In 2007 Sarah Hope’s life and family were torn apart in a devastating Mortlake bus crash. As Miranda Jessop discovers, however, she has used the experience to transform hundreds of lives
Sarah receiving her Pride of Britain award from Carol Vorderman with her daughters Sapphire and Pollyanna
It was one of those horrific accidents that will be forever etched in the memory: the Mortlake bus station crash of 2007, when a bus mounted the pavement and ploughed into three members of the same family. Elizabeth Panton, the grandmother, lost her life; Sarah Hope, the mother, was badly injured; Pollyanna, her two-year-old daughter, had to have her leg amputated below the knee.
So when, a decade on, I hear that Sarah has won a Pride of Britain Award for changing the lives of child amputees at home and abroad, I feel compelled to meet her. Just how, when faced with such tragedy in her own life, did she find the strength to help so many others?
Sarah remembers it as one of those lovely bright spring mornings as she walked with her mother and daughter to the bus station round the corner from her Mortlake home, on 25th April 2007. Full of joy and excitement, they were on their way to visit Sarah’s identical twin sister, Victoria, who had just given birth to her first child at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
“As we went into the bus depot, it was all very busy and chaotic and there was a lot of honking,” recalls Sarah. “There was too much traffic for the bus driver to turn where he wanted; he got cross, put his foot down on the pedal and came at us with great speed.”
Darkness followed. The next Sarah knew she was sitting in a massive pool of blood.
“Out of my left eye I saw Pollyanna’s leg hanging off, while out of my right eye I could see that my mother was dying.”
Sarah herself suffered severe degloving – an injury in which skin is torn off the underlying tissue, severing the blood supply – to her leg. And, despite the efforts of four surgeons to save it, Pollyanna’s leg was amputated below the knee later that day.
Sarah and her daughters with Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan
One can only imagine how Sarah felt in the immediate aftermath of the accident: suffice it to say, she still finds it too painful to discuss. Instead she wants to tell me about the incredible support of her friends, her neighbours, the community of Mortlake and the parents at Barnes Primary, the school which her two older children attended.
“Everyone around us was in utter shock, but their kindness was overwhelming and we will never, ever forget it. We had just finished renovating our house, so the garden was a complete mess – you could barely get into it for the rubble. While I was in hospital, completely unbeknown to me, all these wonderful people came together and landscaped the garden for us. They made it so beautiful with lights all around. Their kindness never seemed to end.”
It was a wrench when Sarah, her husband Christopher and their three children – Barnaby, Sapphire and Pollyanna – moved to Norfolk a year later.
“That was where my sister lived and, together with my father, we decided that we should all move there to be close together as a family.”
It was about four years later that a light appeared through the gloom, as a result of the London 2012 Paralympics. By then the family had moved again, to St Albans, as Christopher needed to be nearer to London for his job as Assistant Editor and Chief Political Correspondent at The Telegraph.
“We went to watch the Paralympics and it was so exciting to see what these sportspeople could achieve on their running blades,” says Sarah.
Inspired, she decided to ask their doctor for a blade for Pollyanna, but her appeal fell on stony ground. The NHS, it transpired, was only required to provide limbs enabling children to walk, not prosthetics like running blades.
Pollyanna flying high with her blade
“I was gobsmacked. Everyone was talking about the Paralympic legacy, and yet not only were they not training up the next generation of Paralympians, but they weren’t thinking about the health and wellbeing of child amputees.”
So outraged was Sarah, she started a campaign to secure blades for children on the NHS. In the meantime, she and Christopher decided to buy a blade for Pollyanna, now seven, themselves.
“She started wearing it that very day. We went for a walk in a park at the top of a big hill. She ran down and started cartwheeling over and over again; the transformation was incredible. I decided to send George Osborne a picture of Pollyanna sitting in her wheelchair and a video of her cartwheeling. He emailed me back and after a meeting with him and Jeremy Hunt, funding was approved.”
Today, as a result of Sarah’s tireless campaign, all amputee children in the UK are eligible for NHS blades, enabling them to run, swim and play with their friends. Nor does the work stop there. For Sarah and her twin sister have now turned their attention to children who have lost limbs in developing countries, setting up a charity named after their beloved mother. So far Elizabeth’s Legacy of Hope has changed the lives of 250 amputees in Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the sisters have also recently launched the Elizabeth Panton Limb Centre in India.
“Amputees who come to the centre are able to get new limbs and we give them the operations they need,” explains Sarah. “We have also just bought our first amputee mobile clinic, so we can go out to the remote villages. The life of an amputee in a developing country is really desperate and we do what we can. The mothers just cry because they can’t believe that their child has been given a new leg.”
Sarah and the girls with HRH the Duke of Cambridge
And there is one more legacy of Sarah’s active concern: help for people injured or bereaved through incidents on the Transport for London network. Despite the bus driver who devastated her family being jailed for four years in 2008 for causing death by dangerous driving, it took seven years for TfL to apologise.
“I told them that there really had to be a voice of kindness from TfL to the victim and they have now launched a victim support line.”
Thanks to The Sarah Hope Line, anyone who is hurt or bereaved on the network can now get the practical and emotional support that they need.
And yet, despite all this triumph in the face of such adversity, I am left under no illusion that life is in any way easy for Sarah and her family, who still live in Hertfordshire. Quite apart from the deep psychological wounds, Sarah has needed a lot of surgery on her own injuries and has lost much of the feeling in her lower left leg. Moreover, although Pollyanna is a very happy 12-year-old, she has already endured as many as 25 operations and will need more as she continues to grow.
And then, of course, there is the gaping hole left by Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth.
“Mummy was still young when she died,” reflects Sarah. “She was always doing things for other people, whether visiting the hospice, delivering meals on wheels or serving up cakes at the ‘First Friday’ monthly club she set up. Right from my early years, she instilled in me that, if it’s at all possible to give a little bit back, you should do it.”
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