It’s Wednesday lunchtime and Sara Freeman’s phone is buzzing. Her sister is in touch to say she has just heard her nephew, Sara’s son Tommy, name-checked by Sir Keir Starmer in Parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions.
It’s an exciting occurrence, even in connection with an England international rugby player. “I can’t quite believe it,” is how Sara puts it, and those five words are a summary of the amazing experiences she and her husband Cliff have been sharing with The i Paper.
Tommy Freeman’s story is one of persistence and success and trauma and family love, and “one of the worst days of my life”, which was how Sara describes his full-on tonic-clonic epileptic fit when he was aged 18 in December 2019.
FIRST-HALF HAT-TRICK for Tommy Freeman
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Wednesday was Freeman’s day off from preparing to play for Northampton Saints in Saturday’s Champions Cup final against Bordeaux-Begles in Cardiff.
He went to the House of Commons and, in a room near the main chamber, gave a short speech on behalf of the Epilepsy Society charity, which in National Epilepsy Week was tied to two questions about funding and assessments put to Starmer by MPs.
The PM at the dispatch box acknowledged Freeman’s presence in the public gallery and wished him and the other British & Irish Lions well for this summer’s tour.
Freeman is a powerful advocate. He has scored 15 tries in his last 11 matches for club and country, and is a strong tip to be named England’s player of the season next month.
He is quick and mobile and his ability in the air suits the vogue for a wing to chase and deal with kicks in attack and defence. He wants his epilepsy to be seen not as “woe is me” but as “a super-strength” pushing him to chase his dreams.
Freeman has been shortlisted for England player of the season (Photo: Getty)Sara will tell you medical matters were never Tommy’s thing. He isn’t comfortable in settings such as hospitals, even though Sara is a nurse and, while she and Cliff essentially retired at 55, she still works one day a week on the children’s ward at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn.
Cliff does a day or two as a chef in a pub near their home in Marham, Norfolk, having served – “tea and coffee mainly,” he jokes – in the catering arm of the Royal Air Force for 35 years, including four years in 32 the Royal Squadron, keeping the then Prince Charles and his wife Camilla fed and watered.
But a diagnosis of epilepsy forces a person to walk a particular path. Freeman volunteered the subject for the first time in public in an interview with The i Paper in January last year, relating the discovery of what turned out to be idiopathic generalised epilepsy at the age of 13, after he endured “stares” or involuntarily switching off during lessons at Culford School.
“Everyone had always called him a space cadet,” Sara says. “But that was why there was a delay in picking it up. He was having 30 absences an hour, of two or three seconds. I took him to two consultants, and they’re saying ‘no, he’s fine, Sara, he’s just blond and he doesn’t want to talk to you, he wants to watch television’.
“And I said ‘my children talk to me when I talk to them, so I don’t believe you’. And the consultant said, ‘Mrs Freeman, for you I’ll do an EEG’ – it was 2014, and Tommy was 13 – and we walked out of there, and they just said to me, ‘he can’t swim, he can’t shower on his own, he can’t climb, he can’t ride a bike’.
“I asked Tommy later, ‘did you ever have a problem on the rugby pitch?’ And he said, ‘there are a couple of times I caught the ball and I didn’t know where I was, so I had to sort of refocus’.”
Sara’s medical training and the people skills she shares with Cliff make a potentially awkward topic easier to discuss. They and the now 24-year-old Tommy are aware there are many more acute sufferers of epilepsy than him, and it has many forms, affecting one in 100 people in the UK.
Even so, Freeman will be taking Epilim tablets to avert seizures for the rest of his life; he still cannot be left alone in situations like having a bath or a swim. He and his partner Ashleigh are researching the risk from the tablets if a sufferer wishes to have children.
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Set against this, it might seem comparatively tame to remember how Freeman also fought back from Leicester Tigers not taking him into their academy at 16.
They had future England full-back Freddie Steward coming through, they told Freeman he was too small – he is now 6ft 3in and 16 stone – and Sara and Cliff thought that was that, and “he’ll just do it for fun”.
Freeman didn’t. He enrolled in an AASE (advanced apprenticeship in sporting excellence) at Moulton College, and Northampton, who already knew about him from younger days, took another look.
He was in their senior academy, and had appeared in a pre-season friendly with Leinster and at Sale Sharks in the Premiership Cup, when he met some old school friends for a Christmas drink. The day after a long night – mixing his drinks, a quick kip on a sofa – he was driving back to his parents in Marham. He had been off the epilepsy tablets for two and a half years; the ones he initially took from 13 until his GCSEs at 16.
Sara recalls: “He’d driven for about 20 minutes and he phoned me and said, ‘mum, I feel bad. I think I’ve got starings again’.
“I said, ‘open the window, carry on home, and we will get you something to eat, and then go to bed’. If at any point I thought he was at risk, I would have told him to park and we would have picked him up.
“Anyway, he arrived home, and his dad had made him some toast, and within 10 minutes, he went into this huge fit, and it was absolutely horrendous.
“He tried to call my name, because I was sitting opposite, but it just came out as ‘maaaam’, and I said to Cliff ‘get him on the floor quickly’, because obviously he wasn’t in a safe place, he could have knocked his head.
“So we got him on the floor, and he went into a full tonic-clonic fit. He vomited, his lips went blue. He just carried on fitting. He didn’t answer us, he didn’t acknowledge us. I called to his brother to call an ambulance, and I just lay next to him and kept saying, ‘Tommy, come on, come on, get out of this’.
“I am a nurse, and I know that actually they’ll come out of it, but it’s your own son, and you want oxygen and at work I have all those things around, whereas I had nothing, nothing, and I was so scared for him. And I think when it all stopped, which probably was after three or four minutes, Cliff broke down crying because Tom didn’t recognise us.”
Freeman was picked for the Lions tour of Australia last month (Photo: Getty)The ambulance was delayed but two neighbours who were ambulance workers came in to help.
Once on the way to hospital, Sara recalls: “Tommy’s complaining, because his tongue was so bad – he had bitten right into it and it was swollen, it was bleeding, it was blue.
“I said that heals quickly, you’ll be fine. The problem for me was Tommy was just absolutely distraught and he said ‘that’s me gone with rugby now’. And I have to say we thought as much.”
For the first two weeks, Sara watched as Tommy slept at night, fearful of further fits.
His older brothers Jack and Sam – now a policeman in Norwich, and RAF policeman at Marham respectively – had experienced febrile convulsions brought on by high temperatures when they were young, but this was different.
There was no explanation, no hereditary link, just something amiss with Tommy’s brain waves.
“I remember going out into the garage,” Sara says, “and I just broke down in tears, because I always buy the boys the same things for each other at Christmas, and this time there were drinks and I’d concentrated on presents for the car.
“And I thought, ‘Tommy, you can’t drink and you can’t drive any more’, when I just wanted him to be normal, like any other 18-year-old.”
Northampton Saints “at no point said it was over”, and a 24-hour EEG dictated a new course of tablets.
The alternative possibilities were said to have been a bleed on the brain or a brain tumour, neither of which bear thinking about – although think about it the family did, and they regard epilepsy as the least worst option of the three.
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After six months Freeman was able to reapply to drive, dependent on having a year of no fits. He has never had another one.
Today, Freeman has accumulated 98 appearances for Northampton, and 20 for England. He scored a hat-trick of tries in Saints’ Champions Cup last-16 win over Clermont Auvergne, and repeated it in the shock semi-final win over Leinster in Dublin three weeks ago.
From a serious knee operation in 2021, and a savage early dropping by then England head coach Eddie Jones, his career has shot forward, and many pundits pick him on the wing for the Lions in Australia. Cliff and Sara are excitedly booking flights and hotels.
Sara, the daughter of a Navy man, says she is the more sporty of the couple, although Cliff, who grew up in Cornwall, played football and rugby.
They have the time now to follow Tommy everywhere, but when Cliff gained his “third stripe” as an RAF flight sergeant it opened up multiple postings that came with a continuity-of-education scheme, which meant a top boarding school for the boys. They sent Tommy to Culford, where he discovered rugby.
“He was there with the sons of senior officers,” Cliff says, “whereas his dad was a flunkey, cabin crew, non-commissioned – a tart with a cart.”
He pauses and chuckles: “Am I putting myself down here?”
Cliff wore the RAF No 1 dress uniform as he flew with the Wessexes, Sophie and Edward.
“And they used to task me for Princess Anne flying to Edinburgh if Scotland were at home during the Six Nations – I think because the other sergeant just wasn’t interested in rugby.”
More seriously, he says: “After a while, you’re not ambitious for yourself, you’re ambitious for your children, and you want to do the best for them.”
He joined Northampton Saints in 2018 after being released by Leicester Tigers (Photo: Getty)Cliff’s 14 postings included Swinderby, Brize Norton, Halton, Northolt and Scampton, and Bahrain to link to communications flights in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A lot of time away, while along the way Tommy had summer-camp contact with Saracens and Harlequins, as well as Northampton through Bury St Edmunds RFC and then Leicester through Wymondham when the posting was Marham.
There were afternoons with Sam and Tommy minded in a side-by-side pushchair while Cliff coached Jack in the under-eights at Bicester RFC, and many a rainy touchline.
Last Saturday at Northampton’s home ground, Franklin’s Gardens, having a pre-match drink in the Rodber Bar, Sara showed off her lucky Saints socks.
And they work as Northampton beat Saracens and Freeman is feted afterwards as the supporters’ player of the year.
Next Monday, Freeman will make an appeal on BBC Radio 4, on behalf of Epilepsy Action, maybe as a Champions Cup winner.
“I honestly believe Tommy wouldn’t be the man he is today, without going through these hurdles,” Sara says.
“He was dropped by Leicester and he had to fight. He was diagnosed very early on and struggled academically. He decided rugby was for him, and he was given the opportunity after that fit to carry on, thanks to Northampton Saints. And now he’s in the Lions.
“If you’re never turned down and never facing adversity, you don’t get to where you want to be. He never, ever gave up, whatever was thrown at him. And I think that is part of his game. Yes, he never gives up. He keeps on going.”
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