Henry Fraser: ‘There were so many moments before my accident I took for granted’

On a blustery grey afternoon, which reminds Henry Fraser that winter is coming, it is light and quiet inside. His easel is to the left, where his latest intricate painting can be seen, as Fraser talks about an enriching life. Only his face and neck are alive with movement for his entire body is paralysed from the shoulders down. But Fraser addresses the devastating paralysis he suffered eight years ago, when he was 17, with a calm acceptance underpinned by defiance.

It needs an iron will to prosper as Fraser has done against devastating odds. The former academy player at Saracens, where his brother Will was a stalwart of the squad which won the Premiership and successive European Champions Cups, is now a mouth artist and the author of a moving book about the lessons he learned from paralysis.

Fraser has already told me how sport instilled the ferocious competitiveness which allowed him to confront paralysis. He has also grinned at the fact that his admirers stretch from JK Rowling, who wrote the book’s foreword, to his boyhood hero Jonny Wilkinson praising this “story of transformation and inner power.” With similar equanimity he remembers how he was once “consumed by fear and darkness.”

Fraser looks out at the large garden in Hertfordshire where he and his three brothers used to run around with a freedom he can only imagine now. “The first surgery was unsuccessful,” Fraser recalls after his spinal cord had been severed and crushed when he dived in the sea in Portugal in 2009. Surgeons spent seven hours trying to re-align the vertebrae. “Before the second surgery my heart kept stopping so I needed a pacemaker. I couldn’t breathe myself, couldn’t even talk. The pacemaker box was next to my head so I wasn’t sleeping. The