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Assault

“You want to talk to my son?

“You've chosen the wrong day to visit. At weekends he goes away to be repaired. He's at the dance clinic all day. He works with physios who know about repairing dancers' damaged joints and limbs. They're helping my damaged boy to heal.

“I think he was attacked by aliens, those other boys in his school who hated what he loved. Certainly not human creatures those kids, they acted like a feral pack. That's my anger talking. My hatred for those cruel boys overwhelms me, I'm not much better than they are sometimes, I remind myself it's not revenge my poor boy needs. But we do want justice. That's why we're suing his school and the Local Authority for negligence.

“My son is a gifted boy. He's determined to master a very demanding discipline. He's been building his strength and training his body for the last six years. Dance has become his life. Those boys had been bullying him for months, since they discovered that he spent his Saturdays studying ballet Their cruelty reached its peak when the mob decided to demolish his feet. What, they must have thought, can a lame dancer so? In their unforgiving eyes my son's ambition was nothing but queer.

“They beat him to the ground, one of them rode a bicycle over his ankles. I can't believe what they did to him. These despicable brats have crammed my head with fantasies of revenge. I burn with love for my gifted, beautiful son. I'm still shocked by how close we came to losing him.

After the attack, doctors told him he wouldn't be fit for a career in dancing
We couldn't recognise him any more. Where once he was cheerful and loving he sunk into truculence. We discovered that he had started to sniff glue. He told us later that he was hoping to die.

“Those idle, malicious boys pushed him to the brink of death. We had failed to protect him. He hid what he saw as his shame even from us. The school did nothing. All we could do, we decided, was to talk to the local TV station. We told the reporter we were suing the school for not even trying to look after him.

“Publicly we confessed our impotent love, the only weapon we had left. We exposed the malice of his schoolmates to the public gaze. Rapidly the story spread beyond our small town. For a brief moment it exploded, a comet soaring through the public consciousness. That's how the physiotherapists from professional dance companies, experts with a lifetime of experience in dancers' pain, contacted us. They gave our boy the hope that they could make good the damage his feet had sustained. They offered their skills for love.

“They made his recovery a task for him, demanding all the determination he was capable of. Their love is tough, practical love, but they have bandaged his soul with their compassion, they've shown him hope.”

Alec Bell, February 2014