplemented with the income from the rented house; we had a new Volvo 850 estate car that towed our new 26ft Swift Challenger caravan and we had a good nest egg safely stowed away in the Bank, saved for a rainy day. We had a pretty good idea of where fate was taking us and we were happily settled back thoroughly enjoying life to the fullest extent. On our arrival in Somerset we picked up a Chinese take-away and a bottle of wine, which we took home and devoured all the while discussing colour schemes and decorating plans in preparation for the following days. At 2am that morning, awakened from a deep sleep by a tremendous commotion, I jumped out of bed and rushed out onto the landing where I was confronted with the nightmare scene of Mo lying face down at the bottom of the staircase, with her legs pointing up the stairs, her arms trapped beneath her and her neck twisted away from her body in quite an unnatural angle.
As Custodians, we lived in the west wing of the Stately Home which meant that we were always on hand to oversee the many varied events, both family and commercial, that occurred in the main function rooms. Our task was to ensure the smooth running of the events, the satisfaction of the paying guests and, above all else, the safety and security of the house and it’s many valuable contents. Therein lay the problem, because we lived in the ‘big house’ permanently, we could never get time off – even on our designated day off we could guarantee that at some stage the telephone would ring and a member of ‘The Family’ or the staff would say: “Dick, I know it’s your day off but could you just………….” And bang would go our day off for another week. Falling back onto our previous experience as Caravan Club Wardens, we decided that we should buy a caravan and disappear off into the Welsh Hills on the eve of our day off and not reappear at work until the morning after our day off. His Lordship was not too enamoured of the idea but agreed that we had to have time away from the big house in order to rest, recuperate and thus reinvigorate our tired spirits for the next week. Mo and I set a budget and started looking for the new car and caravan. We eventually settled on the Volvo car and the Swift caravan, a luxurious combination which was a fair bit over budget and the car was very petrol thirsty when solo let alone when towing a ton and a half of caravan but we were earning good money and could easily afford it. Very soon we were off enjoying our one-day off a week travelling all around the Midlands and Wales.
Convinced that Mo was dead, I snatched up the phone and called for the ambulance. The emergency operators could not find our address on their computer and several minutes were lost in the confusion whilst we went through several combinations of village names and locations – so much for strangers manning ‘centralized’ call centres – when they had a call from the ambulance that had been sent out to us. By sheer coincidence the driver of the ambulance was the same driver who had attended our address to collect the body of our previous tenant and he still remembered the location of our house. Then I heard a most wonderful sound, Mo was groaning and complaining bitterly that the cat was trapped underneath her and that she could not move a muscle. Hours later we arrived at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol after a 5 miles per hour journey from Musgrove Hospital in Taunton. The fact that Mo was still conscious after the accident pointed to her having damaged her spinal chord rather than her spinal column but the full extent of the damage to Mo’s neck could not be assessed properly until weeks afterwards. Right from the start, however, the prognosis was not good. The Doctors considered that Mo would probably never get out of bed again and it was almost certain she would never be able to walk again. In the space of thirty seconds, early on the morning of the 30th May, fate had dealt us a bitter blow – not bothering to put the light on, Mo had gone to the bathroom but had forgotten where we were. Instead of walking from the en-suite bathroom into the bedroom at the ‘big house’ - she had walked out of the bathroom and fallen head first straight down the stairs at our house in Watchet.
Nearly a year had by now elapsed and we knew that although Mo was firmly wheelchair bound we could actually manage to get around reasonably well and we wanted to see if it was possible, once again, to extend our horizons with the use of the caravan. His Lordship had allowed us to leave the caravan under covered storage in Cheshire until we could bring it back to Watchet but our problem was that at 26 ft long the caravan was too big to park outside our house. We couldn’t afford to put it into any kind of ‘safe’ storage and taking into account Mo’s injuries, it was obvious that I had to operate the caravan single-handed. Mo came up with the answer, which was to downsize the big Swift to a much smaller one albeit not so small as to stop us using it with the wheelchair. In arranging to part exchange the Swift we expected to lose a small fortune by selling to a dealer but with Mo still attending hospital physiotherapy on a regular daily basis, I didn’t have the time to try and sell it privately. That is until we arrived at Highbridge Caravans in North Somerset, an honourable and caring family firm that I cannot praise too highly. Having heard of our plight, they offered us, in a straightforward swap with no added complications whatsoever, an almost new and definitely unused ABI Dawnstar complete with a brand new full awning with lightweight poles. With permission from the Hospital we immediately set out on a short weekend trip to see if we could cope with the myriad of problems that constantly cropped up. The answer, unfortunately, soon became apparent – we couldn’t! Among her many other residual injuries, Mo had lost most of the use of her right hand as well as most of the strength in her left hand and therefore could not easily or safely operate many of the caravan facilities. We had always operated as a pair and now she felt very guilty that she could not assist me in positioning the caravan or putting up the awning or any other thing that needed more than one pair of hands. Above all, no matter how hard she tried; Mo could not master the ‘manual’ loo flush that was definitely designed for right-handed operation – the very hand that she was now lacking. Time to think again.
After much consideration we decided that the answer to our wanderlust could be a suitably converted Motorhome. Not to put too fine a point on it but we all know that motor homes do not come cheaply, especially one which would have to be converted for our own special needs. Mo’s injuries entitled her to the award of Disability Living Allowance and the possibility of a VAT free vehicle. This saving, added to the proceeds from the sale of the car and the caravan and a very understanding Bank Manager had us back on the road within a year in a converted Bürstner T625 Harmony with a wide door, wheelchair ramps, a fixed double bed and an electric loo. With a 2.8 litre turbo diesel engine, large water and waste tanks and a reasonable size bathroom, we thought we could handle just about anything that was thrown at us – and that is how it worked out. We took Dougal (the Motorhome) out for a weekend trip and it worked well so we took him out for a week and that worked too, so we took him on a month long trip around the UK. Everything worked beyond our wildest dreams except for a problem with parking in public car parks with restricted height entry; it became evident we would need a smaller car to assist with the touring aspect of our travels.
Nearly three years had now passed and it was time once again to pay for Council Tax, water rates, gas and electric bills and all the other financial outgoings set by ‘the Authorities’ over which we had no control; our income was absolutely positively fixed, Mo had her pension and disability allowance whilst I had my Army pension and a carers allowance. Take income from expenditure and you are left with the money to live on – or that, at least, is how it should be – except that as far as we could work it out, we were getting less and less to live on from one year to the next – hidden taxes, they call it. The media were talking about a possible 30% rise in water bills over the next several years, council tax was going up about 14%, I don’t need to go any further, you know the story as well as me. Our combined income was due to rise by about 3% with a result that we were going to be several hundred pounds out of pocket over the coming year and perhaps even more in the next year – time to take stock of the situation before the Bank Manager became involved! Mo was officially classified as being paralysed from the neck down and required 24/7 care and attendance which meant that I as her official carer could not go out to work – or I would have to pay someone to look after her whilst I was at work earning the money to pay for someone to look after her whilst I was at work – if you see what I mean!
In 1990 I was a Major in the Army and Mo was working as a ‘Temp’ in Newbury, Berks. Although well off financially it was the well known story of ‘earn big money – spend big money’ and we were working around the clock in order to finance our life style and social status. Until one day, in a typical mid-life crisis situation, we decided that we were wasting the prime time of our lives and we should give it all up in order to travel the World in our caravan – we actually got as far as Cornwall where we ended up running a Caravan Club site, but that is a different story. Last year, 2003, we decided we had had enough of the hidden tax situation - our money was hard earned enough already and be damned if we were going to pay even more of it in tax. So we reviewed our 1990 decision to see whether we could, once again, give it all up and become ‘third age travellers spending the kids inheritance.’ The Bürstner had performed splendidly but was too small to be considered as a ‘full-time’ vehicle so our first task was to identify a vehicle which was not only big enough for the wheelchair, Mo and myself to live in but also one which we could afford to buy and run for the foreseeable future. In December 2002 Mo’s brother, Peter and his wife Yvonne, had given us a year’s subscription to the MMM magazine as a Christmas present - little knowing that they were going to totally change our lifestyle. In February 2003 we were lying in bed one Saturday morning flicking through the edition that had just arrived in the post when we spotted an advert for an American RV being sold privately in Cornwall. We had seen the occasional RV on the road but had never seen one in the flesh - so a quick phone call to the number specified to see if it was still available and we were in the car on the way down to Hayle. We did explain to the seller that it was the very first one we had ever been inside and if we liked what we saw, we would probably want to look at others but his answer was that if we didn’t visit him then he wouldn’t stand a chance of selling us his vehicle anyway, so we might just as well go and see it. Need I say more, within a few minutes of seeing the vehicle we were smitten and had it not been a ‘smokers’ vehicle we would have bought it on the spot.
From that moment on it was all systems go, we opted for a new vehicle adapted for the wheelchair and visited all the main dealers trying to find the particular layout that we considered suited us best, all to no avail – the vehicle we wanted did not seem to exist. Until, that is, we arrived for a second time around at Freedom Motorhomes in Tewkesbury where we described to Nicky, the saleslady, exactly what we wanted and she pulled out a brochure showing a vehicle which conformed to our plans and fell within the confines of our budget. The problem was that this particular vehicle required an HGV licence and Freedom Motorhomes as a matter of policy did not import such vehicles! Broken hearted we thanked her profusely for her troubles and left to make our sorry way home. About an hour later, whilst we were on the motorway driving back to Taunton, Nicky rang us to say that the Directors had held a very quick meeting and decided to import our vehicle as a ‘one-off’ especially for Mo. We quickly agreed the final contract details and used the Bürstner as a deposit. The delivery date gave us about three months in which to auction all our furniture, sell the house, sort out our personal lives and allow me to pass my Class 1 HGV licence.
By hook or by crook we were going to become the proud owners of a Forest River Georgetown 346 double slide with an 8-litre petrol engine converted to dual-fuel.
Problems? After Mo’s accident we don’t have problems – we simply have challenges and challenges are there to be over come! Mo and Dick’s RV was about to become Mo and Dick’s ‘Harvey’ – sounds much more British, don’t you think? |
