Clover Growing Wild

One moment can change your path forever. Katie Jarvis spoke to Clover Stroud - who will be appearing at the Bath Festival: May 19-28 - about her life-changing experience.

- Katie Jarvis

As a child, Clover Stroud lived an idyll, growing up in a big, old house in Minety, where she’d ride her ponies in the paddock and play with the kittens she and her sister, Nell, were given on her seventh birthday. “It was a bit like being children in storybooks, the old-fashioned ones that mum read aloud to us…”

That was the first part of her life. The 6,067 days, 866-and-a-half weeks, 145,608 hours, 8,736,480 minutes, 524,188,800 seconds she lived before horror ripped her life apart: “a jagged dark scar that separates the time immediately before the accident from the time after”.

On November 25, 1991, when Clover was 16, her mum went out for her usual ride - and never came back. Or, at least, the mum who left never returned. Falling from her horse on a disused airfield, Charlotte Stroud landed on her head, causing catastrophic brain injuries. From then until her death, in 2013, unable to communicate, she needed round-the-clock care: “alive and dead at the same time”.

The agony – the unendurable agony that had to be endured – of the ensuing years defined Clover’s life for ever, as she describes in her book, The Wild Other.

Clover, this must have been an almost-impossible book to write – not just because of your profound grief; but the life that grief propelled you into: sex, drugs, divorce, postnatal depression. You’ve finally found happiness and stability – but going public must have been difficult?