Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Paralys lived a f a breat but as a killed hi the plu
The monotonous, mechanical wheeze of the breathing machine which sat by his father’s bed, sighing in and out every second of the day, provided a rhythm to Jonathan Cavendish’s childhood.
Robin Cavendish had been paralysed from the neck down aged just 28, after a near-fatal bout of polio.
Pumping air into his lungs through a tube inserted into his chest, this electric machine was his lifeline. If it stopped, he would die within two minutes.
And because he and his wife Diana had made the radical decision that he should come home, rather than remain in a hospital as was the norm in the 1960s, ensuring the ventilator never stopped was their responsibility alone.
Jonathan says, matter-of-factly: “I realised quite early on my father was two minutes from death at any time.”
The regular power cuts of the era brought that fact home with a heart-inmouth jolt. Thankfully, there was a hand pump for such emergencies.
But being told that, as a toddler, he had once pulled out the plug and run away, leaving his father alone, choking, and spiralling towards oblivion, must have been horrifying.
Jonathan explains: “I was around two or three, I did it by mistake. I think I just tripped over it or pulled it out or was playing, and probably ran off.”
Robin found his cries for help fading fast as the artificial breath failed. Then, with seconds left, someone happened to walk into the room and slammed the plug back in the wall. Crisis averted.
Jonathan says: “There were a lot of those moments. But it didn’t play on me because my parents made it into a joke.”
Robin and his wife Diana’s laidback attitude in the face of such trauma is just one extraordinary facet of their story, which film producer Jonathan has brought to movie screens in Breathe, starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy.
In the film, the pet dog pulls out the plug. Jonathan, 58, who produced Bridget Jones’s Diary, says: “We couldn’t get the two-year-old version of me to do it.”
Robin contracted polio in 1958, when he and Diana had been married only two years. They were living in Kenya, where Robin was a tea trader, and Diana was expecting Jonathan.
Active, gregarious Robin was suddenly told he had months to live, and would be confined to hospital until he died.
He was flown home to Oxford to endure his “final” months as a sort of “living corpse”, but he and Diana refused to accept this miserable fate.
With enormous courage, and against doctors’ orders, Diana organised for Robin to be transported to the family’s home in Oxfordshire with his ventilator.
One consultant raged that Robin would only last two weeks.
But with a special wheelchair and a mobile, battery-powered respirator designed by a friend, the scientist Dr Teddy Hall, and a van with a hydraulic lift for his chair, Robin went on to live a fulfilling life for a further 35 years.
He campaigned and did fundraising so other disabled people could have access to the same freedom-giving equipment, all the time changing perceptions and lives.
His positivity was incredible, Jonathan says, and completely infectious.
He says: “We had such incredibly good fun. I was probably 12 or 13 before I realised he was any different.”
There were even foreign holidays – although the first, to Spain, when Jonathan was seven, was a little fraught. The portable ventilator blew up as they drove round a roundabout outside Barcelona. Thank God for the hand pump.
Jonathan says: “I remember having to pump for 36 hours while poor Teddy Hall had to build a new machine and get on to a plane, fly to Barcelona, and get in a