Strictly Jonnie’s boyhood courage
Mum tells how star thrived with one leg
WHEN Jonnie Peacock leaps across the Strictly floor, we see a brave and determined pioneer, the show’s first amputee contestant.
But what mum Linda Green also sees as she watches him from the audience is a scared little boy, crying in pain.
The Paralympic gold medallist was ravaged by meningitis aged five.
And in the first 24 hours of his illness, Linda feared he would not live, let alone jive. He was so poorly, Linda was told by the doctors to say goodbye.
In an emotional first interview with her boy, she spoke of how watching him in action on the BBC show fills her with more than just pride – it gives her flashbacks to his ordeal.
She recalled the moment she rushed the youngster to hospital with a “purplish red rash which smothered him from head to foot”.
She said: They were putting lines into him everywhere. They said, ‘If you have anything to say to him you have to say it now, because we are going to put him into a coma – that’s the only way his body can fight’.
“So I went round, right next to his head, and I was stroking his hair, his lovely, blond hair.
“And he was so delirious, and he just said ‘Ow’. And I said, ‘That’s right, you fight. You stop them doing that’.
“I thought if he goes down feisty, he might have a chance.
“I couldn’t say goodbye. I told him I loved him and he just drifted away.
“When they put the camera on me on Strictly and I’m bawling my eyes out, I must look a right soppy mum but that’s what flashes back to me.
“I don’t just have my son back – look at him, he is just stunning.
“I’m so genuinely thankful to Strictly, not just for giving someone with a disability a chance but the fact that I, as Jonnie’s mum, get to see him so happy.”
Jonnie, 24, can remember very little, he said, believing his brain has wiped the memory to protect him. “I think I was angry and confused,” he said. “I was five. You understand your leg has gone but you don’t really know why.” Linda recalls every painful detail from their time in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. Jonnie was conscious before the surgery, performed by Per Hall, and took the news surprising well, clearly unable to process it. “He was into Transformers and Power Rangers so he thought that might be quite cool,” she said. But when he came out of theatre, his response was heartbreaking as he blamed Linda. “He looked down and there’s a flat
space, where his leg was – he just screamed, absolutely screamed,” she said.
“He wouldn’t look at me. He told me I had given him the wrong Calpol. That went on the whole of that day.”
But Jonnie has always been one of life’s optimists – an active, football-mad lad who never sat still and was a real wind-up merchant. By evening, that Jonnie was back.
“Right towards bedtime, someone had given him a water pistol,” said Linda. “I tried again to peek around the curtain. Every time I had previously, he turned his head, it was horrible, but then he squirted me and it was hysterical.”
That resilience was to typify Jonnie’s attitude.
His abiding memory is being back home and insisting on changing his own bandages. “I remember having a nurse come to change my bandages,” he said. “They were teaching Mum but I wanted to do it.
“That’s just me. I guess a fiveyear-old wanting to change their bandages, that is something!”
Ever modest, Jonnie insists it was Linda, 52, and his father Chris, who still live near Cambridge, and his sisters Bethany, 33, Rebekah, 27, and Hannah, 26, who truly experienced the trauma of his illness.
“It was a lot harder on those guys than me at the time,” he said.
Chris, 54, a maintenance engineer who split from Linda before Jonnie’s illness, says it was around six months before Jonnie’s knee healed enough to be fitted with a prosthetic leg. Nevertheless, he would simply not stay still. “The meningitis had ravaged his body but he got around so quickly, he had great balance,” said Chris. “If you weren’t careful he would get away from you!”
Linda built a bedroom in the space under the stairs, thinking he would not be able to use them.
But in just two weeks, Jonnie was flying up them.
She says: “He was like Spider-Man, that was his nickname. He just used to climb up the banisters.”
Jonnie even insisted on doing ballet with his sisters to get stronger – when he wasn’t chasing them, brandishing his prosthetic like a stick. “I used to say, ‘That’s your leg, it’s not a weapon,” said Linda.
Jonnie added: “I didn’t think about it. As a kid you want to get on with life and I was always sporty, and any opportunity I would get involved.”
Linda, who worked for a disability charity after Jonnie’s illness, got him involved in athletics – and in training, he did very little different to the ablebodied athletes.
His dedication led him to win the 100m in the 2012 and 2016 Paralympics.
He is now Strictly’s first amputee contestant but says his ability is barely any different from the other celebs. This week, he is training for the quickstep with pro partner Oti Mabuse, which he says is “tough” – but not because of his prosthetic leg.
“Rise and fall sometimes on the right leg won’t be as good, squatting sometimes the bum comes out, otherwise everything is pretty much the same,” he said, stressing he doesn’t want special treatment.
“You try and do it as normal as possible. You try as hard as you can,” he insisted. “When I was a kid, Mum would say, ‘You have the washing-up to do’, and suddenly my leg would fall off and I’d say ‘I can’t stand there now’.
“The first couple of times it worked, then she realised, so she put a chair there and said, ‘You can kneel on that’. Every person, if they find something hard they’ll say ‘I can’t do it’, but they can. They just have to work harder.”
Linda nodded. That’s her lad. “His stump used to be raw, sore, terrible, but he still put his leg on,” she said.
“I’d be cringing and so upset but it was more painful for him to watch boys playing and not be able to join in.”
Her son’s a fighter, said Linda, and she will be ever-thankful for that.
His stump used to be raw, sore, terrible but he still put his leg on LINDA GREEN