‘Ladder acted like a guillotine’:
One of the country’s bestknown food names talks to Kim Knight about life after the fall — the weeks when he feared he might lose a foot and getting through it sober.
Late summer in Greytown. Martin Bosley sits on his porch tasting whelks for the first time. He digs meat from the shells with a tiny metal pick and adds malt vinegar and black pepper.
They’ve been delivered by his mate Len, a 72-year-old tall, skinny Englishman on a bicycle, whose wife found these treasures — inexplicably, wondrously — in the frozen section of Kilbirnie Pak n Save.
The two men sit together, eating and chatting. Life is so lovely. And then you fall off a ladder.
“I hit the ground on my back, on my bum,” says Bosley. “I looked down at my foot . . . it was in the boot, but it was facing the wrong way.”
IT WAS the Saturday after the whelks. A week of work-home-work, the gentle monotony of a year just kicking into gear. The sun is still shining and Bosley is back outside, cutting the hornbeam hedge that surrounds the home he bought two-and-a-half years ago. He wears rugby shorts and a pair of Dr Martens ankle boots. Shirtless, no pockets, his cellphone on a table inside. He looks at the old aluminium ladder and thinks: This is definitely your last job. You’re going to the dump with the green waste.
He is a couple of metres from finishing the hedge when he hears the ladder creak. Its bottom feet buckle and fold. The ladder pancakes and Bosley biffs aside the still running hedge trimmer. Leg bones snap as he falls into the mangled metal, and then his ankle comes down on a broken rung. “The step of the ladder acted like a guillotine. Rather than just breaking the ankle, it cut the foot open and severed right through the bone and the ligaments.”
Bosley, national sales manager at sustainable seafood company Yellow Brick Road, is better known as a celebrity chef. He is a broadcast media regular who has published two cookbooks and written dozens of magazine columns. He is the former head chef of Wellington’s Brasserie Flip, who went on to do fine dining at Martin Bosley’s Yacht Club and bacon butties with his own brand “Marty Sauce” at City Market, which he cofounded. In 2014, he survived a very public business liquidation; in 2020, he made a more private decision to quit drinking. And now, on a Saturday afternoon in Greytown, he knows everything has changed again.
“The metal step of the ladder was literally just like a knife. Like a meat axe through the foot.”
Autumn is hanging on for grim life when the Weekend Herald pulls up outside a tiny cottage with a bright yellow door. The last of the leaves spindle in the cold wind and Bosley is ready to tell a cautionary tale. Four months ago, doctors told him there was a possibility he would lose his foot. For weeks, the prognosis has been bad. Now, the infection has finally gone and physio has started in earnest. His foot is saved. One day soon, he will walk again.
“It was just this profound sense of relief,” he says as the Weekend Herald camera rolls. “Like the storm clouds had lifted. Sort of a biblical moment, when the sun came through and the angels sang because this terrible, terrible thing was no longer a possibility and for the first time since the accident, I could see the finish line.”
But what Bosley doesn’t know — what he doesn’t find out until three days after we leave and the video is edited, the photographs filed and the story under way — is that the infection is back. He is not out of the woods.
At Masterton Hospital, during his weekly check-up, a doctor will tell Bosley the setback is likely caused by the screws that have been placed in the bottom of his tibia; that, assuming another round of antibiotics does its job, the metalware may need to come out sooner than anticipated.
Bosley faces more surgery and the ultimate threat — an infection that can’t be controlled, that gets into his bones, that once again raises the spectre of amputation just below the knee.
“IT’S BEEN a s*** day,” he tells the Weekend Herald over the phone.
What happens when your world literally collapses?
Three days earlier, Bosley told us, “I’d never broken anything. I’ve never sprained an ankle, I used to read about those accidents where bone came through the skin and I’d literally start throwing up in my mouth.”
His neighbours heard him yelling for help. Sue over the back fence dialled 111. Nicholla Tobin, on the other side, had never met him (“he was the quiet neighbour with great smells coming off the grill”) but she fetched his shirt and a blanket and was holding his head when Bosley heard ambulance officers tell her “he can’t go unconscious, we need to stop him losing so much blood, we need to try and save the foot”.
Her husband, Chris, part-way through his volunteer firefighter training, assisted an ambulance officer dealing with the compound fractures and profuse bleeding.
I’ve fortunately never had to go through any sort of depressive episodes or anything like that. But suddenly I found myself in that state. When was the first time I cried, Mum . . ?