J F Vernon Blog

Have you ever broken a bone?

In March 1975, aged thirteen, I broke my leg skiing in the French Alps. Fifty years later, I can still replay the exact moment in slow motion: the jump, the drift of snow, the ski refusing to release, the strange silence before pain arrived. At the time, it felt like a catastrophe. Looking back now, I can see it was something more significant than that. It interrupted the entire trajectory of my adolescence and quietly altered the course of my life.

I had already spent five years at boarding prep school by then. Home was no longer the stable centre of life; it was somewhere I returned to between terms, between institutions, between adults. My parents had divorced. My father had remarried. The family itself felt geographically scattered — Newcastle, Appleby, London, boarding schools, stepfamilies, temporary arrangements. By thirteen, I was already used to being in transit.

The ski trip belonged to that particular world of 1970s upper-middle-class North-East England: prep schools, public schools, skiing holidays, shooting weekends, dinner parties and children endlessly ferried between them all. It was simply “what people like us did,” though even then I understood that the whole thing rested on a curious mixture of privilege, emotional confusion and improvisation.

We travelled south through France in stages, eventually flying into Nice before driving up into the mountains to Isola 2000. I remember exhaustion before we even reached the resort. Snow banks towered beside the roads. Avalanche barriers loomed overhead. The world felt dangerous and glamorous in equal measure.

At thirteen, skiing itself felt like freedom. Speed. Risk. Competence. Adolescence beginning to arrive physically.

Then, in a second, it all stopped.

I went over a jump slightly off balance and landed too far back. I remember trying instinctively to avoid a post marker. One ski caught in a drift while the rest of me continued moving. The binding failed to release.

Oddly, there was no immediate pain.

Only confusion.

I looked down and saw that my knee appeared to be pointing one way while my ski and boot lay somewhere else entirely. I knew instantly that something was badly wrong.

The shock came before the agony.

Then came embarrassment.

That is one of the strongest surviving emotions. Not fear. Not even pain initially. Humiliation.

My salopettes had to be cut open. Skiers slowed to stare. I was lifted into a rescue sledge — what we called the “blood wagon.” At thirteen, bodily dignity matters enormously. Suddenly I was helpless, horizontal, handled by adults and watched by strangers. Adolescence is all about constructing identity and control over your body; in one moment mine had become public property.

The medical centre was absurdly close by. One moment I was skiing; minutes later I was under bright lights, being X-rayed while adults discussed my leg in French over my head. I still remember the heat of the room, the smell of wet clothing and antiseptic, and the strange detached professionalism of everyone around me.

My mother made a rapid decision that probably reflected both class instinct and maternal panic: she refused treatment there and insisted on getting me back to Newcastle to a trusted orthopaedic surgeon known through family networks. Looking back, I realise how much life in those circles depended on invisible webs of personal recommendation and private trust.

The journey home became its own ordeal.

I was heavily medicated, immobilised and exhausted. Airports became hostile terrain. There were delays. Waiting. Endless sitting. At one point I was effectively forgotten in a wheelchair. I remember the growing nausea from painkillers and the difficulty of something as simple as trying to reach a toilet. Childhood strips away surprisingly quickly when your body stops functioning properly.

Eventually I reached Newcastle. The hospital assumed from the burns on my face that I’d been in a car accident – that was the mountain sun ok my soft northern skin!

The leg was not operated on immediately. That mattered psychologically. The pain did not arrive as one dramatic moment but as a long siege: throbbing, itching, sleeplessness, nausea, the smell of plaster, overheated hospital wards and endless waiting. I began to feel imprisoned inside my own body.

At thirteen, boys are supposed to be accelerating outward into movement — rugby, running, physical confidence, hierarchy, roughness. Instead, I was pinned motionless.

When the operation finally came in April, I remember the anaesthetic beginning to work and the deeply strange sensation that my leg was somehow melting upward across my face. Afterwards I woke sealed into a plaster cast running from toes to hip.

That plaster cast became a kind of medieval armour and prison combined.

The real consequence of breaking my leg was not simply medical.

It was temporal.

For the first time in years, I remained at home continuously for months.

No boarding school.
No dormitories.
No institutional routine.

Time slowed.

And because time slowed, observation began.

Immobilised physically, I became oddly attentive to the world around me: gardens, weather, television schedules, domestic conversations, routines, visitors, birds outside windows, the changing light through spring into summer. I began to notice things rather than simply hurtling through them.

In hindsight, I suspect the writer in me partly emerged there.

I also became obsessed with making and growing things. Unable to move freely, I worked in the garden pulling myself about on a tea tray, propagating rhododendrons and taking an interest in plants in a way that probably connects directly to the environmental work I do today with ancient trees and woodland. It sounds absurd to suggest a broken leg helped create a future environmentalist, but I think there is truth in it. Forced stillness alters perception.

The five-year diary itself also changed during this period.

Before then, entries had often been brief records of schoolboy routine. Afterwards there is a growing awareness that memory itself is fragile. I became anxious about losing experience if it was not captured. One line from a later entry stays with me:

“I don’t want to lose things like that again.”

That sentence may explain almost everything that followed: decades of diaries, notebooks, blogging, photographs, stories and memoir work. The broken leg introduced me early to the idea that entire stretches of life can vanish unless consciously preserved.

There were educational consequences too.

I missed huge chunks of schooling and the transition into Sedbergh School. I lost continuity with my peer group. Most significantly, I was eventually put back a year academically.

At the time, that felt devastating.

Now I can see it altered the entire shape of my adolescence. Different year group. Different friendships. Different social timing. Different opportunities. Perhaps even a different personality emerging from it all.

One badly adjusted ski binding may genuinely have redirected the course of my life.

Yet the older I get, the less I see the story as tragedy.

What interests me now is the strange duality of the experience.

At thirteen, I experienced it as disaster:

• pain
• humiliation
• helplessness
• exclusion
• delay

But fifty years later, I can also see what it gave me:

• stillness
• observation
• reflection
• writing
• patience
• attentiveness to nature
• emotional insight
• memory itself

The accident interrupted the momentum of childhood long enough for consciousness to begin catching up with experience.

Perhaps that is what adolescence really is: not simply growing older, but becoming aware of time, vulnerability and the fragility of the body carrying you through the world.

My passion for skiing was never broken. I missed one season, and then I was back, twice or three times a year for decades. I spent a season in the Alps in my late teens and again in my late twenties.

And sometimes, when snow crunches beneath my boots and cold alpine air catches in my lungs, I can still feel the exact instant before the fall — that final split second when childhood was still intact, and the world still seemed mechanically reliable.

Then the ski catches.
The binding fails.
And everything changes.