Graham, use someone's computer to grab Puppy Linux onto a CD and boot your laptop with that in the cd drive (u should be able to get into the bios on boot up to set the cd drive to bootable still).
It will boot to a windows like graphic user interface and load mouse drivers etc. If your hdd is readable it will read it.
It might let you do some repair. At the very least you can get files off onto USB stick or dvd.
It got me out of a spot on two occasions
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm.