Read Online Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin - Free Book Online

a private prosthetist, sending him instead to a public hospital to have his legs adjusted to fit his growing bones. They had been a comfortably-off white family in a country where to be born white had always been a guarantee of material security. But after her husband left, Sheila Pistorius had to make every penny count.
    It was lucky for her, as it would be for her son twenty years later, that the extended Pistorius family had money and were prepared to part with it to help their own flesh and blood. The home they moved into was bought not by Henke, but by his wealthy brother Arnold. Pistorius’s paternal grandmother helped out with money too. They would struggle, but they would not starve. Sheila had so little faith in her husband that, with what turned out to be eerie foresight, she approached Arnold and his wife one day and asked them, please, in the event that she should die, to take care of her children. They assured her they would. When the time came for Pistorius to go to Pretoria Boys High it was Arnold, not Henke, who paid the bills.
    She thanked her brother-in-law, but most of all she thanked God. A devout and active Christian, she sang in her church choir, traveled to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites, and taught her children to love and trust the Lord. Life could be hard and cruel at times, as Jesus had found, but God the Father was benevolent, He had a plan. ‘Things happen for a reason,’ she would tell her son. There was a divine method and a deeper truth behind the apparently random suffering one had to endure. God was her rock and she was her son’s, and he absorbed her teachings, attending church services and praying daily as a boy and for the rest of his life. She was the center of his childhood universe, instilling in him the conviction that he might be different from other people but he could do anything, she told him, to which he set his mind and body. It was to her, not to his father, that he would later attribute his fierce drive to succeed.
    While he saw his father less the older he became, his mother was the one who taught him not to feel self-pity, not to show weakness when he was teased, as sometimes happened at primary school, about his artificial legs. She also instructed him to brush off the curious remarks of strangers with jokes, saying his feet had been bitten off bya great white shark, or pointing out the advantages of having artificial legs. You could slam a nail into them, as he sometimes did to shock unsuspecting new acquaintances, and it did not hurt.
    Sheila practiced what she preached, refusing to make any distinction between her treatment of her disabled son and her other children. Hence the story he would tell journalists a hundred times when he became famous of how in the morning, when he was preparing to go to school, she would tell him to put on his legs in exactly the same tone of voice as she would order his elder brother to put on his shoes. That he should consider that story to be the most eloquent illustration of an upbringing during which he was encouraged to deny the limits of his condition says much about the centrality of his mother in his life, and how assiduously she sought to make amends for having brought him into the world not fully formed. But limits there were, and during those periods, sometimes lasting for months, when as a small child the cracks and blisters on his stumps were too painful for him to go to school, it was she who nursed his wounds and comforted him, sitting by his side with his head on her chest, stroking his hair.
    Sheila’s refusal to let her son’s disability hold him back physically or mentally was the engine behind his remarkable triumphs on the running track. She never imagined that he would become world-famous, but she did know that the funny little wooden legs he wore when he was small would inspire curiosity and sometimes mockery. In her determination that he should never feel awkward or ashamed, that he should always stand proud,