Stirling: A Story of Hope and a Boy’s Dream

Stirling: A Story of Hope and a Boy’s Dream

Prologue

It was one day in the year 1961, whilst driving on the long journey home to Cape Town after the South African Grand Prix in East London (a city that lies on South Africa’s East Coast), that the young boy told his father that Jim Clark would one day be the champion driver of the world. The young boy was in a bad mood, because the young Clark had beaten his hero, Stirling Moss. And for the next few years the young South African boy followed the rising Scot star ’s ascending career with great interest and pride. So that the new “shooting star” eventually usurped the place of the now retired old hero, Moss after his near fatal accident at Goodwood, UK…until it too was tragically extinguished in a minor race at Hockenheim, Germany in 1968. And that night the young boy lay on his bed and read the race program over again and again… then he fell asleep and dreamt in peace. One day…

#

The young driver lay in a deep deep coma, lingering on the cusp between life and death. Hour after hour, day after long day passed as the dedicated young nurses in the Intensive Care unit at the famous Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa watched for any semblance of movement on the casualty’s still young and bleeding body, pierced with tubes connected to medical equipment.

And up on the slopes of Devil’s Peak in the shadow of Table Mountain the schoolboy slept on and on, drifting into a deeper foggy haze of unconsciousness… totally unaware of the concerned thoughts and prayers of his loving parents (and some good friends) who kept a vigil by his bedside… day after long day, then into the month of May in the year 1965. The very best mom and dad that any child could wish for!

And in the haze the young boy dreamed on… and on…

#

HE WOULD NOT WAKE UP PROPERLY FOR 38 DAYS!

From: STIRLING MOSS: The Authorised Biography by Robert Edwards (Published by Cassell & Co, UK)

Stirling Moss was in a coma for 38 days in Atkinson Morley Hospital, London

And many people throughout the world prayed for the star driver’s healing… a collective appeal to Christ. Perhaps one of them was even a concerned young boy in Clovelly, Cape Town, South Africa.

Moss’s inability to speak was confusing, although the physical injuries were more familiar.

He did not immediately notice that he was effectively paralysed. The physical damage to the left side of his body was made worse by the fact he could not move it, the massive bruising his brain had received had to heal first. This would be frustrating to say the least, particularly since the extent of his injuries were not initially revealed to him. The patient assumed that he could not move because he was injured, rather than because his brain would simply not allow it. His friend, David Haynes finally revealed the truth; although it depressed Stirling, it also caused him to fight his condition harder, initially to no avail.

The neurology department closely monitored his progress. And these are the words of one occupational therapist:

“We didn’t know very much about motor racing, of course; but none of us really thought he would ever drive again – he had been so very badly hurt, but he tried so hard.”

Very slowly, he started to recover some motor function, and as the bruised brain gradually repaired itself, he was more and more able to push himself physically, even within the confines of a wheelchair.

As the physical injuries started to heal and the papers became full of optomistic stories concerning Stirling’s imminent return to racing, he turned to his colleague Berenice Krikler, the resident clinical psychologist at Atkinson Morley. But what condition was he really in?

Krikler knew next to nothing about motor racing (that would soon change) and therefore lacked any kind of benchmark against which to measure Stirling’s attributes. However a number of Grand Prix drivers, such as Innes Ireland, Graham Hill, Bruce  McLaren, Roy Salvadori and Jack Brabham offered their services to construct the sort of baseline, which she needed as a starting point.

The essence of her study was a series of reactive, cognitive and personality observations, using both the racing drivers and a control sample of intelligent and experienced motorists. She sought some standard by which Stirling could be judged.

As she collated and analysed the results, it became quite clear to Krikler that by these measures Stirling had better not get back into a racing car. On the section of the test concerning visual co-ordination and concentration, Stirling scored the maximum measurable deficit against the control groups.  When she told him, he clearly did not fully appreciate what had happened to him, nor did he (or anyone else, for that matter) , have any idea whether this would be a permanent or shifting state.

The report was kept confidential at the time, but was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in February 1965, nearly three years after Stirling’s crash.

So whilst the press speculated in the “silly season” of late summer and early autumn about Stirling’s imminent return to motor racing, the cruel reality was that he had to lean up against a wall to put his socks on in the morning, he was unable to see straight and was virtually incapable of making properly understood.

He left Atkinson Morley on 20th July 1962.

His affable personality had changed; so he got easily frustrated and angry. Stirling was still extremely unwell, but did not realise it. His ability to accept the damage done by him to the Goodwood injuries extended only to the idea that he had been slowed down a little, that his reflexes and concentration had obviously suffered and that he might, one day, readress the matter of racing. In terms of the effect upon the rest of his activities, he was outwardly dismissive and quite unable to come to terms with the reality of what had happened to him.  In truth, the cause of what had happened interested him rather more than the resultant damage which had been inflicted upon him.

But Berenice Krikler’s clinical report, which Stirling was most reluctant to read, stated quite firmly and categorically that he was brain damaged. He was not mad or crazy, but he was severly injured. Those around him, both professionally and personally, could see it; he could not or would not. If it made his friends more protective (and they remain so to this day) then this produced in him a form of obstinacy, which when combined with his own natural impulsiveness, could lead him into perilous territory.

As Ken Gregory (his manager) put it: “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the man who came out of the Atkinson Morley was not the same man who went in.” Brain injuries are terrible things, and not only because of their obvious effects. Their victims frequently cannot grasp what has happened. In Stirling’s case, perhaps because the issues were not properly explained to him in physical terms that he could relate to, he chose to press on regardless. It would cost him dear.

Meanwhile Berenice had also observed him well enough to know that his own sense of perfectionism would not allow him to delude himself about any shortcomings in his performance. She had noted in her report that: “Racing drivers differ significantly from the controls (the regular motorists) in that they are more stable in their judgement of their performance. With racing drivers there is a trend towards a higher level of aspiration.”

His co-ordination was still a ragged shadow of its former  self, but felt he needed to earn a living as well as to concentrate.

After testing a Lotus 19 sports car, he realised with a dawning sense of horror that Berenice Krikler had been exactly right in her assessment (and later, as they became better acquainted, that her confidence in his own acuity about himself had also been spot on). All the flowing instincts, the unthinking balancing, unbalancing and rebalancing of the car were absent. If his relationship with a racing car had once been a sensuous dance, it was now more like a vaguely recalled hop with a mere acquaintance. There was no flow. It was  a disjointed, disconnecting experience… thoroughly depressing.

This was a devastating revelation for him.

From: STIRLING MOSS: The Authorised Biography by Robert Edwards (Published by Cassell & Co, UK)

And Stirling by Craig Lock [Kindle Edition]

Available at http://www.amazon.com/Stirling-Craig-Lock-ebook/dp/B004YTT4GO

and as a paperback at http://www.amazon.com/Stirling-craig-g-lock/dp/1494333805/

“Life is God’s novel; so let Ultimate Source write it, as it unfolds…”

– me (as inspired by the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer)

from The Old Man and the Sea  available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GP3MW70

Also from Golden Dawn (a book still to be written) but already available in paperback at

and as an e-book at http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Dawn-Story-Dreams-Peace-ebook/dp/B00H2B6GUS  !!!