'You have to use the pain'
Leonard Cohen is playing in Simon Weston’s front room when I arrive. The Partisan, a wonderful Cohen song about men laying down their lives for their cause. It seems horribly appropriate and I worry that he spends his afternoons with such a mournful accompaniment. But he tells me not to be so bloody stupid – it’s just a really nice tune.
Weston was the scarred face of the Falklands war, the survivor of the attack on the supply ship the Sir Galahad whose extensive burns necessitated more than 70 operations. Eighty per cent of his body is scarred because skin had to be grafted from one part of to another. In the 1980s he sank into drunken depression – racked by guilt for surviving an attack in which 48 of his fellow Welsh Guardsmen died – but in the past decade he has staged an astonishing fightback.
The BBC made six documentaries charting his fall and rise, following him back to the Falklands and recording his emotional (and, for some grieving relatives, controversial) meeting with the pilot who made that deadly attack on the Sir Galahad. In a new book, Moving On – part-autobiography, part self-help manual – Weston celebrates his return from the darkness, his ability to find joy even in the songs of Leonard Cohen.
“I wanted this book to be positive,” he says . “There’s not much looking back in anger or misery. If I do look back it’s only to make sure I know where I’m going. You look back at certain aspects of your life and say ‘that was a hellish place to be, a very lonely place to be and I don’t want to go back there.”
Weston makes his living now – and judging by the detached house in a well-heeled Cardiff suburb and the two Mercs on the drive a very good living – from motivational speaking. He has turned his victory over extreme adversity into an inspirational parable for execs in search of inspiration. Parables come naturally to the Valleys Welshman: Weston had no sort of education and joined the army at 16, but he is drunk on words, a natural actor.
Sometimes the sentiments can be cloying. “Everything that happens in life is a lesson,” he intones. “We can use that and make it work for us, harness the energy of it all. There’s nobody out there who hasn’t had tragedy. If you haven’t had tragedy, you will. Everybody has pain in their life. It’s what you do with it. Can you use it constructively?” Please put the Leonard Cohen back on.
Weston was 21 when he came back from the Falklands in 1982. His account of the 48-hour journey back in agony, his peeling back stuck to a stretcher, makes me feeel queasy. He lost the next five years to pain, guilt and fear for the future. He went home to the village of Nelson and moved back in with his mother; he lived on booze and self-pity.
“I’d lost my friends, my colleagues, my career. I thought the army was going to be my life. To find a whole new life was very difficult. I remember seeing a careers guy a few months after I came back, and he said ‘what are you going to do, any ideas?’ I said ‘that’s your job, you’re supposed to have the ideas.’ And he said, ‘well, as far as I’m concerned you’re totally unemployable.’ I thought ‘great, thank you very much.’ ” If ever there was a reason to start drinking, that was it. That could have destroyed me.”
But it didn’t. He spent some time in Germany with the Welsh Guards, which forced him to start acting independently again; set up a charity called Weston spirit aimed at helping disadvantaged young people; met and married a volunteer at the charity called Lucy; had three children; became an outspoken champion of squaddies’ rights and threw himself into mad money-raising ventures – driving rally cars, jumping out of aeroplanes, running marathons, bobsleighing down the Cresta Run.
He gets a surprising amount of flak. He’s a celebrity in Cardiff and some people seem to resent his brash, I-beat-the-world style (two Mercs!). His sister was attacked in a restaurant by someone who evidently thought the Westons were getting above themselves. South Wales is a small world of tribal hostilities, but he shrugs off the backbiting. “Some people would prefer it if I was sitting in the corner, the gibbering idiot, the dribbling mess. But that’s never going to be me.”
He says that first and foremost he loves his home and family; that he didn’t ask to be a public figure – that was created by the BBC camera crew that zoomed in on him as soon as arrived back in the UK in 1982. But there is a considerable ego there too: he is disappointed that the Arts Council of Wales has refused to back a film company which wants to make a movie “A Christmas Carol meets It’s A Wonderful Life – about him.
The great irony of his life is that, had he not been involved in that terrible tragedy, he would have been an anonymous squaddie. At 42, he would just be retiring, heading back to South Wales, probably meeting that army careers officer and trying to decide if he was employable. Instead, doors have been opened, millions have been raised for charity, business respond to his inspirational homilies with standing ovations.
“People will look at my picture on the jacket and they’ll say ‘poor bugger’, look how damaged he is. But it’s been fun. The first four or five years were really hard, but even then there were still some light moments. And now, since I was able to come out of that bad depression and move on, it’s been so much fun.”
He of course draws a lesson from all this. “There are far too many people who get to a certain age – 16, 18, 21 – and instead of going out there and exploring all their boundaries, they get their job and go down a little tramline for 40 years. Then they buy a Harley-Davidson. But why did it take them all that time to go and explore the things they really wanted to do. Why did they try to be a rebel so late in life and not really get to where they wanted to be? So I’m busy doing all that – chasing dreams, looking for things that might get the juices running.”
He has no fears now for his employability. As well as motivational speaking, he has dabbled in broadcasting. “There will always be something. I’ll just carry on down the road gently turning over this and that. It’s like looking for crabs on the beach. You turn over stones regularly and under each stone there’s nothing, but occasionally you turn over a stone and there’s the crab. ”
An agent told him that his shelf life as symbol of the Falklands would be about three years; 21 years on he’s still getting letters (and bibles), still laying bare his life in books. “I didn’t set out to be a public figure and I’ve haven’t milked it,” he says. “I ve never done anything cheap or tacky. I’ve worked hard and it’s been a slog – there is immense pressure in speaking to big groups – but it’s been fun too.”
His hideous burns could have made him hide away; instead he paraded them for the world to see. He says he was a “drunken fool” in the mid-80s, seen in one documentary swigging sherry from the bottl; now he still likes a drink and has the odd wild night at the rugby club (“tying one on” in the strange Valleys phrase for a binge), but no longer “drinks to fall over”.
He ends with a parable, beautifully told (try to imagine the chapel cadences). “ You learn as you get older. You’d be a waste of space if you didn’t discover a lot of lessons in life. I remember breaking up a fight between some guys in the pub that used to be my local. I said, ‘come on guys, we’re all grown-ups, you shouldn’t be fighting, you’ve had one drink too many and you’re getting stupid. This guy turned round to me and said, ‘the problem with you Weston is you’ve changed’. And I said, ‘d’you know, Mark, the problem with you is that you haven’t.’ ”
Moving On is published by Portrait
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