Tom Kearney: knocked down, but he’s got up again

FROM the forgotten sport of pedestrianism to the political sport of pedestrianising Oxford Street.
On Sunday I was there to see traffic stopped on the famous shopping street for the first time by the Mayor of London.

The publicity stunt was put on by Sir Sadiq Khan who is hoping to leave a legacy of a Parisian-style boulevard in the heart of the West End.

Visitors were met by over-priced street stalls, deafening music and an American basketball promotional show, but there were also some telling voices of dissent.

Bus drivers and safety campaigners had come down to call out the mayor over Transport for London’s horrific safety record.

I had written about Hampstead’s Tom Kearney several times over the years.

But Sunday was the first time I’d met him. He was actually hit by a 73 bus in Oxford Street in December 2009.

Standing on the spot of the crash, he told me how the Hampstead Heath ponds played a big part in his recovery.

“Al Alvarez [a celebrated poet] lived near me and he was always begging me to swim in the ponds every day. I thought, that’s not me, it’s gross,” he recalled.

“After I was hit by the bus, he said to me ‘Tom if a bus can’t kill you, the ponds certainly won’t, in fact I think it will make you better’. So I used to go down with him every morning, and then I totally got it. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Recalling his coma, Mr Kearney said: “I was eating out the night before I was hit, in Chinatown. And I woke up from the coma desperate for food. I was desperate for Chinese dumplings.

“I was begging people to feed me dumplings, that was the last thing I remembered that was really good.

“Now we go every year on ‘bus day’ for Chinese dumplings in Chinatown.”

Mr Kearney who was put in a recovery coma for two weeks after being knocked down, told me: “Coming out of a coma is not like waking up from a sleep. You perceive yourself differently from what you are. You are trying to catch up with the memory of who you are.

“It’s disconcerting for those on the other side. But I think it’s important for people to know about both sides.

“People in comas can hear and remember. I have a full memory of it. I can pinpoint the times when people were there talking to me.”

Mr Kearney was particularly taken by sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s “Winged Figure”, unveiled on the side of the adjacent John Lewis store in 1963, that he described as “my angel”.