I know it might sound strange, but I feel lucky

Catrin Pugh, who became the UK’s worst ever burns survivor in a horror coach crash, is now working with patients at the Katie Piper Foundation, one of 189 inspirational groups set to benefit from match funding during this week's first Big Give Small Charity campaign

- By Karen Rockett

On her worst days, Catrin Pugh still can’t always face the world — strangers staring at her scars in the street and even occasionally asking: “What the hell happened to you?”

But 12 years on from the most terrible day of her life, it’s slowly getting easier. The 31-year-old, who holds the unenviable “title” of Britain’s worst ever burns survivor, has a satisfying career and a loving boyfriend. She can walk and work and, mostly, face the world.

“I still have times when I’m back there, lying by the road on fire, waiting for help. Something will trigger the memory and for a few minutes I am back there,” she tells me.

“I don’t have memories of seeing the fire itself. I felt it and I heard it hissing, fizzing. My memory is of crawling up the [coach] aisle, knowing I was on fire.”

Catrin, then 19, was with a group of five friends, on a gap year, and was returning home after an enjoyable ski season in the French Alps in 2013. But the brakes failed on the coach she was travelling in and rather than go over a cliff edge, its driver, Maurice Wrightson, 63, crashed into rocks on a hairpin road and burst into flames.

Everyone on board managed to escape, mostly with relatively minor injuries, but courageous Maurice died and was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery.

Catrin suffered third-degree burns on 96% of her body during the crash — just the soles of her feet and scalp were spared.

She only survived because her then boyfriend, Shaun, managed to drag her out. After three months in a coma and 200 operations and skin grafts, she awoke to find her life had changed beyond recognition.

That she woke up at all was a miracle in itself, having been given only a one in a 1,000 chance of survival.

“I had times when I didn’t want to go on, trying to see what life would be like for me now, knowing I would be forever judged by the way I looked,” she says.