Back from the brink: Tetraplegic’s war stories
He was 16 when a fateful plunge into a river left him a tetraplegic. But war stories have brought him back,
Some might say Patrick Bronte’s interest in the stories of war veterans began with his dad’s passion for military history.
Others might say it began when he saw Saving Private Ryan the first time.
But really, it began on the bank of the Tukituki River on a scorching hot morning, two days after Christmas, 1996.
That’s when he broke his neck. Patrick was a rebellious, antiauthoritarian 16-year-old, who was vastly more interested in skateboarding, swimming and hockey than studying.
After a morning skateboarding around Waipukurau he and three mates went to the river for a swim before lunch.
It was a swimming hole they knew well, near a shingle plant. They’d been swimming there all summer.
He climbed the willow tree they’d been diving from. Then he leapt.
Only, he had gone too far up the tree, and his dive was too steep. He smashed into a shallow ledge aside the pool, and instantly lost all feeling below his neck.
He was lying in the water, face down, motionless. His mates thought he was taking the mickey.
‘‘I could hear them talking. Then one of them pulled me up onto the gravel. I had these bizarre electriclike sensations. I thought ‘this is it’,’’ said Patrick, who is now 38.
One of his mates ran to the shingle plant to get help. The others floated him to the shallows, then pulled him out.
An ambulance arrived, then a rescue helicopter, then his mother, who had rushed from their home – a sheep and beef farm 20km east of Waipukurau.
‘‘It felt like a scene from a TV show, doors smashing open as they rushed me to ER. It was all bit of a blur,’’ he said.
‘‘I remember telling the surgery people ‘please don’t cut my shorts off, they’re not mine’.
‘‘I’d borrowed them from my mate to go swimming in,’’ Patrick said.
He spent three days in Hawke’s Bay Hospital before being flown to Burwood Spinal Unit in Christchurch.
He and his parents knew things weren’t good, that he’d broken his neck, but none of them knew what the long-term prognosis might be.
In Burwood his lungs collapsed, probably due to the water he had taken in, and he was put in an induced coma for three weeks.
‘‘I only have vague memories of all that. I think things were pretty touch and go for a while. They down play things to make you feel better.
‘‘I was on a ventilator and I was struggling to talk. Dad had a hard time trying to lip-read and hearing my faint voice. He was very distraught. Mum became the translator. Mum went home for a break. That’s when Dad and I actually became very close,’’ he said.
‘‘During that sixth form year he was the enforcer of discipline. I did some stupid things, got suspended from school for driving students around town at lunchtime on my restricted licence. I was a little shit. It was Dad who had to try to bring me in line.
‘‘Looking back he was very fair, but at the time it didn’t feel that way. We’d been at each other’s throat for a year. In hospital he read a book to me. It was Andy McNabb’s Immediate Action .I broke down a few times. He broke down too,’’ he said.
From a very young age Patrick had been influenced by his dad’s interest in military history.
‘‘Mum and Dad always encouraged me to read. Dad would find books that interested me. They tended to be military oriented because that’s what I liked.’’
His dad’s grandfather had fought at Gallipoli and the Western Front in World War I, and his mother’s father had served on a submarine in World War II.
‘‘Frustratingly all he’d ever say to us when we asked about the war was ‘we used to just wave at mermaids’. That’s all he ever said,’’ Patrick recalls.
When his father read him that Andy McNabb book, Patrick’s interest was reignited. He began devouring books on war, history and soldiering.
Then came the news. After weeks in traction he was told that he would likely be a tetraplegic.
‘‘I kind of knew by then that I wouldn’t be walking again. But I thought I might be able to use my arms. That’s what I thought being disabled was all about. But it was looking like I might have to use my chin to operate a wheelchair unless my shoulders could move. I spent ages at the gym. I had to work hard. I’ve never worked so hard on anything as I did over that six months,’’ he said.
Eventually he was able to move his shoulders sufficiently to manouevre his arms in a way that would allow him to work a wheelchair.
After six months at Burwood he was able to return to Hawke’s Bay. That’s when things really sank in.
‘‘At Burwood you’re surrounded by people who are like you, and staff who don’t look at you any differently. They don’t see the wheelchair. You’re in a bubble there. It only sinks in when you come home. I spent the first three months in the old Waipukurau hospital, just before it closed, while a new wing was put on our house for me. Living in the hospital was alright. Living in town was a novelty. I was able to catch up with my mates,’’ he said.
‘‘My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to get a girlfriend again.’’
He needn’t have worried too much. He had one within a few months.
For the past 16 years he has been with Julie, with whom he now lives in Palmerston North.
‘‘I’ve been very lucky.’’
His closest mates finished school and began heading off to university. In 1998 he had a change of heart about school and decided to return to complete seventh form and ‘‘do it right’’.
But behind the brave face the former upstart was losing his pluck. Depression became a constant companion.
‘‘Before the accident I was a moody and angry teenager. After it I matured a lot. I think you have to. I never got angry, or bitter, or packed tantrums. I just got depressed.’’
It was around this time that he talked a reluctant caregiver into taking him to a Hastings cinema to see Saving Private Ryan.
‘‘It made a huge impression on me. The next day I told Dad about it. He got out all his D-Day books. It was around then that an old acting mate of Dad’s came round. His name was Tony Langley, known as ‘Bones’. I said ‘Bones were you in the war?’. He said ‘yeah’. I asked if he talked about it. He said ‘yeah to people who are genuinely interested’.
‘‘So the next weekend he came out with his mate Charlie Reed, another WWII veteran. They did that for about six weeks, every weekend. They’d get quite animated, and a bit argumentative sometimes. I’d just sit back and soak it all in.’’
Those Sunday sessions with Charlie and Bones gradually helped lift Patrick from his depression.
‘‘They inspired me. I began thinking about the very, very difficult periods they had gone through in their lives when they were young and I thought ‘I’d better get through it too’.’’
He decided to go to university, and was admitted to Massey.
In 1999 he moved from Waipukurau to a state house in Highbury, Palmerston North.
Unfortunately it coincided with an addiction to opiates.
‘‘They were the only things that could deal with the pain. It was all prescribed, but it meant I was a zombie and couldn’t focus. I had to bail from uni and go back to Burwood to get off the drugs and go on the methadone programme.’’
Further health issues ruled out returning until the next year.
‘‘By then I was really hungry to get into it. Really hungry. I was into arthouse film at that stage. The closest thing they had to that at Massey was media studies. So I studied that and warfare studies in the centre of defence and security studies. I was at some lecture, daydreaming. I thought, ‘I need to record Bones and Charlie’s stories. They’re the ones who got me here’. So I went back to Waipuk and interviewed them with this huge VHS camera I borrowed from Massey. I had no idea what I was doing. I’m the sort of person that rushes into things without much planning, like a bull at a gate.
‘‘After talking to Bones and Charlie I started thinking ‘there’s something to this’.’’
So he tracked down more veterans. Usually each one he interviewed was happy to put him on to others he should meet.
‘‘The stories were incredible. Real Boy’s Own or Commando comic stuff.’’
The BA studies were ongoing, but health issues would keep cropping up, keeping him away for months at a time.
‘‘Eventually I just started thinking about how important these interviews I was doing were, and that the people I’m interviewing weren’t going to be around for long. I knew I had to get as many done as quickly as I could.
‘‘The ones I got close to started dying, or got to the point they couldn’t remember anything due to dementia. Even Bones couldn’t remember me. I just thought it didn’t make any sense to get the degree, so I dropped it.’’
The plan with the recordings was to deposit them in the Waiouru Army Museum.
And things began ticking along. Word got out among the veterans and RSA circles and he was even approached by the NZSAS Association to capture the experiences of the members of the SAS who served in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam.
Then in 2009 his dad, Roger, died at just 57, just two months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
‘‘And that’s when everything turned to shit for me.’’
Patrick was away interviewing SAS veterans when he died.
‘‘He insisted I went and did my interview. It was full circle in a way.
‘‘He was my best mate, by biggest supporter, my father. I was reeling from that’’.
The depression returned and the veterans project was parked.
For about eight years the project was on the backburner. He did the occasional interview, but it was far from a priority, and the zeal with which he’d set out had dimmed.
A bout of pneumonia in 2010 didn’t help. It nearly killed him, twice. He was resuscitated both times.
His wife, mother and a psychologist brought him slowly back from deep depression.
Then, last year, the clouds began to clear. He returned to the project. Before long he was applying the sort of vigour he had 10 years earlier.
This time, though, he had refined things. He saw the future would not involve putting the interviews in archives at a museum, where they would rarely be seen, but on a website that anyone could access at any time.
So he’s developed a website, ngatoa.com, which launched today. Initially it will contain the stories of some 100 veterans. Eventually it will include all 300 veterans he’s interviewed so far, and more to come.
He has also formed a trust, the Nga Toa Charitable Trust as a funding vehicle for the project and has created a Givealittle page for anyone willing to contribute.
‘‘I’ve spent a lot of my own money and inheritance on these interviews, which is fine and I’m not complaining about that at all. It’s been my choice to do that. But there are aspects of the project that I need both professional help and financial aid to see it right through,’’ he said.
‘‘I think people have seen it as a hobby. I created the trust so it would be taken more seriously. I see it as something I can give back to the country because the country has been so good to me through their taxes paying for ACC which has covered me.
‘‘People say to me ‘oh it makes sense that you do this because you have so much time’.
‘‘I’m thinking ‘mate, if you knew how long it takes me to get out of bed each morning and to carry out simple tasks, you wouldn’t say that. There are a lot of complications with being a tetraplegic’.’’
So far he’s spoken to about 300 individual veterans – several of those two or three times – compiling about 700 hours of footage. ‘‘I try and go for three hours. The first hour is about their life before the army. The rest is about their service. It’s all about their individual part. Each individual only saw a small part of a big battle. They could only turn their head left and right and look forward.’’
About 60 per cent of those served in WWII, the rest were from conflicts since, including Afghanistan. He’s heard some incredible yarns. Bravery, terror, fear, death and humour all feature.
‘‘I think it’s important the public hears them so they can understand how personal warfare is. And how it’s not black and white. It’s grey and it’s a horrible affair. This is so the public can see and hear these accounts, and can appreciate those who have and do still serve the country in conflict.’’
‘‘Before the accident I was a moody and angry teenager. After it I matured a lot. I think you have to. I never got angry, or bitter, or packed tantrums. I just got depressed’’.