The McCartneys' Mission
For most of us, Heather Mills came to prominence only with the announcement of her engagement to former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney. And after some rather nasty accusations in the media about her charity and rise to personality status, media interest in the 35-year-old model peaked in the lead-up to their wedding in June last year. But—for most of us—we have only heard the happy ending to her fairytale-like story.
not quite, “once upon a time . . .”
Heather Mills grew up in a family marred by impermanence and abuse. Her father was employed only intermittently and regularly moved the family around Britain chasing elusive opportunities and escaping creditors. He was violent and short-tempered.
“The trouble was you never knew where you were with him,” Mills recalls. “One minute he’d be all sweetness and light, the perfect TV father, the next he’d be behaving like Attila the Hun. It only took the slightest thing to switch him from one personality to the other. He’d yell, throw things and belt Mum around the head—it didn’t matter if we were there or not. Sometimes I really believed he was going to murder her. Once or twice I thought he was going to murder us too.”
The situation deteriorated to the extent that her mother left the family when Mills was just nine, leaving her and a brother and sister to fend for themselves. By the age of 10, she was regularly shoplifting to support her siblings. By her mid-teens, her father was in prison and Mills was homeless on London’s streets.
Bouncing from one menial job to the next, she eventually found an opportunity in the modelling industry. It was the gateway to a new life and a wide range of new experiences.
In 1990, foremost among these was her love of snow skiing. “I started skiing in Slovenia on my first holiday there when I was 21,” she says. “I fell in love with it so much I went to live there and trained to be a ski instructor.”
Yet her new lifestyle was to be short-lived. The civil war in Yugoslavia shattered the region and many of her new friends were directly involved. Mills’s response was one conditioned by sympathy and practical resourcefulness. She began working to set up refugee crisis centres, hospitals and permanent housing for those affected by the war.
She continued modelling to raise money and the profile of her new cause. She became a regular speaker, travelled regularly in Yugoslavia and UK.
something bad
Then, in the midst of her charity work, in August 1993, she was crossing a London street when she was hit by a police motorbike answering an emergency call. She regained consciousness three days later. She had suffered minor head injuries, cracked ribs, a punctured lung, multiple fractures of the pelvis—and lost of her left leg. Despite five hours of surgery, there was no hope of reattaching it, and she was left with just six inches below her knee.
“My sister Fiona, in tears, broke the news to me,” Mills remembers. “I shouted at Fiona ‘No!’ I was 25 years old. My modelling had really taken off. I had a Saab convertible, a flat in West Hampstead. I liked to wear short skirts, roller blade, dance and play tennis. Now I’d become an amputee.”
But drawing on the experiences of her early life, Mills was determined to maintain a positive attitude. In September 1993, she told a journalist, “Something good is going to come of my accident.”
“Overcoming adversity has been a constant motivation throughout my life,” she says. “I’d discovered you can either drift through life passively or take it in both hands and turn it around. ‘Come on, Heather,’ I told myself. ‘You’ve managed to cope with what life’s thrown at you so far; don’t let it beat you now.’”
and something good
As soon as possible, Mills was fitted with a prosthetic limb and she returned to many of the activities she had previously enjoyed. She learned to ski over again and even ran a half-marathon, refusing to be a victim of her circumstances. But with time, the stump of her leg changed shape and her artificial leg had to be replaced. When she discovered that her used leg would simply be discarded, her thoughts returned to her previous work in Yugoslavia.
“In nearly every town we saw amputees crawling along pavements or dragging themselves around on sticks,” she recalled. “Artificial limbs had transformed my life. Imagine what they could do for these victims of landmines and mortars.”
Heather realised that many of the 63,000 amputees in Britain would have “spare” prosthetics, and recognised how easily these could be adapted to be used by the victims of war. “Over the next couple of months, we managed to collect 4500 legs from hospitals throughout the country,” Heather reports. “We left some of the more standard legs intact, but most needed to be taken to bits so that the parts could be quickly used by the prosthetists and technicians in Zagreb to construct specialised limbs. Since nearly all were for adults, I used some money to buy brand-new components for children.”
Her initial project was a success, and her focus began to expand beyond the victims of the conflict in former Yugoslavia. Her campaign has provided prosthetic limbs to approximately 27,000 people in war zones around the world. But she has also recognised a need to reduce the number of victims, so over the past 11 years has become a part of campaigns to ban the use of insidious landmines.
She’s became a patron of Adopt-a-Minefield, and has been involved in UN initiatives to outlaw landmines. Her work has been recognised on the international stage to such an extent that she was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1996, particularly for her work in Croatia and Cambodia.
enter, the handsome prince
It was in the course of this work in 1999 that Mills met Paul McCartney. McCartney agreed to help her record a song to raise funds for her charity work, playing guitar and singing backing vocal. Although any relationship between them was denied until late 2000, a romance had blossomed and their engagement was announced in July 2001.
Reflecting on her remarkable story, Mills comments, “Life is a jigsaw puzzle made up of lots of different pieces. At the beginning you’ve no idea what the final picture will be. It’s only as you get older and little bits of your life begin to fit together that you suddenly say, ‘Oh yes—now I see what it’s all about’.”
For Mills, it’s been about unique challenges and opportunities, where abuse and tragedy have given birth to a determined and compassionate drive to help the victims of some of our world’s worst atrocities and most insidious weaponry—with some glamour and romance added to make the story just right.
Landmines: war’s legacy, earth’s curse
Heather Mills-McCartney, together with her husband Paul, is patron of Adopt-a-Minefield in the UK. The organisation works to raise awareness of the scourge of landmines, to raise funds to clear minefields and—at Mills’s urging—to include rehabilitation of victims.
Proceeds from the sale of their official wedding photo were donated to the charity, raising about $A225,000, as are profits from her autobiography A Single Step. Recently, McCartney gave a birthday concert for $US1 million, with the money also going to Adopt-a-Minefield.
Landmines are banned by international laws that came into force in 1999. To date 131 countries have ratified the treaty, but notable exceptions include China, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia and the USA.
Despite progress, there remain an estimated 60 to 100 million landmines in the ground worldwide. They can remain an active threat for decades, continuing to wreak havoc many years after a war has ceased. Among the worst affected countries are Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Mozambique and Vietnam.
In these places, landmines are a real and constant threat. Landmines kill or injure three people every hour—about 71 people every day and 26,000 each year. Since 1975, an estimated one million landmines have injured people in 64 countries. Of these, 80 per cent are civilians and about one-third are children.
Obviously the direct cost to human life and wellbeing is appalling. However, there are other costs associated with this threat. Found most often in some of the world’s poorest countries, landmines compound problems of hunger and economic inequality. Landmines destroy livestock and render potentially arable land unusable. Landmines make travel dangerous, harming tourism and development and investment projects.
Many organisations are working to clear minefields in various parts of the world and progress is being made. It is always a slow, painstaking and sometimes dangerous task. Landmines can be purchased and deployed for as little as $A5 each, but it averages around $A1700 to remove each one.
Despite the treaties and bans, landmines continue to be produced by more than 100 companies and continue to be deployed in conflicts around the world. The US and its allies laid about 1 million in Iraq during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and another 3 million were deployed in the civil war in of Yugoslavia.
It was there Mills first came face to face with the horrors of landmines and this has been her motivation in the midst of her personal tragedies and joys. As she describes it, “Landmines blow holes in people’s lives.” Together with her husband and many other campaigners, she is working to repair those shattered lives and to reduce the horrific menace of landmines around the world.
Sources: www.landmines.org.uk; www.icbl.org; www.clearlandmines.com; www.unicef.org, A Single Step, Heather Mills-McCartney and Pam Cockerill, The Little Brown and Company, 2002; www.heathermillsmc cartney.com; news.bbc.co.uk; skiing.about.com; www.cyber-beatles.com; www.twbookmark.com
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This is an extract from May 2003
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