Angelina Maddison was badly burned as a child when a chip pan fell on top of her. She talks to Women's Editor Christen Pears about living with disfigurement.

ANGELINA Maddison was walking down the street when a stranger approached and stopped her. "Come here, love, your make-up's not rubbed in right," the woman said, but as she reached forwards, she realised it wasn't make-up but severe scarring.

She apologised, terrified she had caused offence but Angelina was delighted. "It's great that people feel they can approach me. She didn't automatically assume I was different," she says.

Angelina was just three when she pulled a chip pan of boiling fat over herself, causing 40 per cent burns to one side of her face and body.

"At the time it didn't seem like it but I was quite lucky that it was just one side of my body because they could use the other for grafts. I was an ideal candidate for plastic surgery."

She spent so many years in and out of hospital that it became a way of life. She had her last surgery at the age of 17 because she was no longer seeing an improvement. Her scars were taking longer to heal and it could be as long as three years before the tissue settled down.

"I think people get carried away with the romance of plastic surgery. When you see it on telly, someone goes in on the Friday, the bandages come off on the Sunday and they're beautiful by the Monday, but it just isn't like that," says Angelina.

"It gets to the point where you have to recognise and accept who you are. I thought, 'If you don't like me for what I am, I can't change much more'."

Angelina, who is 36, is confident and vivacious. After a couple of minutes, I forget about the scarring that covers the right side of her face and puckers the skin on her neck. I'm more struck by her outgoing personality and sense of humour.

Her eyebrow is taken from the back of her head and she leans forward to show me the scar. The hair grows and has to be trimmed and it's typical of her attitude that when her surgeon asked to show some medical students, she let the hair grow and turned up with it plaited and beaded.

"I'm terrible," she laughs.

She seems content with her life. One of her biggest regrets is missing out on so much of her early education but she has just completed a BA in management at Durham University. There is also good news on the personal front - she and her husband Tom are expecting their first baby in July.

More than 400,000 people in Britain have severe disfigurements to their face, hands or body. Common causes include birthmarks, cleft lips and palates, burns, scarring, cancer, paralysis and skin conditions. Surgical and medical treatment can make a disfigurement less noticeable but complete transformations are rare. Angelina is a trained counsellor and works with Changing Faces, a national charity that helps people cope with disfigurement. Not only is everyone's disfigurement different, whether burn, birthmark or scar, the way they react to it is different. Not everyone wants counselling. Some shut themselves away as a means of coping.

"It's not about me saying I can make it better. It's about listening to what they are saying and working a way through that will help them cope. You've got to let them take it at their own pace. You can't drag them out kicking and screaming," says Angelina.

Because she was so young when she had her accident, Angelina has had a lifetime to come to terms with her disfigurement but it is different for someone who experiences it later in life.

"Somebody in their 20s or 30s has known something else. They have photographs of how they used to look. It must be like a grieving process for who you used to be.

"I also think it's hard being a woman and being disfigured because there is so much emphasis on the way we look but it's difficult for a man too, for other reasons. I think some men find it challenges their masculinity."

Angelina says she didn't feel different at first. She had a lot of support from her parents and brother and sister, but then she had an encounter with a woman selling pools coupons.

"She was so horrified, she dropped all the money and the coupons on the floor. I think that's when I realised I was something different. I was only four-and-half and I didn't understand that reaction or that look of horror. At home, I was still Angelina."

Angelina has always worked in the public sector and is now based in Newton Aycliffe's West Ward Neighbourhood Management Centre. She deals with members of the public on a daily basis and says her disfigurement is rarely a problem, although people do usually react in some way.

"When you first came in, you put your hand to your neck," she tells me. "You didn't know you were doing it but you were just checking yourself. A lot of people do that. People are curious about it and they ask but that's normal and they soon get over it."

She does, however, sometimes attract strange looks or finds herself ignored. Part of the problem, she says, is embarrassment.

"Often we don't know what to say. I think we are frightened that people are going to have an emotional outburst and we won't know how to deal with it. It's that stiff upper lip thing."

She says the onus is on her to make people comfortable with her appearance and she is aware that she sometimes overcompensates, trying too hard to be friendly and approachable.

"When you meet somebody, you look to their face for recognition so with me, my disfigurement is the first thing that hits them. I'm comfortable with that and I want them to be.

"Having said that, I'm not saying I get it right all the time. There are some days when I wake up, I think I would like to be normal but then I think, what the hell is normal anyway?"

* Changing Faces www.changingfaces.co.uk