Well it’s still very clear in my mind, even though it’s now nearly 14 years ago, and it was on the 31st July, 1995, at 7.30 in the morning, a Monday morning, I’d just got into my office, and it was usual for me to get in there just after 7, which I did. And the telephone rang, an unusually early telephone call, 7.30 in the morning, and it was a doctor who I knew who was the accident surgeon at the hospital, [name] hospital, and he said, “Godfrey, I’m afraid Adrian’s had a bit of an accident,” Adrian was my son. So my initial reaction was not too concerned. I said, “Okay, where is he? Is he in casualty?” And he said, “No, he’s in the intensive care unit,”
And of course I immediately knew that this was something pretty awful. So without asking anything more I said, “Right, I’ll come straight away.” So I drove, I tried to ring my wife, she wasn’t at home, I knew she wouldn’t be at home because she went swimming at that time in the morning, so I decided I just had to go straight there, and I drove there which took me about ten minutes. Traffic was quieter in those days, and when I arrived there he was just being taken to the operating theatre, and I was shown this; that he had a head injury and they showed me the scan, and it was immediately obvious to me from the scan that I saw, even though I was no expert, that it was pretty serious stuff, and the prospect of him recovering was probably not very great.
So I very quickly had to get used to the idea that here was my son, a fit healthy young man, never had a days’ illness in his life, was almost certainly going to die, and, well it was unbelievably painful of course, and it became very clear over the next few hours that there was really no prospect of any successful management of the situation.
So I went back home, got my wife, went up there and spent the best part of 24 hours with him in the intensive care unit and eventually had to make the decision to switch off the machinery. And we were very much helped with that by the surgeon, who as I say was a personal friend, and, well life changed dramatically in the space of a very short time.
