As a student at Cambridge in the mid-50s, Alison felt certain that her generation would change the world. She can't now remember precisely what her politics were, though she suspects they were "leftish". Not that it mattered, she says, because among her undergraduate friends were clever men, such as the communist intellectual Neal Ascherson, who would take care of the details when the great transformation came.
For Alison, however, the world was transformed sooner than expected. On an autumn day in 1957, she was riding her Vespa south from her parents' home in the Scottish highlands, the wind flapping her headscarf and, to her left, the mercurial waters of the Cromarty Firth blinking through the trees, when suddenly she found herself gazing across the shore into paradise.
In Bangor hospital, which then had a neurosurgical unit, Alison lay in a coma for two months - her right eye knocked out of place, her skull webbed with fractures, and her shattered jaw held together by an awesome beard of steel scaffolding. To be unconscious for so long with such head injuries was, in the 50s, deemed to be a death sentence; even today, neurologists would consider the hope of regaining full mental functioning to be, at best, remote.
By astonishing fortune, she'd been found where she crashed by a doctor who had performed an instant tracheotomy to get her breathing. No one expected much more from her. Yet in the fifth week after her accident, Alison began to flicker in and out of consciousness and, more unusual still, retained the memory of what her awakening was like.
The coma, she says, was heaven, and the leaving of it hell. "I'd always been taught that hell was flames and black demons, but it's the opposite. Hell isn't red and black, it's white and blue. Hell is hygienic. The people in white moving around me were demons. I felt I had to escape. From my bed I could see high windows, and I thought if I climbed through one I could get back to heaven, which was somehow very close."
At the end of her eighth week, Alison regained full consciousness, surfacing into a state of "terrible mental disorder". She was sufficiently coherent to write a note to her parents, informing them that she was now in hell. Her mother brought in Alison's address book, hoping to show her that she was actually alive. "I remember being intrigued by the cleverness of the devil," she smiles. "He not only sent people who looked like parents and friends, he even sent my old address book, with people's names written in my own handwriting ... the detail of it!"
During the arduous process of piecing herself together, Alison began to paint. For subject matter, she used the surreal, disconnected images in Edith Sitwell's Facade, a series of hauntingly strange poems set to the music of William Walton. Alison's pictures would often feature a lone woman swooning by a tree or river as the world passed by on the other side in a procession of madcap forms. Now in her 70s, she can still recite Sitwell's Tango-Pasodoble in the jabbering rhythms of the original orchestration: Through trees like rich hotels that bode of dreamless ease fled she...
The philosopher-neurologist Antonio Damasio describes two different types of self-awareness: the "minimal self" and the "extended self". It is Alison's minimal self - her control over perceptions and actions as they occur in the moment - that has given her most problems over the years. Blind in her right eye and with one leg perpetually numb, she mislays words and things, crosses roads perilously, forgets her passport when she travels. But her extended self - the narrative being that travels from a remembered past to an anticipated future - has remained incredibly intact.
Her brother recalls wondering how the shattered carapace of his sister could ever be put back together. There was cosmetic surgery, 50s-style, which gave her a face that has taken half a lifetime for her to regard unblinkingly in the mirror. Yet she has painted, taught, travelled, married and been widowed. To Alison, the explanation for her survival lies not so much in physical, social or psychological reconstruction, as within the bright neurological radiance of the coma itself.
The paradise that Alison encountered was, she believes, not metaphorical but literal - and the faith it brought has never left her. She sometimes wonders if perhaps she was gifted with the kind of knowledge that might change the world after all ... or just put the moderator of the Church of Scotland right on some theological matters. But to say so might make her sound crazy, when what she really feels is lucky. "My coma made me see life as being huger than I'd understood before," she says, "because I realised how much huger death was."
· Names and details have been changed.
