The friends called for help and Christopher and the other injured boy were taken to a local hospital, where the doctors wrote Christopher off. He was given no medical attention or treatment and left in a hammock in a back room to die.
Meanwhile, Colin was packing his suitcase in London, about to leave for Mustique, ready to welcome Christopher and his friends, who had planned to end their gap year there. Just before Colin left, the telephone rang. I picked it up and listened as Christopher’s friend told me about the accident. I stopped Colin as he walked out of the door. He could tell by my voice that something was terribly wrong.
Immediately we tried to work out how we could get to Belize. We couldn’t think straight, unable to focus on how to get there as fast as possible. So, I rang the switchboard at Buckingham Palace and asked to be put through to Kensington Palace because I needed to speak to Princess Margaret urgently. I just hoped that, because she was such a friend, and with her connections, she might know what to do. On hearing the news, Princess Margaret told me to ring Nigel Napier straightaway. He sprang into action, contacting the Foreign Office, who then contacted the British Garrison in Belize. This wasn’t special treatment as such, but the process was speeded up significantly because Nigel knew exactly who to contact and did so immediately. Without a doubt, these actions saved Christopher’s life.
Through the phone calls from Kensington Palace, the British Army was called into action and sent a helicopter to collect Christopher, flying him directly to the Garrison, where he was operated on straightaway in one of the tents. By a huge stroke of luck, a surgeon visiting that day was able to stabilize Christopher’s head injury, leaving his head wound open to limit the risk of more blood clots. The army then flew him to a major hospital in Miami.
During his flight there, Colin and I had some more extraordinary luck on discovering Concorde flew to Miami once a week on Saturdays and it just so happened it was a Saturday. We flung some essential items into a suitcase and raced to the airport just in time to catch it.
The journey was terrible. I was shell-shocked and, much to Colin’s irritation, I just couldn’t stop crying. I have never cried so much. Gone was my British stiff upper lip: my son was fighting for his life. Unlike Henry’s diagnosis, this was an emergency that had come out of nowhere and Christopher’s life hung in the balance, making it even more traumatic—we couldn’t know whether our son would still be alive by the time we arrived.
The whole terrifying experience was made worse by knowing that until the hospital was paid they wouldn’t operate. As soon as we arrived, Colin had no choice but to prioritize the payment ahead of seeing his son, frantically trying to make sure there were no delays, very conscious that time would make all the difference to Christopher.
Meanwhile, I was walking down the corridor of this very smart, rather futuristic hospital. It was an intimidating place to be. When the nurse stopped at the bed of a young man, motionless, unconscious, covered with blood, and hooked up to several machines, I looked at him and said, “No, no, that’s not my son.” But she remained where she was and I looked again. I simply didn’t recognize him, and for several minutes more, I stayed convinced it wasn’t him, although I later realized my mind was refusing to accept the reality. He simply bore no resemblance to the Christopher I’d waved off on his gap year only a few months before. More than that, it meant acknowledging that my son was gravely injured, an idea so surreal and horrific, my mind did everything to deny it.
The doctors explained that Christopher was in a deep coma and there was no way of telling whether he would live or die. If he lived, he might lie dormant for the rest of his life, in a vegetative state. Although that sounded terrible, it was more bearable than the thought of him dying. I so desperately wanted him to live. I struggled to process the information, walking around in a daze of excruciating anxiety and exhaustion from the period of limbo we were now in.
On hearing the news, my sister Carey got hold of Amy and May’s school to tell them. As it happens, the twins had just been in their dorm, talking with their friends about how good-looking and cool Christopher was. Carey played down the news, not wanting to scare the girls, who were upset enough by the censored version of events given to them. When Carey ended the conversation by asking them to pray for him to pull through, they realized just how dire the situation was but had to stay at school because they were in the middle of their O levels. Carey meanwhile flew out to Miami with Henry, who, despite being ill himself, wanted to show his support for his younger brother. Their arrival was a godsend because both of them were optimistic, calm, and a good influence on me and Colin—we were struggling to hold it together.
Christopher was moved to a circular ward with a nurses’ station in the middle and hooked up to monitors, like the other patients. The only sounds were the mechanical beeping of the machines and the squeaky footsteps of the nurses while the patients lay eerily silent and unmoving. The setup wasn’t comforting: the nurses seemed to nurse from afar and hardly spoke, and it was very difficult to get near Christopher because of the machines. Although I understood they were keeping him alive, all I wanted to do was hug him and I couldn’t. Only once was I allowed to touch his hand.
Then it was a case of waiting. For a fortnight we stayed in Miami and every minute seemed to drag. At least Carey was a great comfort and did her best to distract me from the horror of the situation.
After two weeks, though still in a coma, Christopher was deemed stable enough to be flown back to London in a private airplane. It was so heavy and full, with specialist equipment and two teams of doctors and nurses, that we couldn’t go with him. Not knowing whether he would go downhill at any point, we had to travel back across the Atlantic after him, which was almost as bad as the journey in the other direction had been.
When Christopher arrived in London, it was still too early to tell what would happen, but at least he was back on British soil. And thank God the man at the ticket office had persuaded me to buy the travel insurance. That £150 was the equivalent of winning the lottery: in the end the insurance company paid out over a million pounds.
At this point, I knew that Henry would most likely die and that Charlie’s future was uncertain. Now Christopher was teetering on the edge of life. How could this happen to us? I might have been powerless to save Henry and Charlie, but I was determined to keep Christopher alive by any means I could.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Nightmare and a Miracle
EVERYTHING CHANGED AFTER Christopher’s accident. My whole life became bound up in trying to save his. I was utterly determined that he would recover and convinced that if I gave him all of my attention he just might be all right. I temporarily stepped down from my duties as a Lady in Waiting, staying by Christopher’s bedside.
To start with he lay unconscious in intensive care, still on a ventilator and attached to all sorts of machines, at the Wellington, a private hospital right next to Lord’s cricket ground in north London. Colin and I sat next to him day in day out, still not sure what the future held.
Although Colin had been distant with all the children when they were young, their relationships had grown over time and Christopher was the only one of our children with whom Colin never ever lost his temper. Instead I’d often hear them roaring with laughter. Christopher would constantly be telling us how much he loved us, which only made it more painful to see him lying silent in intensive care.
The twins adored him, and it was incredibly difficult for them, made worse because they were stuck doing their exams. When they could finally see him, they were shocked into silence at the sight of the tube coming out of his neck. It was hard to comfort them. All I could do was encourage them to engage with their brother. “Give him a kiss so he knows you’re here,” I said, hoping it might be true.
Both Charlie and Henry visited Christopher, willing him to wake up, but nothing worked. Henry, who was gradually getting more ill, remained a very strong and calm presence, insisting I focus on Christopher, who n
eeded me more, rather than looking after him. I felt torn, but it was true that while Henry was walking and talking, Christopher was lying motionless.
A few weeks later, the doctors told us that Christopher wouldn’t die but that it was impossible to know whether he would stay in the coma for weeks or months. He was considered to be stable, so with great reluctance Colin returned to Mustique to deal with all the pressing commitments that had piled up since Christopher’s accident.
I spent all my time with Christopher, but he stayed unresponsive, stuck in his limp, damaged body. I kept thinking about how lively and active he had been and now he was getting bed sores, surrounded by beeping machines. Meanwhile all his friends, as supportive as they were, had gone to university and he was being left behind.
A variety of specialist doctors came and saw him, none of them offering the reassurance I craved. Everything was so uncertain and exhausting. After several weeks without change, the stress began to take its toll and I could feel myself beginning to give up. I started to doubt whether anything would ever make a difference. While I already had quite a strong Christian faith, going to church every Sunday, I hadn’t ever felt I had engaged with God, but now I started to pray hard. I prayed and prayed, and just when I was about to give up hope, help came my way.
I had heard of a Christian healer called Mrs. Black, who lived up in Scotland and, after curing horses to great effect, had realized she had healing hands. Normally I would have been skeptical, but I was a desperate mother, trying to save my son, so I contacted her. She agreed to try to help and said she could work on him by telephone. Even now, this really does sound ridiculous, but somehow it seemed to work. After every healing session, in which Mrs. Black channeled all her energy into Christopher’s recovery, praying for Christ to heal him, he would appear to make an improvement—a slight twitch or apparently responding to something. It was minute and would have been unnoticeable to the untrained eye, but by then I had been observing him for over a month. I took hope from these sessions and the tiny improvements they seemed to provoke.
Mrs. Black came down once a month to do more intense healing on Christopher. During one of those sessions I felt her hands, which were boiling hot—it was as though the power was coming out of them into his body. In between the sessions, Mrs. Black would ring me up to ask how he was doing. One day I was so tired I could hardly speak. She said, “Anne, I can help you. Tomorrow morning sit in a comfortable chair at ten a.m. and drain your mind of everything. I will sit and concentrate on you and you will feel a difference.”
I agreed, but I was very much a doubting Thomas. At 10 a.m., I sat in a chair, hundreds of miles from Mrs. Black, wondering whether I was going mad. But suddenly, to my amazement, I felt as if champagne was flowing through my veins. I felt invigorated. It’s the only time in my life when anything like that has happened to me. The only explanation I can come up with is that it felt like Christ was visiting me, laying His hands on me, making it possible for me to carry on, literally filling me with energy and hope and strength—His strength, I suppose.
This miraculous experience came in the nick of time because, shortly afterwards, I met with one of the doctors. Our surreal conversation took place in an empty operating theater as I anxiously perched on the edge of one of the counters. He said: “I’ve got great experience of treating patients in comas and I can tell you now that Christopher will be a vegetable all his life. There is no hope of recovery for him.” He paused, looked at me and continued, in his matter-of-fact tone, as though unaware of the gravity of what he was saying, or perhaps because he had delivered those lines many times before: “If I were you,” he said, “I would forget about him improving and get on with your life.”
For some people, perhaps, those words would have come as some sort of relief—permission to give up, an excuse to get out of the agonizing and exhausting state of limbo. If I hadn’t had the extraordinary healing experience, I think I might have been one of those people, but my outlook had changed. I thought, I am not going to believe this. With God’s help, and all the other people willing to get Christopher back, this is not the outcome I am going to accept.
I was left feeling more determined than ever, while also knowing that I had to work out and stick to a plan to stay focused and determined and see Christopher through to his recovery. Somewhat miraculously, Barbara Barnes rang me up. “I’ll clear the next six months and do everything I can to help,” she said. Having left us when the twins went away to boarding school, she had just left her position as nanny to the Princes William and Harry and wanted to help Christopher. He was the first baby she had ever looked after and she adored him as unconditionally as a mother. I was delighted and relieved to hear from her and together we started this incredible journey.
From that moment on, I had a plan to try to revive him out of the coma. I found a doctor whose own son had been in a coma and he stressed the importance of the family doing things with the patient. He explained that sitting there feeling helpless would do nothing except make the family feel miserable. “You have to engage on all levels,” he told me, “stimulate all five senses.” He gave me a “coma kit,” which he had invented to help his own son recover. Inside, it had lots of different things to help stimulate a coma patient’s senses, such as a coarse brush, a soft piece of material, and things that had different smells. He explained that for fifteen minutes in every hour every day for weeks, Christopher needed to be stimulated. Only then would he stand a chance. He warned me that it wouldn’t be easy: unless I was completely dedicated and set up a routine it wouldn’t work.
His advice and support made all the difference. Not only was it full of hope, it gave me something to do. Waiting around with a feeling of total helplessness had been one of the hardest parts of it all, and now I had a purpose.
Barbara and I went for it: we used the coma kit every hour for fifteen minutes, wafting a pair of Christopher’s smelly trainers near his nose, then swapping them for perfume or cut grass or a bacon sandwich—any strong smell, good and bad, familiar and exotic. We sang, we talked, we laughed. We played music softly and then loudly, from rap to Mozart. We stroked his skin with velvet, then sandpaper or a brush—soft and hard sensations, hoping that the different textures would stimulate automatic reactions. We dabbed him with a hot towel, then a cold towel, in case the different temperatures triggered a reaction. We read all his favorite children’s books, and his former housemaster at school recorded a tape of all his friends for us to play to him.
Seeing how exhausting the process was, friends began to help us. I set up a rotation where my close friends Margaret Vyner, Sarah Henderson, Ingrid Channon, and Zannah Johnston would come in and take turns to stimulate or talk to Christopher. We’d lighten the atmosphere, joking that Christopher had a whole host of women trying to coax him back into the world of the living. It became a team effort, creating more energy, more motivation, and also providing opportunities to pool ideas. Barbara and I came up with a crazy one: to reenact his birth in the hope that some sort of deep instinct might kick-start his brain.
We eventually persuaded the nurses to let us take Christopher out of bed and nurse him on the floor so I could cradle him: I was sure that if he could feel my heartbeat, it would have a positive effect on him. He was still wired up to many machines and I knew it was an unconventional idea, but the more they said no, the more I felt I was right. So there I was, down on the floor with Christopher slumped on top of me, treating this incredibly tall grown man of nineteen like a baby just in case something deep within him was triggered. Nothing happened immediately but we didn’t give up.
Princess Margaret kept in regular touch, asking after Christopher’s progress, which was still almost nonexistent. But as she continued to ask, I was able to describe tiny changes and she helped motivate me to keep trying.
A big change came when, although Christopher was still in a coma, the doctors finally took him off the ventilator and he started to breathe for himself. However, he still wasn’t able
to swallow. One day Barbara arrived with a baby’s bottle. The nurse on duty was somewhat taken aback and asked Barbara what she was doing with it.
“Well,” Barbara replied, “I thought I might try using it on Christopher. He loved his bottle. Can I just put it in his mouth and see? I think it might trigger him to swallow.”
The nurse raised her eyebrows but gave her permission, while simultaneously dismissing the possibility that it had any hope of working. But it did. Christopher started to suck, and the sucking motion caused him to swallow. His automatic reflex had kicked in. The nurse didn’t believe it, so Barbara showed her. It was a massive breakthrough.
In the end, Christopher was in a coma for four months—the longest four months of my life. I will never forget the day he finally woke up. He had just been moved to the Royal Free, the NHS hospital in Hampstead, for special treatment, and when I visited for the first time, I found him crying. I can only assume that he must have been aware he was somewhere new and felt uncertain of his surroundings. Normally people are upset to see somebody they love in tears, but I was ecstatic. It meant he was feeling something. It meant he was in there somewhere.
I cradled him, comforting him, and started talking about cars because he loved them so much, and although I felt rather silly, I said to him, “Come on, stop crying. You must get out of here. I promise you I will get you a car as soon as you do. What would you like?”
Of course I wasn’t expecting him to answer. But he did. His first word since the accident was “Lamborghini.”
I could not believe my ears. Having been speaking to him with no response for months, there he was requesting a sports car. I have never felt so relieved in all my life because in that moment I knew Christopher was going to be all right.
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