DECEMBER 11, 2011 was the day when the life of former Junior European eventing champion Polly Williamson changed forever, writes Di Alexander.

When schooling a horse at Charlton Park, near Malmesbury where her training business was based, she had a freak fall, sustained a life threatening head injury and spent the next few months in Frenchay Hospital.

Before the accident Polly had reached the top of her profession but she returned home a different person and one for whom every small task was a mountain to climb. She was often confused, angry, panic stricken or crushingly tired, but most of all she was afraid that she would never again be the person she once was.

But she was not called ‘bloody minded’ by her doctor for nothing and slowly, painfully she got her life back together, was able to look after her beloved family, relearn how to cook, to drive, to teach, most importantly to think straight again. One of her final triumphs in her rehabilitation programme was to run the Bath Half-Marathon.

Perhaps her greatest triumph has been to write an account of her life since the accident in a truly remarkable book appropriately entitled ‘Where Did I Go?’ “I’d never written anything before and I did it because my very loyal friend Alison Booth suggested it just as I was beginning to look outside the box instead of being just a machine,” said Polly.

“I so wanted to do something new and on my own and I didn’t even tell my husband, Toby, until it was finished. Another friend, Rosie de Courcy, who is a publisher, was full of enthusiasm when she read it but what finally decided me to go ahead was a letter from the managing director of a publishing company (who didn’t take the book) to say, “My best friend had a stroke and I so wish I’d read your book before and could have known how best to help.”

In Lorna Brookes of Crumps Barn Studio, Polly has found a sympathetic publisher and the foreward has been written by HRH The Princess Royal.

The book has sold in America and Australia and copies were flying out of Waterstones in Cirencester at Polly’s book signing last Saturday.