As a child, television presenter Carol Voderman witnessed how her adored older brother Anton suffered the ignominy and pain of a double cleft lip and palate. Here, for the first time, Carol, 48, and Anton, 55, tell of the battle to overcome a facial disfigurement and speech defect through 24 operations - and attack society's obsession with perfect looks. Here, they both tell their touching - and inspiring - stories
My extraordinary, bright and loving big brother was born on August 1, 1953. He had a shock of dark hair, dark brown eyes and a piercing gaze. He also had a cleft palate and double cleft lip - a disfigurement so bad he was whisked away from my mother the moment he was born.
Mum has since told me the full story of his early weeks - and it sounds almost barbaric. The midwife, who ran from the room with the baby in her arms even before Mum had been able to hold him, said to her: 'He has a hare lip, but it's all right, it will be repaired.'
Anton was a month premature and within 24 hours he developed severe respiratory problems. My mother was told he might not survive the night, and he was baptised and confirmed by the dean of our Catholic church.
It was to be another five days before Mum was allowed to see the baby. She told me later: 'It was such a shock to see his poor little face.' She wasn't allowed to hold him and visits were restricted to an hour a day in the nursery. All she could do was sit by the side of his cot and gaze at him.
A month later, Anton was still in hospital. Mum went for a post-natal check-up and the doctor said he would ring the nursery unit to find out how the baby was. He listened on the phone, then shot out of his seat.
He said to Mum: 'You need to take him home. He is weighing less than when he was born. If this baby is going to survive, he needs one nurse to look after him - and that's you.'
I can't imagine what it felt like for Mum to take him in her arms for the first time. But it was the start of the most remarkable display of motherly love which continues to this day.
Back at home, Anton found it hard to feed. His upper lip was split, and tissue was bunched up in a large lump under his nostril. His nose was twisted to the side of his face, and his lower lip pulled down. The nurses had been feeding him with a pipette, which exhausted him.
Support: Carol Vorderman and Antonpose at the Cleft Lip and Palate Association's 2004 ball
Support: The siblings pose at the Cleft Lip and Palate Association's 2004 ball
Then they tried a bottle with a long teat, but this rubbed against his lump of skin, making it red raw. Their final efforts had been to put milk in a medicine glass, tipping it into his mouth.
Mum used this method, putting a towel around Anton's neck and gently tipping the milk into his mouth.
She had no way of knowing how much milk he was taking in, but she knew the specialist at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool would not examine any baby with a cleft until they weighed nine pounds. It took four months for Anton to hit the weight.
His first operation, at the age of just five months, was to lift and centre the bone in his nose.
Three weeks later, Mum returned from our home in Prestatyn, North Wales, for Anton's second operation, to re-shape the bubble of tissue under his nostril into a functional upper lip.
For the first time, Anton had something resembling a mouth. It made his tortuous feeding routine much easier, and he repaid my mother with the first of his endless smiles.
At 18 months, Anton returned to hospital so the doctors could make him a palate on the roof of his mouth. Until then, he couldn't eat solids. If he tried, it would regurgitate up through his nose.
When Anton's teeth came through, they fell out. In the end, aged three, he returned to Alder Hey to have a dental plate fitted.
To this day, Mum thinks that our father struggled to accept a son with such an obvious disfigurement. Our father was a handsome man, and although he never said so, she believes he found it difficult to come to terms with Anton's problems.
Anton was seven when I was born, and my parents' marriage ended just three weeks later. From that moment on, my mother raised us and our older sister Trixie on her own with very little money.
So what are my own early memories of this remarkable brother? Anton's speech was badly affected. As soon as I could talk, I could understand what he was saying and became his unofficial interpreter.
Strange as it sounds, I never really noticed anything different about him. To me, he was just my older brother, and the kindest boy I had ever known. When I was a schoolgirl, it was Anton with his keen brain and endless patience who helped me with my maths homework.
But when he hit his teens, I became aware he didn't go out like our older sister Trixie.
He was, I later realised, crippled with shyness. If we walked down the street together, I would see people do double takes as they looked at his face. But I always saw Anton with a smile playing at his lips.
When Mum left the man who had become my stepfather during my teens, we went to live with Anton at his flat in Rhyl. I was a teenager, a time when you are naturally concerned about looking good. But in our family, the emphasis was never on beauty but on brains and hard work.
One of the hardest moments came when Anton had a major operation in his late 20s. He had to spend two weeks in hospital, with his upper and lower lip sewn together. There was a gap, for him to use a straw, and as soon as I came up to his hospital bed, he grunted: 'Don't make me laugh.'
It has always been hard to stop Anton from laughing. We spent the rest of the visit trying to stifle our giggles. Then, walking away, the indignity of his situation hit me. Kind, gentle Anton had never once complained.
Anton is pleased that he was born at a time when the quest for physical perfection wasn't as all-encompassing as it is today.
I feel so strongly about this that I asked for a special debate at the Cheltenham Science Festival this week. Last year, research by Cardiff University and the Healing Foundation found that through 9,000 hours of television from 2006 to 2007, people with disfigurements or disabilities were rarely shown in a positive light.
They were depicted in association with evil, bitterness or even crime, as gangsters with scars or burns victims living as twisted recluses. Meanwhile, there's the rise of prime-time documentaries known as 'shock docs'. TV producers admit their quest is for more rare and shocking conditions. I find this sort of television disgraceful.
Having been patron of the Cleft Lip and Palate Association for many years, I'd like to see the 'normalising' of disfigurements on television. Why can't people with a cleft or birthmark appear in soap operas?
Anton has never married. He'd have been a great father, but being single has given him the freedom to enjoy great success, enjoying life with dozens of friends, and establishing a European cleft charity. I'm so proud of all that he has achieved in life.
As a baby, he learned to smile through his pain. Anton's beautiful face is burned upon my conscience, and I never hesitate to agree with Mum when she says he is the real star of the family.
ANTON VORDERMAN, 55, is a property developer and company director, who has helped to launched the European Cleft Organisation to help the lives of children born with cleft palates. He is single and lives in The Hague, Holland. He says:
I can't remember exactly when I realised I was 'different'. I was probably eight or nine when I noticed my family were 'translating' for me because people who didn't know me couldn't understand what I said.
I had a thick, nasally voice - and I still do have a nasal twang, although it has improved through countless operations and speech therapy.
My mother was terribly protective. I remember arguing with my older sister Trixie, and Mum saying: 'Oh don't say that to him. He's . . .' And instead of saying: 'Got a cleft palate,' she would add: 'Not well.'
Looking back, both Trixie, who is three years older than me and Carol, seven years my junior, were also fiercely protective of me, although I never realised it at the time.
As for the operations, they all merged into one. I used to go to Alder Hey for surgery and I loved having time off school. The pain actually wasn't too bad. In fact, I remember begging the nurses to leave my drips in until after visiting hour was over, because I knew I'd get extra presents and sympathy from my mother.
Other kids would ask questions about why I looked different and I would be embarrassed, but it wasn't until I went to secondary school that the name calling began in earnest.
I remember being called 'Fingal's Cave' after the cavern in Scotland. It was really hurtful, but I learned to just laugh and run away.
Mum was the one who built up my confidence and, looking back, it must have been tough for her. She split up with my father when Carol was just three weeks old. I was seven and only saw my father a couple of times after that. Instead, my magnificent mother coped superbly as a single parent.
She has overcome every hurdle in life with a steely resolve and a smile. What she instilled in me, from the start, was the sense of being valued and loved, no matter what I looked or sounded like. It was frustrating to have to repeat myself over and over again before I was understood, but I never stopped to feel sorry for myself.
My teenage years were tough. It's hard to have confidence at the best of times, and I knew I was never the best-looking boy in the class.
At dances, I struggled to approach girls because I never had the 'pulling power' of my friends. But a touch of Dutch courage usually did the trick.
When I was 16, my friend bet me £5 that I wouldn't phone a girl called Frances up and ask her out. I did - and she said yes. We went out for a few months and we got on really well. The romance didn't last, but she still sends me Christmas cards.
The few girlfriends I did have must have taken some stick. I bet they had friends asking: 'Couldn't you do better than that?' They were probably as brave as me in many ways.
After school I went to university to study mechanical engineering, and then went to work for ICI in Cheshire and then moved to Holland to work for Phillips as a technical author.
My shyness was a problem throughout my 20s, but it made me happy with my own company.
It was only when I was 27 that a major turning point came and I had a reconstructive operation known as an Abbe flap. Until then, I had been very self-conscious. Children would come up to me and say: 'What's that?' Their parents, mortified, would hush them. I now have the confidence to say it doesn't matter and explain.
Before that surgery, my bottom lip was turned down, and my upper lip joined my face just under my nose. During the operation, the surgeon cut a section from my lower lip and added it to my top lip, giving me a philtrum - the depression between the top lip and the nose.
The difference was amazing. It was the first time I had gone out with a relatively normal looking mouth, and it made the biggest psychological difference to me. I'm not going to win Mr Universe or any beauty competitions, but I'm happy with that.
This was the first time I could look in the mirror, content with the face which stared back at me.
In all, it took 24 operations to correct the deformities and the resulting medical problems. Today, the same can be achieved with just two or three operations.
But I'm glad I grew up when I did. In those days, even as I was a painfully shy teenager, you weren't judged nearly so much on your looks.
There wasn't the internet, the celebrities, the endless emphasis on beauty and perfection, nor the easy access to plastic surgery. Our society today seems to demand pay-as-you-go perfection, with even teenage girls having breast implants. People are judged so much by what they look like - not who they are, or what they achieve.
Just occasionally, I wonder what life might have been like without a cleft palate, as an average-looking teenager who had grown up in poverty but with no real hardships.
And do you know, I don't think I would have accomplished nearly so much in life. I might have been still living in Rhyl, married with kids in a dead-end job and waiting for the Secret Millionaire to come along.
Instead, I grew up determined to prove everyone wrong. If I heard a doctor say: 'He won't do that,' I would do everything I could to show them otherwise.
I'm not married, but I've had relationships and I'm happy with the way things are. It's not a confidence issue, because in the 20 years since my big operation I've found real happiness and contentment.
If anything, I've learned that the strongest weapon is a mother's love - as well as Carol and Trixie's support. I'm not scared to say how much my remarkable family means to me.
Credit: Mail Online
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