David Hill reviews this new compelling, unflinching and insistently authentic memoir, from journalist Sally Wenley.
Dramatic events don't automatically mean a dramatic book. I can think of several 'Oh, I've had a really colourful life’ renderings that come across in print as flat and monotone.
So what have been the dramatic events in journalist Sally Wenley's life?
Well, in February 1986, the sports prefect at Woodford House School, Havelock North, was a hockey and cricket player, an accomplished road runner, a stroppy and sparky pupil who'd just had her first kiss. She was en route to the annual school picnic when the bus somersaulted down a bank. Two teachers, two girls and the driver died. Sally's spinal cord was severed; she faced life as a paraplegic.
How bald. How inadequate a summary of this compelling, unflinching narrative.
So, some more details – and The Crash is rich with them, nearly all vivid and absorbing. Sally struggles back to consciousness in Christchurch's Spinal Unit, with no memory of the accident; she cleverly saves that till later. She won't believe her prognosis at first; rips up the Get Well cards. As she slowly, painfully starts to sit in a wheelchair, she watches guys with ruined arms spill food down themselves. She helps 'Mr Gang' smoke the dope his mates smuggle in. More vivid details.
Back to school she goes. Every class and corner stabs her with reminders of what she can never do again. The crash is hardly mentioned; there's a sort of rigid-upper-lip conspiracy of silence about it. Our author neatly keeps that till the end of her story also.
Read the rest of the review on Kete Books here.
