Dear Sir, - You have published in your papers various letters at various times from legless girls, as well as stories dealing with cripples of various kinds. All these have treated the loss of a limb or limbs as an interesting experience and not as a handicap, so I think it might interest your readers exactly what it feels like to be a cripple. I am one myself, and I have innumerable cripple friends of all kinds and ages owing to having visited most of the big cities of Europe and America and having been in touch with various institutions and clubs for cripples.
First of all, it may interest your readers to know the mind of a person of physical abnormality is almost always abnormal also. Nearly all cripples are obsessed with an idea of their own inferiority. They are reserved, introspective, and frequently very sensitive about their disability, which makes them of melancholy and distinctly unattractive character.
This applies less to those who were born crippled than to those who lose a limb of faculty later in life. Frequently the former are delightful companions, especially those who are really seriously handicapped.
I remember a girl of 22 or so whom I met in Berlin. She was born completely without a right leg, while her left leg was no more than a foot in length and practically paralysed.
She could only walk with the aid of a rigid steel instrument on her one leg, using crutches, of course, while she wore a special corset fitted with a saddle and prop on which to rest, rather as you would sit on a shooting stick.
In spite of the fact that she was unable to walk more than a few yards at a time, while the simplest everyday action, like sitting on a chair, was, for her, a real effort, she was one of the most cheerful people I have ever met. We used to talk frequently about the minds and characters of ourselves and our crippled friends.
Her conviction was that her body didn't matter - that by its being so malformed it set her mind free from all the material things of life. But she, unlike me, had never known what it was to be a normal girl with hopes of marriage, a home and children, and all the normal desires of a girl.
Here I had better tell you that I am 29, and was quite an ordinary person till I was 18, when a car accident deprived me of my right leg at the thigh and my left at the ankle. With an artificial foot and a pair of crutches I can get about quite well, though many of the things I do with apparent ease are really a considerable effort.
Like all other cripples I loathe sympathy and being help when I can manage myself. I am quite hardened to stares - I get plenty of them - and have taught myself, after a great mental struggle, to talk quite openly and easily about my disability.
Incidentally, unlike most cripples, I realise that some men find physical disability actually attractive I can tell them by the way they look at me.
I know a l5-year old girl of great beauty who has a withered leg which necessitates her wearing a boot with a 6in. cork sole and irons both sides of her leg, who tells me that she is frequently accosted by strangers. But she is exceptional in that she is good looking. Most cripples are not. They generally dress badly, and take no trouble with their looks. In addition, they wear a look of resignation to their fate which only arouses sympathy in the beholder - the last thing they want. For some reason, this is especially the case with those who have to use crutches.
Now, walking on crutches is a strain till you are thoroughly used to it, though I have proved that it needn't appear on your face. But unfortunately, it is impossible to prevent your shoulders becoming raised and thickened. I try and prevent this. I used to sleep in a most severe shoulder brace every night for years, but it was no good. Another disadvantage of crutches is that they rub your armpits sore sometimes and wear out your clothes.
To get over the former I wear a special camisole fitted with tiny sleeves and chamois leather under the arms; but I cannot prevent my clothes wearing, anyhow. For those who can use elbow crutches I suppose it is all right, but I don't feel secure on these with only an artificial foot to stand on.
I should also like to say that artificial limbs are by no means comfortable things to wear. The corset has to be laced very tightly, for one thing - to ease it is to run the risk of chafing the stump.
In hot weather I sometimes feel I could cry with the continual clinging discomfort of the corset that encases my stump from ankle to knee, especially as I generally wear a boot on my leg to hide, as far as possible, my shortcomings. And a change of the weather often seems to make my poor stump so tender that walking even a short distance is horribly painful. But this is enough, I must not whine, for after all I had relatively little real pain when I suffered my amputation.
A Danish friend of mine was less lucky. She used to be a pretty maiden-haired girl till she was involved in a tram car smash. She was pinned down in the wreck, her feet crushed beneath a piece of steel carried frame. Fire broke out, and for some time she lay there, the wreck burning nearer and nearer her poor prisoned feet, and the steel grid getting hotter and hotter.
Finally the rescuers were driven back by the flames before she was released, and she was abandoned to her fate. It was night time, and no doctor had arrived not that he could have helped her had he been there and there she would have burned to death but for a young forester who, as the flames enveloped her feet, rushed in and, with one or two blows of his woodman's axe severed her legs from her body at the thighs and dragged her to safety.
She says she fainted as the second blow fell - I hope for her sake she did. But, in any case, her skin is now white, and her face and eyes bear the trace of her ordeal as she sits for ever in her wheeled chair with not even an inch of stumps where her legs should be.
She is the most pathetic cripple I know, though there is another I have met whose story is nearly as horrible.
It started with a very small thing, - simply a gun going off accidentally which damaged her foot and necessitated the amputation of her first and second toes. She had missed them, but when she had practically forgotten the incident she felt one day an uncomfortable feeling in her foot, and as it persistedshe went to a doctor about it. He diagnosed gangrene, and had to have her foot amputated.
All went well for a while. She learnt to walk with an artificial foot and then, just after I met her, she started to feel a curious numb sensation in her stump. For some time she said nothing about it, possibly fearing another operation. Amputations are far from painless by the way. And then one day she asked me what she should do.
I had a look at her stump and though not a doctor, I saw something was very wrong by its colour, and the upshot was that she lost her leg at the knee. But she had waited too long. The poison was in her blood; and hardly had she learnt to use her artificial leg before a discoloured patch appeared on her remaining foot, and that had to go as well.
A year later I had quite a cheery letter from her, saying that she was in a nursing home after having both legs removed at the thighs, and some time later she wrote to say that she was learning to use her left hand as her right had gone. Since then I have not heard from her; now, if she is still alive, I should not be very much surprised to hear that she has anything but four stumps instead of limbs.
But to return to rather more cheerful things, I must tell you an interesting fact that is not generally known. After you have lost a limb, you have a sort of ghost of it, and it feels as if it still were there. In fact, you can tell in what position your limb would be if it were not missing. Thus I can swing my amputated leg and waggle the toes of my absent foot.
Incidentally, I do this as I walk about as if I had a perfectly normal pair of legs. This is often very awkward before you are thoroughly used to the absence of a leg, and led my friend into a very laughable situation once.
She was very fond of "showing off" and doing things just as if she had not lost a leg at the thigh. One day she wos punting a party of friends on the river when her pole stuck, and in the stress of the moment she snapped back on to her leg that wasn't there.
They pulled her out none the less for her ducking and she solemnly swore not to show off again, an oath which she breaks about twice a day.
But this is rather an exceptional case. Usually we try to hide our disabilities as much as possible, and for those of us who can do so successfully it sometimes lead to awkward situations. A certain friend of mine is a case in point.
She has a rather common hip disease that causes her hip joints to become dislocated when her weight is on her feet; but, having spent most of her childhood strapped flat on her back on a special couch, having her legs pulled down by weights hung from her feet, she can now prevent the dislocation by wearing a surgical corset joined to thigh sheaths which are so steeled and jointed that they keep the joints from slipping.
Of course, with her hips so firmly bound up in this appliance her activities are seriously hampered, and though she can walk quite naturally it is very difficult for her to climb stairs or even step on a bus.
She is so sensitive about her disability that many of her acquaintances know nothing about it at all. Consequently they are often slightly annoyed when she flatly refuses invitations to dance, play tennis, and so on - things she would love to do, if she could.
She is always complaining that she loses her friends, and when I tell her that she had much better pocket her pride and tell them the truth, she cannot bring herself to do so, and so she has a pretty rotten time.
I really believe that people are nice enough not to look down on cripples, and it is quite possible for even a seriously disabled to mix with normal people on a level footing if they care to do so; but this foolish cripple's pride is always standing in the way. I taught myself to forget my pride, but it is a hard lesson to learn.
Cripples, on the whole, are dispassionate people who conceal their feelings so much that they are generally supposed to have none. Believe me, they are far from insensible, but they can simply not imagine thot anyone can have any feeling for them except pity, which they dislike.
Nevertheless, I have discovered that there is a certain type of person who finds the disability of others attractive. In illustration of this, there used to be in Paris a much sought after one-legged beauty. Perhaps the peculiar French type of morbidity wos responsible for her popularity, but from my own slight experience I think not. In any case, there is the fact, and there was also a rumour current in the same city while I was there, to the effect that a certain wealthy merchant had a flat in a obscure street where he kept a singularly beautiful dancer from the Moulin Rouge.
Certainly the lady disappeared, and the story went that she had been persuaded, for an enormous consideration, to suffer the amputation of both her hands and feet.
There is no proof of this tale, and I find it hard to believe that the most mercenary girl would consent to such a drastic deprivation of the means of doing anything for herself for the rest of her life.
But this letter is much too long. I have tried to tell you something about the mentality of cripples. Perhaps this may lead to a greater understanding of these unfortunate people.
Yours faithfully,
Lop-Sided Lady