From that moment on, he slowly came back to life. Although conscious, he was still trapped in a body that had forgotten how to work. Everything was exhausting and slow—words were hard to form, his muscles were weak, as though his body and mind were only just connected. He would have to learn to walk again but, in the immediate aftermath, that challenge was long into the future. None of that seemed to matter right then—it was just a miracle that his eyes were open and he was aware of his surroundings.
The children were overjoyed, as was Colin, who was deeply proud of my efforts and sincerely grateful to Barbara and all the loyal friends who had helped, from Princess Margaret and Nigel Napier, who undoubtedly saved his life, to the army surgeon who had operated on him, and all the doctors, nurses, friends who helped week after week.
Once it was clear that Christopher was strong enough, Diane Lomax, a brilliant physiotherapist, set to work, teaching him how to use his body all over again. A big team helped Christopher strengthen his muscles, but walking was still a far-off aim. Instead of feeling frustrated or depressed, he stayed enthusiastic and never lost his sense of humor. Everybody came to adore him.
He went to a rehabilitation center in Barnes for months and was then moved to Headley Court, an army rehabilitation center, because the surgeon who had operated on him in Belize wanted to show his support. Other people offered help, including Helena Bonham Carter’s parents, Raymond and Elena, because in 1979 Raymond had had surgery to remove a brain tumor, which had left him paralyzed. Their support was hugely useful since I didn’t know anyone who had been in similar circumstances.
After almost a year, once his basic coordination was deemed good enough, he came home to Hill Lodge, our house in London. He still couldn’t walk—his balance was terrible. The doctors warned me that he would “grow up all over again,” behaving like a toddler, then a small child, then a teenager. They also warned me that a lot of coma patients’ personalities changed: they were often moody and rude, and there was a high risk of depression. Bracing myself, I hired nurses and au pairs, and reminded myself of how far he had come.
People assumed I would prepare the house by setting up a bedroom on the ground floor and installing rails, hoists, and a stair lift, but something inside me was convinced that Christopher should not have any aids. I was certain he would come to rely on them, and they would hinder his progress. He was only twenty and an athletic young man with an incredibly positive outlook on life. I believed my attitude was the right one for him.
Christopher’s bedroom was upstairs, so he would have to manage two flights of stairs every morning and evening. While the house doesn’t compare to the size of Holkham, it’s still large when you think of it from the perspective of a young man who is having to crawl everywhere. But crawl he did. His attitude never wavered, and he accepted it would take him literally hours to get from downstairs to his room. Coming down was a bit quicker—he would slide down the stairs on his bottom.
I doubted my decision many times. Seeing him on the floor struggling, inching his way from one place to the next, felt cruel and I had to override every instinct I had to offer support. Sometimes I did, but mostly I offered words of encouragement. It was agony but I really believed it was the best way. What was a comfort was that he never complained and I could also see how motivated he was to move from place to place—if he had given up, he simply wouldn’t have done it. I know this approach wouldn’t work for everyone, but we had a relationship built on trust and love, and he stayed optimistic and determined throughout.
Once he advanced from crawling, he fell over a great deal, but he didn’t seem to mind. Whenever he fell, he would just wait to be helped or somehow manage to get up.
After many months, there was a difference that motivated him further, and because he had succeeded himself, he took ownership of his actions and built on them. He was so courageous, so strong, and kept every bit of his lovable character and wasn’t in the least bit depressed.
As Christopher was recovering, I wanted to share my experience with others: Barbara and I wrote an article for the prestigious weekly medical journal the Lancet, and I also raised enough money to put “coma kits” in various hospitals. Because of the coma kits and my experience, I was contacted by a Saudi Arabian family who asked me to help their son who had fallen off his polo pony and was in a coma. I visited the hospital to find the young man lying in the bed unresponsive, just as Christopher had been. He was surrounded by women in burqas sitting in silence. Not knowing what to do, they had made no attempt at contact and the room had a familiar feeling of mute despair.
I told them to take their head coverings off and their gloves and hold his hand. I told them to talk to him, and showed them all the things in the “coma kit,” doing little demonstrations by wafting perfume under the patient’s nose and rubbing different materials over his skin. They followed suit and a few months later contacted me, thanking me profusely, when the young man recovered.
I find it hard to think about this time in my life. It was so agonizing, so desperate, and I am so grateful there was a happy ending. What is astonishing is that Christopher doesn’t live his life feeling resentful of the accident and in fact he wouldn’t change it. To this day, I find his attitude remarkable.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Forever Young
BY 1988, A year and a half after Christopher’s accident, he still had a long journey of recovery ahead of him. So many people rallied round to help him—the support really poured in. But for Charlie and Henry, the opposite happened.
Nowadays mental health, drug addiction, and HIV/AIDS are talked about more openly, albeit still being among the biggest taboos in any society. But in the 1980s, there was no such openness when it came to mental health or addiction and therefore no such acceptance. AIDS was still the most feared disease in the world because it was so poorly understood. After doctors had first linked it to gay men, they realized it could be passed to babies by infected mothers. Links had then been made with needles and blood. The more connections were made, the more people panicked, worrying that it could be passed to another person as easily as a common cold.
Fear born mainly out of lack of information resulted in many young men with AIDS being abandoned by frightened families, leaving them to die alone. Henry bravely decided to speak out when his HIV virus turned to AIDS, hoping he could help break the stigma. I warned him, knowing that he would be ostracized, but his mind was made up. He told the press, conscious that it would be up to young men like him who actually had the disease to bare all. The press lapped up his willingness because he was one of the first aristocrats to contract AIDS and the first who was willing to speak out, so they saw it as a big story.
Not surprisingly, Henry’s very open admission led some of our friends to distance themselves from us, just too afraid to socialize with us. Although it made everything more difficult for us as a family, I can quite understand where they were coming from: people do what they think they need to do in order to protect themselves and their children.
I was conscious of the possible risk too, worried for our other children, but not wanting to shun Henry. Nothing was certain like it is today, and as the doctors were discovering things all the time, I compromised. I bought him a new set of towels that were a different color from everybody else’s so I could distinguish them, washing them separately. I also served him food with his own plates, knives, and forks, but I never distanced myself from him. Now I know that doing this was unnecessary, but I didn’t at the time and it felt like the safest thing to do.
Princess Margaret was one of the few people whose behavior didn’t change at all. Not only did she continue to see Colin and me, bringing her children to Glen as she always had, but she also visited Henry when he was in hospital, and kept a watchful eye open in case there was anything she could do to help. I was incredibly grateful for her loyalty and attitude. It made me feel stronger, and without my mother there, Princess Margaret offered a similar strength that helped me cope.
Before Princess Diana went to the London Lighthouse in Notting Hill—the first center and hospice made especially for AIDS patients, in 1989 with a posse of photographers in tow—Princess Margaret had helped set it up, officially opening it in 1988. She went on to become the patron of the Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s leading sexual-health charity. She didn’t hold hands and stroke the patients, like Princess Diana did, because she wasn’t tactile in the same way, but she made them laugh and told them stories.
The London Lighthouse opened just in time for Henry, who by then was rapidly declining. He was covered with purple blotches and had no hair left, due to Kaposi’s sarcoma, a type of skin cancer. That was the problem with AIDS: the immune system became so weak that Henry was unable to fight even a cold, and while he got skin cancer, other people succumbed to pneumonia.
Characteristically, Henry took it all in his stride, always trying to stop me worrying, even though we both knew he was going to die. He managed to find peace through being a Buddhist, and when he’d been diagnosed in 1986, he had gone straight to Japan to a Buddhist monastery. I still have the postcard he sent me in which he wrote: “I’m in the monastery, looking at Mount Fujiyama, and if I die tomorrow, I won’t mind, because I’ve been to Paradise—I can see Heaven.” It was consoling that the religion made Henry feel comforted and less afraid of death.
When Christmas 1989 came, he desperately wanted to come home for the day, but I was worried his appearance might upset his son, Euan, who was still a toddler. The people at the London Lighthouse were fantastic and told me not to worry when I raised my concern. Having supported many patients in Henry’s condition, they had a special team of makeup artists for this very reason. Henry came home wearing a turquoise hat and a lot of foundation. Too weak to stand or even really talk, he lay in the drawing room and we all had our Christmas lunch on trays. Euan opened his presents around him and kept saying, “Daddy, come and play with me,” and Henry would reply, “Daddy’s very tired. You bring your toy to me.” Which Euan did. It was as lovely as it could have been.
May, not knowing what to give her brother as a present, decided on a fun cuddly toy—a bright green frog with a red and white striped night hat, which Henry loved, putting on the hat as he lay surrounded by us all. He had become really close to the twins: for sixth form, they had made the joint decision to go to different schools in order to gain some independence from each other, but they found it very difficult. Henry made an effort to support both of them, driving down to their schools to take them on days out. How we all got through Christmas Day I don’t know. It was heartbreaking, but I put on a brave face, wanting to make it as ordinary as possible.
After Christmas Day, Henry’s condition declined, and he was moved to St. Mary’s, Paddington, which had just opened a special wing for AIDS patients. Like all of the other very ill young men, Henry was moved into a room of his own. Most visitors would sit quietly with their loved one in private, but Henry had asked to be surrounded by a couple dozen of his Buddhist friends. I found the visits increasingly difficult because each time I went I had to clamber through a crowd of people chanting: they were so involved in their trance that they were unaware of me. In his last weeks, I was never alone with Henry.
On the final visit, I was opening the door, preparing to wade through the Buddhists, when a nurse grabbed me firmly by the elbow, stopping me entering. She said, “Lady Glenconner, will you come with me?” My heart sank. There was a special room where people went to grieve, and she was leading me there. I knew what was coming but even knowing did nothing to cushion the blow. She told me gently, “Henry has just died.”
I don’t know what I felt—a feeling of agony I can’t put into words. Not only had my son just died, but I had missed saying goodbye to him by minutes.
I also felt pure anger. Anger that he had been so careless. I had warned him so many times to be careful but he just hadn’t listened. Henry died eighteen months after he was diagnosed in January 1989. He was only twenty-nine.
The whole family was devastated. Charlie, who had always been jealous of Henry and had not been on good terms with him for a few years, had made up with him just before he died and now was kicking himself for past failings. I remember sitting in the kitchen at Hill Lodge with the twins while Charlie cried his eyes out. I’d never seen him cry like that and soon I was also comforting the twins, who had dissolved into tears too. They had only just turned eighteen and, on the cusp of developing an adult friendship with Henry, were heartbroken that they would never get the chance.
No one knew how to comfort me and the family, although both Princess Margaret and Princess Diana had eased the shame of AIDS through associating themselves with it and also did a lot for individual men and their families. When Princess Diana heard that Henry had died, she made an effort to comfort me personally by writing a letter of condolence. She had sat with and spoken to Henry at his bedside shortly before he died. She’d been there filming some of her meetings with the young patients on the ward to raise awareness. At the end of the filming, she had asked the nurses if there were any patients too ill to be there. When the nurses said there were two, Princess Diana visited both of them on her own, without the film crew. One of them was Henry.
“Oh, Ma’am,” he had said to her, smiling broadly, “we’ve got something in common.” Princess Diana had looked surprised and asked him what it was. “Well,” came Henry’s reply, “Barbara Barnes was my nanny before she came to look after Prince William and Prince Harry.”
In the letter she wrote she said it had been lovely to meet Henry, even though under sad circumstances, and said she wanted to tell me how brave she thought he was. She wasn’t afraid to confront the situation head-on, which was a complete contrast to a lot of people we knew, who just simply didn’t know what to say at all. Normally I found it hard to relate to somebody so openly emotional, so different from the mold I was used to, but when it came to dealing with Henry’s death, she got it right.
Her acknowledgment of his bravery made me feel proud of him, which was a comfort, especially when I was faced with so many other people distancing themselves from us, then having to deal with the press, who behaved like animals. Having followed his story, they swarmed to the house after his death: Henry had become headline news. While he had wanted his story to be shared in the hope it would have a positive impact, for us in the direct aftermath, the reality was extremely difficult to deal with.
Every morning, a newspaper was posted through the door with Henry’s photo and huge, normally very blunt, headlines. And the press kept coming, the police seemingly unable to stop them, as they filled the street, ringing the doorbell all day and all night, stooping to an all-time low of hiding in the dustbins outside Euan’s nursery school.
Wanting to protect Euan, we asked the local clergyman to come around wearing his cassock so that he could hide Euan under it and get him out of the house. It worked, the press just assuming a member of the clergy had come to comfort us, not realizing Euan was being smuggled away from them. Instead of leaving us to grieve in private, the press hounded us in our family’s darkest hour.
Determined not to let th
eir behavior affect me, and desperately trying to hold everything together for the sake of the other children, I shook it off and busied myself with the funeral arrangements. So, while members of the press were jumping out of dustbins and knocking at the windows and doors, I was trying to make sure Henry’s last wishes were carried out. Because he was so tall, his coffin was very big, and when it came to the funeral, I couldn’t help but emit a tiny smile because, as is Buddhist custom, it was covered with pineapples and other tropical fruit so it looked like a giant fruit salad as it came into the crematorium.
The months after Henry’s death were very difficult. No one else could relate to what I was going through; no one seemed to know how to deal with me or with what had happened. Colin found it difficult, returning to Mustique, away from the press, and I went to Norfolk to get away from it all. When I went to the shops, the people who would normally say hello and spark up a conversation would see me and scurry away. I think they were terrified of saying the wrong thing or making me burst into tears. It was as though everybody was so scared of death, and AIDS was such a feared and reviled illness, they pretended it hadn’t happened. I was from a generation that didn’t have endless heart-to-hearts, we didn’t share our emotions, and for the sake of the other children, I thought it was best to put on a strong front, get on with life, and not dwell. Apart from at the funeral I don’t think anybody saw me cry. Instead I went to church and prayed. After all, what else could I do? Nothing was going to bring Henry back.
My close friend Margaret Vyner understood I needed support and, knowing how devoted Henry was to Buddhism, she took me out to India to stay with Mitch Crites, our mutual friend who had got Colin out of trouble when he’d started a fight with an Indian shopkeeper several years before. I was absolutely exhausted and didn’t want to go but Mitch reassured me, telling me how healing India was. He told me, “Death is a part of daily life and it isn’t uncommon to see a body being cremated on a funeral pyre floating off on the river. The culture embraces death: they talk about it and they see it.”
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