Terry Prone: The surgeon asked Tom: ‘Is she a fighter?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘Then she’ll probably survive...’
Tom Savage and Terry Prone on their wedding day. One day in August a short few years later, Tom knew something was seriously wrong and began to ring 'every garda station from here to Dublin' as Terry was uncharacteristically late and wasn’t answering her phone...
We had a branch of our business near Spiddal, and Tom and Anton, who was then about six or seven, had headed off on Friday, the last day of August, to the thatched cottage we rented there so we could have a final summer weekend before school resumed. I was to join them a couple of hours later. It being the last day of August, most of the traffic was coming the other way, holiday-returning home. As I came round a bend in the road in Leixlip I found a car on my own side of the road driving towards me. My car was reduced to 170 quid’s worth of scrap metal.
I was taken to Blanchardstown hospital with a broken left arm, both legs broken in several places, broken face, broken ribs, just about everything smashed except my right hand. In theory, it should have taken ages for them to identify me and then find Tom. But what happened was that, as the evening drew on, and Anton was tearing around the little cottage in Spiddal, his father sat him down.
