Inside Alton Towers amputee Leah Washington’s tearful marriage ceremony

There is something endearing about Leah Washington’s quiet defiance. At first, she thought she would choose a wedding dress that disguised her prosthetic leg.

‘I wanted to cover it up and look normal,’ is how she phrases it. ‘Then I tried The Dress on and thought, ‘I don’t care!’ Everyone at the wedding knows I’m an amputee so why hide it?

‘You could see the outline of my prosthetic leg and a slight ruck at the side. And then I wore a white mini dress for the evening. I wanted to be able to dance and say, ‘This is me!’

It was a beautiful cream confection: a corset top studded with seed pearls and a figure-hugging skirt. ‘It also had an A-line overskirt so if I’d wanted to cover up my leg I could have. But why would I do that?’ she asks.

On Saturday Leah, 26 and Joe Pugh, 27, her boyfriend of nine years, were married at a glorious country house hotel in Yorkshire, with Leah joking to Joe days before the ceremony: ‘If you don’t cry when you see me walk up the aisle I’ll turn back.’

The two of them fall quickly into easy banter but early experience of shared trauma has given them a maturity few their age possess.

They were teenagers, just getting to know each other when they were injured in a catastrophic rollercoaster crash at Staffordshire theme park Alton Towers.

It was their first big day out together, on June 2, 2015. Leah lost her right leg when their carriage on The Smiler ride smashed into an empty one in front.

‘It was,’ says Joe, ‘like crashing into a brick wall at 90 mph.’

Sitting next to Leah, he watched helplessly as she drifted in and out of consciousness, a hair’s breadth from death. His injuries — which have left him virtually unable to run — were less severe: both knee caps were shattered; a finger severed but reattached, another snapped.

A devastating injury such as Leah’s could have fractured their relationship, yet it actually brought them closer.

Joe was at university in Huddersfield; she was poised to start a teaching degree in Leeds: ‘If I hadn’t lost my leg I probably wouldn’t be with Joe now.

‘We’d have been living miles away from each other. We’d probably have drifted apart.’

Joe adds: ‘We’ve both shared an experience no one else can relate to. We’ve been through more trauma together than most couples do in an entire marriage. We’ve made the best of a bad situation.’

‘You can’t change what’s happened so there’s no point in dwelling on it and being negative. You just move on,’ says Leah.

Today, welcoming me to their bungalow in Barnsley, South Yorkshire — all neutral tones and light-flooded rooms with large windows — they talk about the day they took their marriage vows.

‘I knew Leah’s entrance song (The Vow by RuthAnne), the timings, exactly when she would be coming in and I tried to compose myself, but I couldn’t stop crying,’ says Joe. ‘I was blown away.’

The day was a blur of happiness for Leah, too, punctuated by tears of joy: as she caught the first glimpse of her proud dad looking at her, as her eyes locked with Joe’s when he saw her in her dress, when before the wedding she read a letter he had written to her.

The day’s monochrome theme — men in tuxedos; bridesmaids in black — gave the event an aura of old Hollywood glamour.

Instead of a tiered wedding cake they had a champagne fountain and guests let off a confetti cannon as they began their first dance. ‘It was a bit of a dream, just perfect,’ says Leah.

She carries the legacy of her injury with grace. Tall — 5ft 9in — long-limbed and slender, she greets me wearing tiny shorts and a crop-top; unselfconscious after years of hiding her prosthesis under trousers or long skirts.

‘Leah has grown into herself,’ says Joe, an account manager. ‘She really lacked confidence when she first got her leg. Now she knows what suits her and wears it with style. She’s improved. Her leg does not define her.’

‘Of course I felt self-conscious to start with,’ says Leah, a teaching assistant. ‘I wanted to hide my prosthetic leg. For five years I wore it with a silicon cover, which made it look just like a real leg. But it was also very heavy and restricted function in my knee.

‘So I told my prosthetic centre I didn’t want to wear the cover. I said, ‘I’m doing what’s best for me. If people don’t like it, tough’.’

‘And now she wears shorts and little tops,’ says Joe, approvingly.

‘And a bikini. Either you go on holiday and hide or you enjoy it. I think confidence makes me more attractive,’ adds Leah, who now swims without her prosthetic. ‘I stopped wearing my leg for swimming in 2019. I take it off at the poolside. Kids stared at me the first time I did it. I just faced them and smiled.

‘Young children have no inhibitions. They’re just innocently interested. It doesn’t bother me. The kids at school (aged four and five) are curious. I call it my robot leg and tell them it has a computer in it.

 

‘They’re more intrigued by the leg than how I lost it. I’ve never told them. I don’t want to put them off going to theme parks.’

I wonder if she will ever go to one again. ‘I would,’ she says. ‘If we have kids of our own how could we never take them to Peppa Pig World when all their friends are going?

‘I think I’d go to Alton Towers, too. I’d even get on the ride again. But I probably wouldn’t get past just sitting on it. Unless I was put in that position I don’t know what I’d do,’ muses Leah, adding: ‘It’s probably the safest ride in the world now that all the safety changes have been made.’

‘People have serious car accidents and drive again,’ adds Joe. ‘But I wouldn’t say it’s a necessity to go to a theme park.’

Both have been back to Alton Towers since the crash, but only to try to reconstruct events of that awful day, much of which their memories have obliterated.

‘When I looked up at the rollercoaster I thought, ‘How did I ever come out alive?’ says Leah.

It was touch-and-go that she did. Her leg was so mangled it was amputated to save her life.

Today they thread together the remnants of their memories.

Leah and Joe, who met through mutual friends, had been on a couple of dates and had settled on a day out at the theme park for their first big outing, ‘almost on a whim,’ says Joe, who had just broken up from university for the summer vacation.

‘And I’d seen The Smiler ride on telly. I liked the thrill of rollercoasters, the adrenalin rush,’ recalls Leah.

‘But it had broken down when we got there. By the time it got going again we were at the front of the queue.

‘My brother had said we should be at the front or the back. I was so close to saying to Joe, ‘Let’s go to the back’. And it would have been an entirely different story.

‘But I don’t let myself regret that. I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t know what the reason is.

‘It was a chilly, windy day and we set off, then we stopped on an incline. I remember feeling really cold and wondering out loud if anyone would come to get us off.

‘We’d been up there 20 minutes or so when a voice over a loudspeaker said, ‘We’re having technical difficulties. Don’t panic’,’ continues Leah.

‘We looked out over the whole park, perched on this incline, ready to go over the edge. Then it set off again. There was no announcement, no, ‘We’ve fixed the problem’. We went round a couple of loops…,’ she recalls.

‘And then we went round a corner, cambered over into a dip and were sitting sideways on a slope, racing downwards when we rounded a corner and saw the stationary car just sat there ahead of us,’ adds Joe, taking up the story.

There are voids in their memory that will never return.

‘I don’t remember the actual impact, only a huge bang. I screamed. There were people screaming all around us,’ says Leah. ‘I looked down at my thigh and my leg seemed to be all bunched up. I asked Joe to call an ambulance but he couldn’t. Two of his fingers were hanging off.

‘I remember seeing lots of blood and flesh and skin, splattered on the stationary carriage in front of us. I think it was mine.’

‘You seemed to lose consciousness,’ Joe looks across at Leah. ‘The safety bar was embedded in your leg but we couldn’t see the lower parts of our bodies.

‘I looked at my hands and the middle finger had bone sticking out. It had snapped and was hanging on by skin and tendon.’

They waited four hours or so while scaffolding was erected, and paramedics wearing harnesses clipped to the frame, climbed up to rescue them.

‘I couldn’t feel my feet,’ says Leah. ‘A first aider said, ‘Wiggle your toes’. I felt I could move them, but I couldn’t. I remember a raging thirst and the paramedics cutting me out of my black bomber jacket. I thought, ‘Please don’t cut it. It’s new’.’

A main artery in Leah’s leg had been severed. She was given three blood transfusions: ‘I remember noises, the scream of a chainsaw as they cut the bar from the carriage embedded in my leg and the tight pressure of a tourniquet.’

She was placed in an air ambulance while Joe was rescued by paramedics in a cherry-picker.

‘I remember being in the helicopter thinking, ‘Is Joe OK?’ then arriving at hospital and just seeing the ceiling as they wheeled me down a corridor.’

Tears choke her.

Leah, in a coma for more than 24 hours, woke to find her whole family — parents, grandparents, uncle and aunt and brother Luke, now 29 — gathered round her hospital bed.

‘They thought I was going to die. When I came round they were all there wearing sunglasses. They’d been crying so much and wanted to hide it from me.

‘The doctors had no choice but to amputate my leg. I’d have died otherwise. Normally you make the decision with them, but I was unconscious. So I didn’t know.

‘It was my brother who told me.’ She cries again. ‘He said, ‘You’ll be OK. You’ll be fine’.

‘I just kept screaming, ‘No, no, no’. I didn’t want to know, to hear the words.’

At that moment, would you rather have died? I ask.

‘No,’ she says, emphatically. ‘It was just fear of the unknown. I didn’t know what it meant, how my life would be. I’d just begun to get my independence, I’d begun a new relationship. I’d just passed my driving test. I was going to university. And then there was this big blur of uncertainty.

‘I was living day-to-day in hospital. I thought, ‘Joe will not want to be with me any more’. I was not the person he’d met. My life had changed completely. I thought he’d walk away.’

Meanwhile Luke was talking to Joe. ‘He came and sat with me and said, ‘If you don’t want to be with Leah now we won’t judge you. We get it’.

‘But I thought, ‘I’m going to stick it out. There was no reason to split up’. It would have been weak.

‘I wouldn’t even have learnt what it was like to be with her. She was still the same person. If further down the line I’d thought, ‘I can’t actually cope’, that would have been a reason. But to go then… it would have been a coward’s way out.

‘I told Luke, ‘I don’t want to end it. Everything will be all right’.’

Leah, getting used to the radical shift in her life, says: ‘At that point my relationship with Joe was the last thing on my mind. I was just learning to live with my injuries.’

She spent eight weeks in the Royal Stoke University Hospital; Joe was there for a month. Joe says: ‘We had no chance to rebuild our relationship. Even months down the line Leah’s parents were always with her. Our conversations felt almost forced.

‘Until we could go out without being chaperoned it was not a relationship. Then the first time we went for a meal, three weeks after the accident, we were both in wheelchairs. We had our picture taken together. It felt relatively normal.

‘But afterwards we were back to the everyday round of counsellors, solicitors, therapists,’ says Joe. ‘It still didn’t feel like real life.’

‘My friends were all going off to Magaluf, then university while I was busy with physio, learning to walk again. I didn’t have time to see Joe though we only lived ten minutes apart,’ adds Leah.

A breakthrough came when Joe was able to drive again. He bought a new car. Says Leah, ‘I thought, ‘We’re actually going to do things together now’.’

Then he and Leah went on their first holiday just the two of them, to Munich, she wearing her £60,000 prosthetic leg. ‘And we just got on so well.’

She lives permanently with discomfort, cannot walk further than about three miles and rough terrain is difficult: ‘But I’m used to pain and it’s not there every day. I don’t want to moan.’

Joe proposed to Leah on a holiday in Venice in 2022. ‘I hate gushing and public displays of affection so I found a quiet alleyway, private, and we had a nice moment together. Leah said yes, then cried and we got drunk in a rooftop bar.’

Bonded by their shared experience and a capacity to look on the bright side, they both intend to keep wringing every drop of joy out of life. ‘I’m a spender. Joe is a saver. These days I think, ‘Let’s just do it’,’ says Leah.

‘We both think that. After all, you never know what’s around the corner,’ adds Joe.