Power of positive thinking

Press, 25 May 1984, Page 10

Power of positive thinking

DAVID HUNN,

“Observer,” meets the

disabled British journalist, Margaret Price, whose motto is “let’s get cracking.”

Margaret Price greets you with a big grin and wickedly sparkling eyes; no beauty, but a honey and a devil — the sort who serves you tea in a dribbling cup. She is more than usually tall: five foot eight, she says, though that’s hard to ascertain. She hasn’t stood up for 10 years. Paralysed from below her armpits, she became, from her wheelchair, one of the most successful disabled athletes the world has ever known.

She won 32 international and “Olympic” medals in seven different disciplines and broke 17 world records on land and water. She married, was awarded the M.8.E., became the subject of “This Is Your Life,” contracted meningitis and in 1981 was forced to pull out of competition. Recently, angry at the lack of progress in the sport she left behind her, she got back in the water and broke the world 200 metres freestyle record (for Class II paraplegics) by 28 seconds.

It wasn’t for self-glory

that she did it ("The Observer” was the only national newspaper to report the fact), but to show the others what they could achieve if only, as she oddly puts it, “they would get off their bottoms and do something.” She lives, by meagre courtesy of the State, in a remote cottage on the northern edge of Dartmoor. From there she devotes her phenomenal energies to coaching and to trying to persuade chronically disabled youngsters that the riches of life are theirs for the taking — as long as they don’t listen to the people who tell them, “But you can’t do that sort of thing, darling; you’re not like other people.” When she learned, at 23, that she would never walk again, Margaret’s response was characteristic: “Then

give us a wheelchair and let’s get cracking.” Five days after leaving hospital she was swimming in a public pool. She had always been a naturally strong simmer, but the new, battered Margaret could not even sit up (and still can’t) without a solid body jacket; and one of her arms is very short of strength. Such petty nuisances were never going to stop her. Margaret explains the little miracle that happens to her rag-doll body in the water: “It all sort of hangs down until I get up speed, then the faster I go the straighter it streams out behind.” Like many of the severely physically disabled, Margaret Price is considerably bloody-minded. It’s the only way to win. She does not believe the

world owes her anything special (“No; I owe it thanks for having me”), but she is fiercely determined not to humour those of us who would find it more convenient if the disabled stayed at home.

“The use of my body had gone, but it didn’t mean to me that I couldn’t be seen in public places. “Why should it? My life had changed, but I didn’t see why it should have to stop. <f Have we committed some crime that means we have to be locked up out of sight?” On the contrary, many of the disabled, like Margaret (knocked down by a hit-and-run driver) are the innocent victims of somebody else’s crime, or carelessness.

Yet society at large is reluctant to concede responsibility for providing facilities for the disabled on buses and trains, shops and offices, theatres and cinemas and, most appallingly, the public lavatories — a facility the paralysed need far more urgently than the rest of us.

“A lot of wheelchair people make an excuse when they get an invitation and say they’re sorry, they can’t come this time. “What they’re really saying is that they won’t come because they don’t know what the toilet situation is. “And every time they say no, the four walls of their house or their room come that little bit closer. “Before they realise it, they’re prisoners.” Margaret and Frank Price will never be imprisoned. For the past six years Frank (who is partly disabled) has taken her out and about incessantly, and has carried her into — and stood guard outside — hundreds of public loos. “Things happen to everybody, don’t they,” she said casually. “Bit of bad luck here, bit of bad luck there, but you don’t let it upset the rest of your life, do you? “And whatever has happened to me, I’ve loved life right from the beginning. “I’ve done things, had experiences that I never

would have had if I’d remained able-bodied, and that’s my reward, I suppose. “People think it must be boring stuck in a wheelchair all day. But the day goes too quickly, I can’t get everything in. “If my life is going to be shorter than that of the girls I went to school with, then I’m going to make the most of it. “At the end I shall be able to say I’ve enjoyed what I’ve had, all of it,

every day.” As soon as you meet Margaret Price, she makes you feel that nothing more tremendous has happened to her for a week than that you should have walked through the door. In half an hour, you know nothing more tremendous has happend to you for years than finding her. David Hunn’s “Aiming High — the story of Margaret Price” is published at £7.95 by Arthur Barker.