A new signing for Raft - a powerful book that should be a misery memoir, but somehow isn't...

Title: How Much Can One Girl Take
(and still see the funny side?)

Author: Andrea Hall

Status: Sample Material
Rights: World Rights Available
Category:Personal Memoir

About the book: How much can one girl take and still see the funny side?

This is a story about Andy Hall - someone whose life reads like a black comedy. She jokes that ‘the only thing left that hasn’t happened yet is that I’ve never been kidnapped, and probably won’t be because there’s no one left for them to call for ransom money." As she says “with my luck, by time the kidnappers figured out that they’d have to call me, the battery in my phone would have died so they'll have to shoot me.”

Her list of uninvited experience runs at least the gamut of where your imagination might take you now, and had made her appear extremely resilient. She had learned to intellectualize each step in her life’s run of bad luck because otherwise she wouldn’t be able to continue. She had also learned to present her life in a dryly funny way because actually trying to present the pain would have required her to feel it herself, and what would happen if she took the top off of that box? No. Couldn’t happen. Not allowed.


But then one-too-many things happened to her one sunny day last year while she was taking a long and familiar walk around Virginia Water Lake with her camera and her iPod. She is a nature and wildlife photographer and had almost reached the pond where a family of swans whose cygnets - from hatching until that day - had been growing up in front of her lens. This made her happy.


Unfortunately for her, on that same 25th of July, 2006, Stephen Andrew Tyler, a now convicted and imprisoned serial sexual attacker was also in that park but was not there for any gentle reason. He was there to hurt someone. Sentencing was Friday, May 25th, 2007 when the Judge described him as dangerous and a threat to the public and especially women. The judge chose a “a sentencing route that will enable both a lengthy period of imprisonment to be served, but importantly that Mr Tyler won’t be released until it is safe… which might be never."

- - -


Andy Hall had no idea Stephen Tyler was behind her. She couldn’t hear. She was striding fast and straight through a long rhododendron-banked path when someone grabbed her shorts from behind, yanking them down from the sides with great force. Grabbing them back, she whipped round to see a man with arms stretched low and wide crouching behind her right shoulder. Now her world is operating in split seconds. She is taking mental photographs realizing all she could see of ‘him’ was his eyes. He was wearing a full white face mask cut only with perfect ovals for his eyes, and bizarrely, hand decorated with tiny little red chevrons. A woolly hat framed the mask completely, and the rest of him is covered in black.

The shutter goes down on this image in her mind as she was hit hard to the back of the head with something that felt like rocks. Another split second she realizes she is alone and this person is trying to kill her. She starts to scream as he circles her to block her path, swinging heavy blow after heavy blow to her head. She raises her arms to defend herself and takes two more mental stills, one of the weapon – again patterned and again homemade and probably packed with hammers - and one of the peculiar way the tanned, weathered skin around his eyes creased as he squinted in the sun.

She doesn’t remember pain. “It wasn’t a priority at the time”, she later said in court.


Next thing she knew she was running. With no idea how she got away she is running and screaming for help until she finds it, and luckily she finds incredibly good help because, with swift action by 6 then strangers and herself, they had a helicopter overhead and this immense area surrounded by police in minutes. While she was taken to the hospital covered in blood and bruises for stitches to her head, the police were finding their man.


By now, perversely, Andy was laughing because, to her, things got funny. That’s the way her mind has learned to cope, so that’s what she would see. Her first thought on reaching safety was that she didn’t realise that, as a 40-a-day smoker, she could run that far, that fast AND scream at the same time! She was really quite impressed!


Then she started to giggle when she realized that that the song that had been playing through this whole ordeal was Madonna’s “Sorry” – part of the perfectly matched lyrics of course being:


I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know

Please don't say you're sorry

I've heard it all before

And I can take care of myself

I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna know

Please don't say 'forgive me'

I've seen it all before

Others laughed at her recanting the mortification of being in the ambulance and watching her 1983 vintage, pink and orange floral nylon briefs being passed at a great height from one forensics bag into another in the car park in front of a sea of policemen who watched them arc through the air like a tennis ball. As a single woman, she couldn’t help but to immediately and frantically address the crowd from the back of the ambulance, like a bloody Eva Peron from an inelegant balcony, pleading them to believe her when she shouted, “I promise I’ve got better ones at home!!” If only she’d known what was going to happen that day she could have dressed better….


These same friends, expecting her typical reaction to disaster, joined in with the jokes. A favourite came from her oldest childhood friend who said through tears of laughter, “Andy. When you do eventually die, I am going to deliver your eulogy. All I’m going to say is, “There! Now everything’s happened!””


But this time her saving sense of humour didn’t last forever for and she finally broke. This was just one too many things for her and she couldn’t do it this time. She didn’t realise that her extreme anger, depression, frustration, stress and anxiety were what happens in post traumatic stress. How would she? How would any of her friends that she lost before she got help know?

Her recovery continues and now she wants to share her experiences and yet another newfound hope with others who are running out of the energy to fake it. It will be ok.


About the Author: The second daughter to a Texas-based oil family, Andrea (Andy) Hall was born one State away in Tulsa, Oklahoma on January 23rd, 1959. Andy’s family remained in the Midwest until moving to Surrey 1964 following her father’s transfer within the industry. She was schooled in the UK and latterly in the US before returning to London from Colorado after college, taking a position in the PR office for The Savoy Company in 1981.

In 1984, Andy moved to Boston, Massachusetts to work in advertising and PR States-Side. Four years after her father’s death in 1986, she relocated to Tulsa for family reasons and used this time to return to college to gain a Business degree. Then, in Spring of ’95 she returned immediately to England upon learning that her mother was given 3 months to live after being diagnosed with cancer. Instead it was Andrea’s older sister who died in 6 months at age 38, leaving her alone to care for her mother who, by the beginning of the following year, was paralysed from the chest down after a treatment went wrong. Andrea cared for her mother until her death in September 1999, and remains in the family home on Surrey/Berkshire border of Windsor Great Park where she still trying to unravel some legal issues that even today are preventing her from moving on in many ways.

Whilst she remains there, Andrea now works as a freelance writer and photographer erstwhile walking miles out alone with her camera to capture otherwise lost glimpses of beauty in wildlife and nature. The most unjust blow delivered by Stephen Tyler is that she doesn’t go out alone now.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Contact: Adrian Weston
Phone: 0044 1273 730 070
E: adrian@raftpr.com