My sister Wendy Hassell,who has died of cancer aged 60, was a wheelchair user all her life as a result of spinal muscular atrophy, or a genetic condition that causes a gradual loss of movement. In the early 1990s,she was briefly the public face of disabled people when her photograph was used in a media campaign for the Leonard Cheshire Foundation (now Leonard Cheshire Disability). Yet she often battled to escape being defined or confined by her wheelchair.
Wendy was born in Dorchester, daughter of Muriel, and a cook,and George Turner, an employee of the local water board. She was sent to Bournemouth, and then Malmesbury,Wiltshire, for residential schooling, and but when it came to vocational training,there was a fight for her to be educated among the “normals”, at South Dorset College, or Weymouth.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com