Page 28 Daily Mail, Wednesday, August 28, 2019
F
ROM the second he was
born, just a few days into the
start of the new millennium,
the bond between Alison
Lapper and her son Paryswas an extraordinary one.
‘He was put on my breast and I could
touch him with my shoulder. It was an
amazing feeling,’ she said, in an interview,
just a few weeks after his birth.
‘They always talk about the love you
have for your child being unlike any other
— and I finally understood.’
Determined to do as much as she could
for her son herself, the fiercely independ-
ent mother — due to a congenital condi-
tion, she was born with no arms and tiny
shortened legs — breastfed her son for ten
months, learned to change his nappy with
her feet, and even (when he was still small)
managed to lift him with her teeth.
Later, Parys would ride around on his
mother’s lap as she manoeuvred in a
wheelchair, progressing to the arm of the
chair as he got bigger; which happened
quickly, the cherubic blond-haired boy
outstripping his mother’s 3ft 11in frame
by the time he headed off to school.
A tremendous mother-son relationship,
a remarkable bond of trust. In later years,
Alison and Parys would talk of the impor-
tance of that trust as he grew, negotiating
the perils of busy roads and the like.
Not in a position to grab her son by the
hand, Alison’s voice was her means of
protecting her son.
It is all of those things that make Parys
Lapper’s sudden death at the age of 19 so
utterly tragic. The circumstances of his
death are unknown; Alison’s fiancé Si
Clift gave no further detail when he
announced on Facebook ‘tragically, Parys
Lapper, who was only 19 years old, died
suddenly a week ago’.
In a message to followers, he described
Parys as ‘a mischievous, generous, kind,
loving, frustrating, cheeky, forgiving,
beautiful boy. He was his own man. He
was a good son.’
Alison, an artist, posted a photographic
tribute to the child she once thought she
would never be able to have, a montage of
images taken through the years.
H
eR SOCIAL media pages
document the warmth of their
relationship; smiling together
at parties and events, his arm
flung affectionately around her shoulder
in front of a white Christmas tree.
Today, many other people who never
knew Parys personally will also feel a sense
of grief at his death.
This is because much of Parys’s young
life was captured by TV cameras recording
by Beth Hale
Unique maternal challenges: Alison Lapper with her newborn son Parys in 2000. She learned how to pick
him up with her teeth (right). The statue (below) shows Alison when she was seven months pregnantlife
ALISON’S
Unique maternalchallenges:AlisonLapperwithheDaily Mail, Wednesday, August 28 , 2019erer nnewbornsonParysin 2000 .Shelearnedhowtopickthe acclaimed BBC series Child Of
Our Time, presented by Professor
Robert Winston.
Child Of Our Time aimed to show
the different experiences of being
a child of the new millennium and
until they turned eight, the 25 chil-
dren featured were filmed yearly.
There have been intermittent
series since to update their lives,
with the last just two years ago.
The project was intended to end
around their 20th birthdays.
Tragically, Parys is the first to die.
From before his birth, Parys was
in the public eye because of Marc
Quinn’s marble sculpture of Alison,
crafted during her pregnancy and
displayed so memorably on the
fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square
from 2005 to late 2007, more than
five years after Alison had posed.
Parys is the unseen presence in
that artwork, a large replica of which
featured in the opening ceremony
of the 2012 Paralympics.
At the time Alison sat for the
sculpture, she was seven months
pregnant, so the marble bump is
Parys. The sculpture sharply
divided public opinion, but was
hailed as the most powerful work
by a British artist in decades.
Alison and Parys first saw it in
Italy, before it was transported to
London. Parys’s reaction? ‘But
where’s me, Mummy?’ In 2005,
when the sculpture was unveiled
in its London home, Parys then
five, perched on his mother’s lap,
rain-soaked blond locks framing
his cherubic face.
But as the TV cameras lined up
to interview his mother, Parys
had one thought: ‘Mummy, when’s
the party?’
‘Later, later,’ said Alison, battling
valiantly to retain her focus. As the
interview continued, a small voice
could be heard questioning: ‘When
though, when later?’
Alison dealt with the moment
with the aplomb known by multi-
tasking parents everywhere.
Yet, there was a time when she
thought she would never be able
to be a mum.
‘I’d got so used to being told that
disabled people didn’t have rela-
tionships and didn’t have children
that I suppose I blocked all
thought of having kids out of my
mind,’ she said in a 2003 interview.
‘But I was lucky because my
doctor and gynaecologist were
very supportive, and once I became
pregnant, I was absolutely deter-
mined to keep the child.’ Right
from the start (and even before),
Alison had to deal with disapproval;
the questions about how she couldpossibly cope; the judgment. She
later recalled: ‘Normally when you
are pregnant, people ask if you’re
having a boy or a girl. All I was asked
was: “Is he going to be like you?” ’
Alison, who had been in a rela-
tionship that floundered shortly
after she discovered she was preg-
nant, was told there was a five per
cent chance her child would be
born with the same condition,
phocomelia, a condition similar to
the one caused by Thalidomide.B
uT, testament to the
steely determination
that characterises her 54
years, she said: ‘I’d just
tell people that if he were born like
me, would that be a crime? And
wouldn’t I be the best mum he
could have, so I could teach him
how to cope?’
When Parys was born, on January
6, 2000, he was, of course, perfect.
Alison has never named his father
but, from the outset, she was
determined her son would have a
childhood far removed from her
own upbringing.
When she was born in 1965,
doctors thought she would die.
When she didn’t, she was sent atsix weeks old to Chailey Heritage
School, in east Sussex, a residen-
tial home which catered for chil-
dren with physical disabilities.
She didn’t see her mother again
until she was four and, despite
contact through her childhood
and into adulthood, the relation-
ship later broke down entirely.
Shunning artificial limbs, Alison
forged her own path, leaving Chai-
ley at 17 and going on to gain a
first in fine art from the university
of Brighton before making a living
as an artist for the Mouth and Foot
Painting Artists organisation.
There was a three-year marriage
that ended in divorce, and then
later, out of the blue, came Parys.
The Child Of Our Time cameras
were present when Alison was
given an anaesthetic injection into
a vein in her neck, prior to under-
going a Caesarean section at
Worthing Hospital.
And cameras captured, so very
movingly, the overwhelming
emotion on the new mother’s face
(she was conscious throughout) as
her swaddled new arrival — all 5lb
8oz of him — was held to her
shoulder for the first time.
Footage from the series shows
Alison getting behind the wheel of
her specially adapted car, thencarefully and attentively ushering
her pre-school son out, while
keeping an eye open for traffic.
It also shows her tying his
shoelaces with her feet.
But one thing Alison was always
determined to avoid was her son
becoming her carer.
‘I remember when Parys was two
or three, a social worker wrote on
our file that he’d need special
holidays and days out as respite
from caring for me when he was
older. She just assumed that he
was going to be my prime carer,’
said Alison, in 2007.
‘I was so angry. How dare she
plot our lives for us? My heart goes
out to children who are carers
because I know how much bloody
hard work it is.
‘Children have a right to be chil-
dren and have a life, and although
Parys might pick something up for
me or give me a hand with some-
thing it is not expected of him.
‘He sees me, flaws and all. He
sees Mummy when she’s weak and
in pain, or just tired. He knows what
I’m like when I’m feeling like that,
but I never want him to be beholden
to me because of my disability.’
So, for many years, she employed
two carers to help support her
with things like cooking andFiercely loving and loyal, the
star of Trafalgar Square’s ‘fourth
plinth’ sculpture AND a major
TV series... the inspirational
story of the bond between
artist Alison Lapper and her
son, who’s died aged just 19