It is 30 years since an IRA bomb killed Lord Mountbatten. The bomb was placed in a boat. Also in that boat was Timothy Knatchbull, Lord Mountbatten’s grandson. He survived though his twin brother, his grandmother and a local teenager did not. Timothy Knatchbull now in his forties has written a book which revisits that day.

   Mr Knatchbull, what do you actually remember of the day? What did you remember during your later childhood?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well it was a tremendously happy, relaxed, family holiday in the west of Ireland. And like most families that day we were enjoying ourselves. We had a big family breakfast, we went out on a beautiful flat calm sea and it seemed that everybody in the village that day, everybody who had a boat, was out and that was a very fortunate thing.

  We had only gone about a quarter of a mile, half a mile or so, when there was a really dreadful explosion. My memories of that are terribly snatched: a sensation of the explosion. Then the next thing, I remember being in the bottom of a boat and I could feel a very hard floor that I was on, a wooden floor. I could feel the vibration and I could hear some very frightened, emotionally charged, kindly voices. Irish accents.

   And I knew that something was dreadfully wrong and I knew there was something dreadfully wrong with me but quite what I couldn’t tell. I tried speaking and found that I was really hardly able to utter a syllable and I tried again and eventually made myself heard.

   What I was trying to do at that stage was work out what had happened and where I was and what was wrong with me. And those were the first memories.

Justin Webb
And then in hospital you were obviously told about the devastation to your family. Plainly it changed you as a person, it would change anyone. But your book is really about two journeys isn’t it? It’s the physical journey back but it’s also an emotional journey?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Correct. I was incredibly lucky to be helped by so many friends and family, Irish and English, and quickly found my way back into a physical normality. I was in hospital for less than two weeks and I was able to get on with my life. I hadn’t lost any limbs, I was very, very lucky indeed.

   I was lucky that I took a cue from others in my family, most notably my parents but also my elder brothers and sisters, my Aunt, my cousins, all who were able to get on with their lives and have a remarkable lack of bitterness. And to heal.

   But I never really had a chance to say goodbye to my dead twin, Nicholas Knatchbull, and this was something that prevented me from making a really full mental and emotional recovery. And I had ongoing symptoms which I decided in later life that I would address. I did that initially with some therapy in the early 1990s, which I found useful, but after marrying and having children of my own there was a real sea change and I decided that I would, in 2003, for the first time, go back to Ireland to try and discover a new level of healing.

   What I’m talking about is that it was very difficult for me to really accept that Nicholas had gone at some deep, psychological level. He was still too present in my mind and in my heart and that was partly because I never saw him, never had a goodbye, never saw his dead body and I was, like my parents, unable to travel from hospital to be at his funeral.

   So by going to Ireland I was able to piece what I needed to piece together of that experience. And secondly, and rather profoundly, I needed to move on and get into a state of forgiveness that had eluded me. It was something that when I tried to look into the events out there, I found that actually precious little was known about who did what and how and when.

Justin Webb
And you have forgiven those responsible?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well by going back and asking a lot of questions of a lot of people I found two things. Firstly, that people were very desirous of talking and indeed of having some degree of having some extra healing themselves, this was 25 years later. And I did it very quietly and very privately in 2003 and 2004. And I found that it was a process that allowed me, that by addressing these questions, of what had happened tp myself, digging deep and finding out for myself, first-hand what had happened and who had did it and how and indeed why, I was able to get to a whole new level of forgiveness and indeed healing and to be therefore free of many of the symptoms. For example I used to often hear the sound of the bomb and having gone back and spent a week there each month in 2003 starting on the 24th anniversary and finishing on the 25th anniversary, I found those symptoms evaporated. I’ve decided to write this book to document that and to share so many of the good things with others.

Justin Webb
Timothy Knatchbull, thank you very much. It sounds fascinating and uplifting.

Tim Knatchbull and his family have needed every ounce of determination to live. It’s thirty years since he was blown up on the fishing boat off Ireland in the IRA atrocity which killed Earl Mountbatten, his grandfather, his grandmother Lady Brabourne and the young Irish boat boy, Paul Maxwell and most savage of all for Tim, I suspect, was the fourteen year old, identical twin brother, Nicholas.

He has now written a remarkable book which is dense and intense and very personal called ‘From a Clear Blue Sky – Surviving the Mountbatten bomb’.

It’s a very grown-up book, it’s very reflective. You can tell you’re in mid-life now. This was the right time to do it, was it?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Definitely, this has been the only time in my life where I could have done it. As a child – because really the story is about a fourteen year old boy. I found myself suddenly and completely turned upside down. My life completely changed because from my earliest experiences my life had been predicated upon an hour by hour sharing of my life with this fantastic identical twin.

Libby Purves

When you were little you say you sometimes got muddled as a toddler you thought it was a mirror and you didn’t know if it was your brother or a mirror until you reached out and touched you.

Timothy Knatchbull

   I was worried and I came near a mirror, I would look into the mirror and if I saw an image of myself I would have to stop and think, ‘Is that an image of myself or is it my twin standing the other side?’ I’d move an arm and if the image moved an arm I knew it was me and if he didn’t I knew it was safe to go to him.

   So my life was pretty predicated on the idea of sharing my life minute by minute until that moment on August 27, 1979 when this bomb exploded.

Libby Purves
Let’s go back, quite briefly, to that day. Looking back at the height of The Troubles it seems remarkable that your grandfather, Lord Mountbatten was still so determined to keep on with his Irish holidays. He loved that place didn’t he?

Timothy Knatchbull

   He had an absolute passion for it. He’d been introduced to Ireland when his wife, Edwina, had inherited this wonderful place called Classiebawn on the West Coast of Ireland near a little village called Mullaghmore, County Sligo. He had been a Royal Navy destroyer captain and had called in to Derry for repairs in, I think, 1941. He got a few hours and got permission to dash down to see the place and he then wrote to his wife, ‘But you never told me how stupendously beautiful it is and I’ve never seen anywhere like it and I can’t wait to move in’.

   After the war they got the place patched up, it had been neglected for a generation. Her father had locked the place up decades before after Ireland had separated from the UK and he and she started to make it their summer home. He fell so deeply in love with it. She died in 1960 very suddenly and unexpectedly and if anything he found an even greater love for the place after she died.

Libby Purves
He was clearly a top granddad wasn’t he, from your descriptions in the book? He was a great granddad to have out on the fishing boat and full of stories.

Timothy Knatchbull

   He was so brilliant because along with this world class reputation – as someone said of Churchill – he also had this boy scout enthusiasm. So to have him as a grandfather, he was so brilliantly able to get on to our frequency. In many respects he was not childish but childlike. That made him so much fun to be with.

Libby Purves
You researched for the book, the security worries that there were. The security services did realise that having – I can remember very distinctly because I was a Today programme presenter at the time – I remember about three weeks before, somebody in the IRA saying, ‘Britain, we will break its sentimental imperialist heart.’ And when Mountbatten was blown up I thought, ‘Oh that’s what they meant’. It was a deliberate attempt at a national, wartime icon. So it was terribly dangerous for you all to be out there wasn’t it?

Timothy Knatchbull

   I think with the benefit of hindsight of course, it was wrong. But when I came to research this book it was a question I wanted to ask for myself. I dug very, very deep into the archives in Dublin, in London, in his own archives and pieced together the flow of letters that had started when violence had started at the outbreak of The Troubles in 1969. By 1971 he had police with him in Ireland; he had Garda – the Irish police – with him

   Each year he took a very measured, very clinical approach to it. In ’74 he took the decision that he would cut the holiday in half because he felt the risk was too great.

  With every passing year, it seemed that everyone was in agreement. Although there was a small amount of risk it seems like the risk at Terminal Five [Heathrow Airport, London], it seemed like something that was just academic. How wrong it was.

Libby Purves
On the boat you were saved because you were sitting right in the bow, the blast that killed Nick outright, somehow missed you. A detail stays with me from the book that years and years later when mobile phones were invented, you found that tiny electronic relay click that happens before a car phone goes off would freak you out. And you would realise gradually that subconsciously you heard the relay before the bomb. You must have done.

Timothy Knatchbull

   There must have been something like that going on. I think that what I had built up in my mind was this sort of overhang: the sound of the bomb. Different impulses would trigger the sound of the bomb in my head in later years.

  The first time it happened I was learning to drive. There was a rather clunky, very old Landrover engine that I was trying to change the gears in, this was only three of four months after the bomb. I tried to change gear and as I did so, I did it rather inelegantly, there was a grinding of the clutch and I suddenly heard an explosion. I looked across to my elder brother, Philip who was in the seat beside me, I looked at him and I realised that he hadn’t heard the explosion. I thought, ‘What the hell was that?’

   That night I lay in bed and tried to work it out and couldn’t and then months later, about six months later, I had a similar experience where walking under a bridge, a train went over and it scared the living daylights out of me. Again my head filled with the sound of the bomb as it did with circuitry.

   If I would flick a light switch or listened to a click connected to a radio signal, my mobile phone, it would trigger this sound. I don’t really know what was going on other than it was a tell-tale sign to me that something needed to be sorted out. This impulse of triggering the sound of the bomb in my head was unhealthy and I need to go back and sort it out.

Libby Purves

You write a lot about the kindness and the sorrow of the Irish people around you, that a boat with three children on would be targeted like this. A sweet letter: Dear Tim, I love you, I am sorry, I am ashamed, I’m Irish, I love you, I pray for you. Love Sarah, eight years old.

But you also pass on some utterly horrible comments like the man in the pub who said, ‘No innocent English blood was ever shed in Ireland, only innocent Irish blood because the English were not innocent.

Did you go through a stage of adolescent rage against the IRA, against the Republicans, against the people who had done this?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well we’ve touched on rage already and I think, yes, I had my moments of rage and they were natural, they were the flip side of the emotion.

   I remember one day I was at school and the eleven o’clock news came on, probably somebody sitting in a studio not far from where we are now, with the news which is that Classiebawn, our former lovely home in Ireland, had been occupied by the IRA and banners draped out of the window. I remember that was a moment of intense boiling fury. I bashed my fist against the table. I was alone in my study at boarding school. I calmed myself down and looked at my watch and I knew that I was meant to be in double biology in ten minutes. I sort of got a hold of myself and I walked down the passageway. As I walked down the stairs, suddenly again I just had to lash out. I was talking to myself, I was shouting as I walked down the stairs.

   They were very, very few and far between, those moments of rage.

Libby Purves

Your view in the book and you write a lot about the Peace Process, the IRA and Irish history and the gradual rehabilitation of IRA men into leading political Peace Makers and government figures and so on. You’re very adult now, you’re very forgiving. You seem to have moved on in a way sometimes difficult to comprehend when one thinks of what happened to you.

Timothy Knatchbull

   I was incredibly lucky that right from waking up after surgery in Sligo Hospital in Intensive Care, right from that moment on I was surrounded by people who were fantastic examples, namely my brothers and sisters, my parents and my aunt and my cousins. They were so good because there was never any bitterness or real anger. It was an acceptance and that allowed me – I was so pole-axed and disorientated – I was looking for example, I was looking for guidance. And when I looked around, I was like a sponge; I was absorbing it all the time. And from my parents in particular came this message which is, ‘The Irish are our friends.’.

   And as you say the people who were looking after us, our friends and neighbours and relatives in Ireland were always giving us this message of shame for what had happened, of support, of love. I left Ireland with that as the backdrop.

Libby Purves

And when you came back on all these visits for this book, you found that again?

Timothy Knatchbull

   I needed to find that real forgiveness which had been in the background. I really needed to process it and make it more real.

Libby Purves

The twin thing fascinated me. I have to say before I read this I didn’t completely understand how the death of an identical twin goes beyond even ordinary bereavement of a sibling. A real internal physic loss, something different and strange; you express that.

Timothy Knatchbull

   I was so utterly lost after he was killed and it took me a long time to begin to understand really what his death meant to me. At the beginning I got back to school and at the end of every class I would close my books and it was just instinctive that I would turn to the desk beside me and just expect him to be there.

   I had to learn how to navigate through that and again I just accepted that it was very difficult for my mother and father, my brothers, Nicholas’ friends, everyone else can get on and so could I.

   Later I did admit to myself that there was something so profoundly disorientating about it. In later adult life I got into stages where I just found there was this deep sadness and loneliness in me. I would get up very early and work from very early to very late; always keep myself busy. Then ask myself what lay behind that.

Libby Purves

There’s an extraordinary quote in the book from somebody about the death of a twin, saying that in a way you have the worst of both worlds because you have lost a part of yourself and so you are both the mourner and the victim at once. Who was it who said that?

Timothy Knatchbull

   During the research for this book I turned up a very remarkable memoir of losing a twin by an American man called Saul Diskin. In piecing together his experiences and others I began to understand much more my own psyche. That gave me an ability to unpick my feelings and to try and then learn how to do things that would keep me healthy, mentally and emotionally in the way that I’d learnt to in the gym.

   That unlocked for me what became the absolute turning point in my life was when I reached a stage where I was able to really, deeply fall in love in a way I never had before. My wife, Isabella, is the person who’s changed my life. In falling in love with her, I gained the emotional security and in fatherhood that I had never had before. That allowed me to go back to Ireland and face up to it all.

Libby Purves

I also like your comment at one point, where everyone was complimenting you on how strong you were and how you were being so strong and actually that wasn’t that good an idea at all. Was it? To show weakness?

Timothy Knatchbull

   I needed to have my complete collapses and I needed to do that in a way which in sometimes would be in a trusted environment with other people and to show that vulnerability I found was something that didn’t hurt me. It actually allowed me to learn and to glean from them much more strength and support and hope.

Libby Purves

The book is ‘From a Clear Blue Sky’ and I do commend it.

Dominic Kent

  He had an idyllic childhood in Kent, growing up in Mersham near Ashford. But in 1979 at the age of fourteen, Timothy Knatchbull’s world was shattered when he took a boat trip off the coast of Ireland. The Provisional IRA blew up the vessel assassinating his grandfather, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India, and three other members of the family. Timothy’s twin brother, Nicholas, was among the victims.

  30 years on after the tragedy, Timothy now says he has come to terms with his loss and forgives those behind the bombing. He started off by telling me his fond memories of growing up right here in Kent.

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well it was a wonderfully happy childhood. I was born in London and at a few days old I came down and lived in Mersham. I was a tail end Charlie of a large family. My parents had seven children. They had five and they thought they would just go for one more and then, about two or three weeks, I think, before the birth they were told it was to be twins. They were very, very happy.

  We were born November ’64 and my identical twin brother, Nicholas, was 20 minutes older than me. He was christened Nicholas Timothy and I was christened Timothy Nicholas. From that day we really had a fantastically close, almost symmetrical relationship. Very different personalities. We grew up with five elder siblings in the family – a very close family.

   My father worked in London in the film industry and my mother was based mainly locally. We grew up in a very happy home in the village of Mersham and I went to school in Ashford and had a wonderful time. At nine years old we went away properly for the first time, went to boarding school.

  But throughout my education I always continued to come back to Mersham, that is the family home. It really is a home from home. I finished my education and went to London and made my own career in media and later worked abroad. So Mersham’s a terribly special place to me. My mother still lives there. Her name confusingly is different from mine, it’s Brabourne – Lady Brabourne. I visit her regularly and have very happy memories.

Dominic Kent

  So the side of the river for you presumably is ‘Man of Kent’ or is it ‘Kentish Man’?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Quite right. For me I’m a ‘Man of Kent’, very proud of it and I’ve never felt more proud to be coming back. A few weeks ago I dropped in at Chatham and went to the printers there, Mackays, where I saw rolling off the presses – a very impressive machine – the book that I’ve written about my childhood experiences in Ireland in 1979. That book From a Clear Blue Sky was published yesterday and documents an intense experience that I had when only fourteen years old.

   The experience I had at that time was something that has stayed with me ever since. We went on a family holiday in the West Coast of Ireland. We visited my mother’s father, Lord Mountbatten who had a family home there. We had, from my earliest memories, my twin brother and I, had gone out with the rest of our family to Ireland and had spent summer after summer there.

   In August 1979, 27th of August, we went out from the harbour in his small fishing boat as we often did. A delightful little twenty nine foot long, green painted, rather smelly but gorgeous fishing boat.

Dominic Kent

  A dream for a child, a dream for you and your brother to go out on the boat.

Timothy Knatchbull

  And he was a dream grandfather; always interested in us, full of fun, fantastic sense of humour. Well he wasn’t childish but he was child-like. He had this fantastic facility to find an interest in the things we found interesting – our toys, our games. It was that infectious enthusiasm that really dominated out childhood.

Dominic Kent

   When the news hit the headlines in 1979 that Lord Mountbatten of Burma had been assassinated, perhaps no one knew what else was happening. A real family story and a story that left you with the loss of your brother and the loss of your grandfather and a big hole in the family along with three members of your family.

Timothy Knatchbull

  That’s right, it was a day that changed my life, changed the life of my family and others beyond completely, utterly shocking. From the most tranquil and happy possible circumstances, seven of us on the boat. My father’s mother was on the boat. Her name was Doreen Brabourne, she was eighty three years old and she turned to my mother in the stern of the boat – this was at about 11.45 that beautiful Bank Holiday Monday in 1979 – and said, ‘Isn’t this a beautiful day’. Very shortly afterwards there was an incredible explosion.

   My memory of it is really just an impression, a snatched impression, very violent force. The next thing I remember, and it must have been a couple of minutes later, was coming round in the bottom of a very small boat. I knew it was very small because I could feel wooden floor boards and close by I could detect a small engine and I could feel the vibration coming through the floorboards and very close to me I could hear just two voices. Two very emotionally charged voices, very kindly, very caring, Irish accents and they were just asking me, reassuring me really, ‘It’s OK, you’re alright’.

  I knew that I was in a terrible condition that something terrible had happened. At that stage I just tried to concentrate really minute by minute and tried to work out what was wrong with me.

   I couldn’t see, I couldn’t even work out I couldn’t see but I had no sight at that stage. I had both eardrums blown in but thankfully I had all of my limbs. I was taken into the harbour, which was only about three quarters of a mile away. From there, again, I received fantastic care from the people in the village.

  We were taken to hospital in Sligo in the west of Ireland, about half an hour away. We started the process of a recovery. My eighty three year old grandmother died in the bed beside me in Intensive Care, early the next morning. My mother was in the bed opposite me in Intensive Care. She had 117 stitches in her face with 20 in each eyeball. She had a machine breathing for her and I’m told was really barely recognisable, not only as my mother but as a human being. She was a mass of wires. My father grievously injured as well.

   What I didn’t know for those first three days when I was Intensive Care is that my grandfather had died instantly in the explosion as had a lovely, local Irish boy, fifteen years old, much the same as us, called Paul Maxwell. He was working on the boat, helping out on the boat that summer as a job to earn pocket money.

  But most horrifically for me was the news broken to me by one of my sisters that my beloved identical twin brother, Nicholas, was dead.

Dominic Kent

  Timothy Knatchbull, the grandson of Lord Mountbatten talking about the boat trip that changed his life.

PART TWO

Dominic Kent

  It was a boat trip that changed one Kent man’s life forever. Fourteen year old Timothy Knatchbull who grew up in Mersham near Ashford was on a family holiday off the coast of Ireland when his boat was blown up.

   His grandfather, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and two other members of his family were killed in the attack. It’s been a long and difficult journey for Timothy Knatchbull but thirty years on he say’s he forgives the IRA.

  Earlier he spoke about the moment in the attack which left him perforated eardrums and how he could not see. He spent the first three days in Intensive Care and it was there that he found out that his twin brother, fourteen year old Nicholas Knatchbull, had also been killed in the boat bombing.

Timothy Knatchbull

  I never truly healed from that moment in a way that was complete. In 2003 I went back to Ireland to really address that question: the lack of a goodbye to my dead twin and a wish to try and get to a new stage of healing, a new stage of understanding and forgiveness and reconciliation. That’s what I’ve written about in this book.

Dominic Kent

  It’s impossible to imagine what any family that goes through with this kind of atrocity. We hear these stories of many families around the world who find themselves, and we’re still hearing of our soldiers who find themselves on road blocks, who are blown up on a daily basis. And for any family dealing with the hurt, you were right at the very centre of what happened.

  I mentioned earlier the headline of the story which of course in people’s minds they think of Lord Mountbatten and they think of him perhaps alone. For you as a family to move on from that, to try and move on, lots talked about a resolution. I know that eight years later from when that happened there was a bereavement counsellor that came into your life, that I understand helped to at least not move on – I’m not sure anyone could – but to get a sense of peace with what happened.

Timothy Knatchbull

  That’s right and it was the beginning of a process of unlocking in me things that needed to be unlocked.

  The thing that really changed me was falling in love with my wife, with Isabella, marriage, children. On the birth of my first daughter, Amber in 2000, like any new parent I suppose, I was in love, not with the experience but with my little girl and looking into her eyes it made me ask a lot of questions about life, about parenting. It made me think about the loss my mother had suffered in losing her son.

  I wrote a letter almost by reflex, I wrote a letter to the couple who had been in that little boat I described in Ireland and I said to them essentially, ‘Thank you for saving my life, you’ve no idea what it means to me, day by day, to be loving the gift of life and now to be seeing a little girl’.

  And as I went back to Ireland what I discovered lay at the very epicentre of my on-going emotional wounds which had not healed, was the inability to say a proper goodbye to Nicholas.

  Now on the 6th of September 1979 there was a funeral in the church in Mersham, St John the Baptist, and it was the funeral of my grandmother and of my identical twin brother. That day, my parents and I were unable to travel; we were in our hospital beds in Ireland. We had no way of listening to the service. A very kind broadcasting unit at William Harvey Hospital made a recording and they got that to us and that was the first time that we heard the music, we heard the prayers.

  We held our own very short service, about five or ten minutes, with a wonderful chaplain in the hospital and with some great friends of ours who had come out to be with us when the rest of the family had returned for the funerals. That was key. It was a tremendous extra sadness not to be at his funeral because it was that failure to say goodbye properly which had stayed with me as an overhang.

  In 2003 I went back to Ireland, very quietly and very privately; just to spend time in the West of Ireland. I made the time to go and spend about a week there, alone in August 2003, the anniversary of the bomb that was coming up – 24 years at that stage. Things started to unlock for me. As I spent the following month, another four or five days, and the month after that and so on, right through that year until we reached August 2004, which was the 25th anniversary when I stopped.

  By that stage I had managed to piece together, for the first time, a true understanding of what had happened that day. Of who had attacked us, how they’d attacked us, why, when, how they had moved. And that was part of what I needed to start getting into a new state of forgiveness and healing.

Dominic Kent

  And on that state of forgiveness, on that state of healing, you have forgiven those who caused it?

Timothy Knatchbull

  That’s been one of the blessings for me that right from the get-co, my mother and father leading really from the front and the rest of my family as well, they harboured no bitterness. We just had an acceptance of what happened. I was very impressionable, I was a fourteen year old, and I followed their example. Never recriminations, no bitterness, we got on with our lives. But by going back to Ireland, piecing it together, I was able to address many of these unanswered questions and thereby came to this sense, of this extra sense of forgiveness which I feel now.

  When I went back to Ireland I wanted to make sure that first and foremost I wasn’t going to do anything to bring injury or open up old wounds for anybody. I went there to try and just patch up some old wounds of my own which I was able to do and move forward.

  And I wanted the same for other people. And time and again I was just bowled over when I found in talking to people they said, ‘Well in talking to you we’ve found a little bit of extra peace for ourselves. We wanted to say goodbye to you. You disappeared in a whirlwind with the violence and the security and the trauma of it.’

   Really, the process for me has allowed me to say goodbye to my dead twin, has allowed me to say hello much more to the present much more in which I’m living and the joy of having a wonderful family of my own, of seeing my own children beginning to grow up and indeed learning about these things is part of that, and to have this happy time.

   And what a joy it is to come back to Kent on a regular basis to see my mother to see the home and of course, from time to time, to visit the grave of my twin brother Nicholas.

Dominic Kent

   And has the sound of the bomb blast stopped and disappeared from your mind?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well it’s something of a miracle for me that that has happened. I couldn’t really hope for sure that it would happen but you’ve mentioned the sound of the bomb and quite right, that is what I found happen to me. I had something that would trigger it, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes more than half a dozen times a day and the sound of the bomb would fill my head.

  Well in going back to Ireland that has stopped, almost completely and it is a wonderful gift, small mental reminders like that have gone. And it’s a wonderful situation now to be rid of that and to be seeing Ireland in this increasingly peaceful state. Of course my dearest wish is to see that continue, because the pain and the suffering, one wouldn’t want that on anybody.

Dominic Kent

  Timothy Knatchbull, the grandson of Lord Mountbatten, talking about how he has come to terms with the IRA bombing which killed his grandfather and two members of his family. He’s written a book, it’s called From a Clear Blue Sky and it came out this week.

  A dreadful event in Irish history from thirty years ago, August 1979. There were survivors from the IRA bomb that killed Lord Mountbatten. One of those survivors has written a book thirty years on. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Can I ask if it is difficult for you to actually hear that report again thirty years on?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well, no. Of course on the day I didn’t hear it because I was lying in a hospital bed in Intensive Care in Sligo. All of this was going on, to some large degree, with me quite unaware. I knew something had happened but it was really only after I came out of an emergency operation that afternoon that the full magnitude of it slowly began to seep in.

   And I spent three days in Intensive Care and it was on the fourth day in hospital that one of my family came to me and explained that not only were my beloved grandparents dead and Paul Maxwell but the real hammer blow for me – the moment that changed my life – was when they told me my identical twin brother, Nicholas Knatchbull, was dead.

Matt Cooper
How did you cope with that?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well, it was a calamitous moment in my life, the worst moment in my life possible. We had grown up in an intensely close family. We were the youngest of seven children. We were identical. He was christened Nicholas Timothy, I was christened Timothy Nicholas. My parents brought us up really identically so that we were dressed in similar clothes, led a similar life and really we were never more than a heartbeat away. In the first fourteen years of my life I think I only spent four or five days apart from Nicholas. Really he was my true soul mate.

  When I looked into my sister’s eyes as she gave me the news, she said to me, ‘When you came to the hospital, you were only semi-conscious, in and out of consciousness, you woke up and Nicky never did.’ And in that moment I realised that my entire life, my whole conception of what it meant to be alive, was going to be changed forever.

   I looked into her eyes and as slowly she dissolved into tears, I followed her. I wanted to give a signal to my family that I was strong and I was well, that I was a survivor and that I was going to carry on in the way they were. I did my best to do so.

   I managed to piece together my life. We went back to England a little over two weeks later. Within a few months more I was able to go back to school and start picking up my life.

Matt Cooper
How hard must that have been? Traditionally we think that from the British aristocracy a certain degree of reserve and stiff upper lip. Did you exhibit that or was that perhaps in some way damaging to your ability to cope with what had happened to you and what had happened to your twin brother?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well of course the culture was that a boy growing up into a young man – there was a certain expectation. You try to be strong and not show your emotions too much. But I had a very loving, supportive family, brothers and sisters, mother and father, who helped me enormously get through that period of time. But the signal I wanted to send to them and to the rest of the world was that I was alright. I didn’t want them to worry too much. Slowly, I think at times maybe I fooled them and perhaps more damagingly fooled myself. As my physical wounds began to heal I was left with some lasting emotional and mental wounds that really wouldn’t go away.

   In later life when I was in my early thirties I addressed these. I went through some therapy and that really started making me aware of the need to open up and become healthy in a way that I hadn’t before.

  I met the love of my life, my wife, Isabella. We had children and in 2000 when my first daughter was born, I had an extraordinary moment looking into my newborn daughter’s eyes – she is called Amber. Looking at her I was filled, not just with a father’s love which any father knows but also with this desire to protect one’s child. Also at the same time an acknowledgment of the futility of that hope that I would be able to protect her from hurt all life.

   But much more than that, something else came through which was a desire to reach out to the very extraordinary people who on that day in August 1979 had pulled me from the water, undoubtedly had saved my life by motoring over. They saw something floating, they thought it was a football, they grabbed hold of it. It was a man and a woman in a small boat and they found it wasn’t a football; it was a human head – my head. And as they started to pull into the boat they didn’t know what they were going to find; was there a head attached to a body? Were there going to be legs?

   Well, I was lucky enough to keep all of my limbs. I lost only the sight in one eye, some of the hearing in one ear. And as I lay in the bottom of the boat, I knew something awful had happened.

  But many years later as I looked into my own daughter’s eyes, I realised what an incredible gift life was and I wrote to those two people to say thank you for every day of life they had given me and for the miracle of being able to look into my newborn daughter’s eyes.

   From that moment on I realised it was a completion of a journey of healing and truth, forgiveness, reconciliation, that I needed to go through.

   Happily married and with children, for the first time I felt emotionally secure enough to come back to Ireland and the place that I had grown up loving all my life and despite the attack that love had never left me. I had left Ireland in 1979 predominantly with the images I had taken away from Sligo of love, care and attention from the people of Mullaghmore, from the professionals in the hospital.

   Happily married and with children, for the first time I felt emotionally secure enough to come back to Ireland and the place that I had grown up loving all my life and despite the attack that love had never left me. I had left Ireland in 1979 predominantly with the images I had taken away from Sligo of love, care and attention from the people of Mullaghmore, from the professionals in the hospital.

  I decided to go back in 2003 to revisit it. So very quietly, very privately I slipped back into the west of Ireland and spent four or five days, sometimes a week, at a time, one month and then another month, starting in 2003 and after twelve months finishing on the 25th anniversary of the bomb.

Matt Cooper
And what good could that do you?

Timothy Knatchbull

   It was a process of trying to come to terms and complete a process of healing. Now, I didn’t really know what the questions were that I needed to have answered when I went back. I began to realise as I went there. I spoke with our neighbours, our friends, relatives, the community. I began to realise there was an awful lot more to the picture than I had understood before.

   I began to realise that if I wanted to become truly forgiving then I needed to know much more about the attack. There was precious little known about it. So I simply went about finding out the information first hand for myself. Piecing together almost forensically, a picture of what had happened, who had moved against us, why, how, when. These were questions that I needed to have answered if I…

Matt Cooper
…Had they not been answered in the court case there had been?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Well of course the court case had addressed some of those issues but because of the way that a court case works only a small amount of the picture will come to the surface. As I answered, for myself, many of these questions, I found that the feelings that I needed to reconnect with came to the fore. The primordial, over-riding feeling that I needed was this: I had had no goodbye to Nick, my twin brother. There had never been a moment when I had looked into his eyes, or at his dead body. There had never been a moment for me to be in a church service at his funeral because as he was buried in England my parents and I had lay in our hospital beds in Sligo unable to be there.

  And finally in 2004 I had completed that process. I had been back and pieced together what I had needed to, not just the facts but really the feelings of the background and understanding. And I was able to say goodbye to him in a way I’d never done before and with that goodbye came a hello. A hello to the present I was living in, to my wife and my children, my job, my neighbours, my own community and to lead that life in a much more full and enriched way has been the most fantastic gift and a reward for me for going back is how I feel.

Matt Cooper
A couple of things out of that: did you suffer from what might be termed the ‘Survivors Guilt’? In wondering ‘why had I survived?’ from what you have described it was almost a miracle that you were pulled from the water and that you managed to live whereas your brother died.

Timothy Knatchbull

   I never did feel that ‘Survivor’s Guilt’. I felt other complex emotions but I remember in the years following it and many years later discussing this with my parents, with my father who’d gone through the second world war. It’s simply ‘Survivor Guilt’ was not something I felt, it was more complicated than that.

   There was a wonder and there was an extraordinary sense when I went back in 2003 and stood on the little strip of sand where the rescue boat had landed me ashore after the explosion. I realised then what an incredible gift I had been given. To be in some miraculous way, reduced from something for which I had no right, no expectation, to live through. The way that in the moment of the explosion the boat was reduced to the tiniest scraps of driftwood left floating on the surface. Big chunks went straight to the sea bed; there was just rubbish there and the damage that was done to the fabric of the boat. When I look back I feel nothing but wonder and gratitude to the fact that I was able to come away and live.

Matt Cooper
And indeed your parents as well. When you went back what sort of reaction did you get from people? Was there a sense that you found some of them almost embarrassed by their memory of what had happened. That some people in respect had wanted to forget what had happened?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well with the passage of years, a great deal of healing had passed in that time and that was wonderful but really what had amazed me as I started to work my way back and just quietly call on people who I had known in my childhood and talk to them.

   The predominant thing that came out time and time again was their warmth, of the degree to which they would like to welcome me back. But also their own sense of not having had a goodbye.

  There was that day, after generations of my family having had a home in that community, suddenly a brutal finality. There was this explosion and people – our neighbours, our friends, and the community – had not been able to have their own sense of good bye. I felt as they were talking to me, time and again people said how much they had enjoyed the conversation, how much it had meant to them and to some small degree, there was a little bit of healing it seemed to me that needed to be done on their part as well as mine. That’s what I took away.

Matt Cooper
Did you come across anybody who might have attempted to try and justify these murders?

Timothy Knatchbull

   It’s a very complicated equation and I understand that and I understand that at all times I kept my eye focused on the future and on the personal process I was going through. So I never tried to tie this into a wider political picture. I needed to understand some of the backdrop but I never tried to connect it in any way other than was me personally, as a fourteen year old child unable to make a sense of it and heal fully.

   Going back as somebody approaching my fortieth birthday and making good on that process and reaping huge rewards and living now in a new state of forgiveness with an acceptance that I’ve said my final goodbye to my twin brother, Nicholas. This is really what I’ve done through this book From a Clear Blue Sk and really enjoying life with a fantastic wife and five wonderful children.

   It’s something that while I feel we all have a certain amount of luck in our lives – and I had incredible luck in having Nicholas for a twin for the first nearly fifteen years of my life – and the luck that I have now with my health but also this wonderful life I have with young children and a fantastic wife.

Matt Cooper
When your children get older and they read this book what do you think they will make of it?

Timothy Knatchbull

   Already our children, the eldest of them is nine, they are curious, they want to know. I’m keen that they shouldn’t just have that part of our family’s painful history airbrushed out. They should know about their five wonderful Aunts and Uncles who are living but also about the wonderful one who died that day. It was a remarkable life, all be it a short one he lived: a beautiful one. He is someone who is terrible important to me and it’s a wonderful gift for me to give my children to know about him. So they ask me. They say to me – they are aware about the bomb – and they ask me about it, ‘Tell me Daddy who was on the boat that day?’ And ‘Where were you?’ ‘Who died Daddy?’ Who was it who died?’ And I tell them.

  Somebody once said with relation to the Troubles, that for it to be unrepeatable it must be unforgettable. I hope that in some small way, I’ve put another chip into reminding my family, the younger generation of my family and friends and maybe people beyond that, about something that shouldn’t be forgotten but certainly we should always keep our eye on the future. And be looking at the healing and reaching out and remembering that the greatest gift I came away with was the lack of bitterness my parents had that infected me. It inspired me and I’ve never lived my day with a moment of recrimination.

   There have been flashes of anger, of course. Years ago in the aftermath immediately, but that’s all washed away and I’m just so happy to find that increasingly Ireland is entering a new stage of a very peaceful existence and please God that may continue.

Matt Cooper
Timothy Knatchbull, thank you very much for taking the time to join us. The book is called From a Clear Blue Sky.

Roger Hearing
Because you were quite badly injured, weren’t you?

Timothy Knatchbull

  I’m told when they got me to hospital they weren’t sure if I was going to live. They put me into Intensive Care in a bed opposite my mother and beside my grandmother. My grandmother died about twenty hours later and my mother was given a 50/50 chance of living. She had an unrecognisable appearance: 120 stitches in her face with 20 in each eyeball.

  I wasn’t as badly wounded as her but nonetheless they were not sure if would live or die. They gave me an emergency operation and my first memories in hospital were coming out of that operation and coming round in Intensive Care.

  Then only three days later being told the news that changed my life, which is that my identical twin brother, Nicholas, was dead.

Roger Hearing
Along with other members of your family of course. It’s something that hopefully none of us will have to experience. The shock must have been profound?

Timothy Knatchbull

  It was. I was incredibly lucky both with the level of care from the holiday makers and the local residents in the village who had pulled us very, very quickly out of the water. And then we were rushed to hospital, a brilliant hospital with brilliant doctors, one particularly brilliant doctor who led a team there.

  We returned to England about two and a half weeks later. My parents continued their recuperation in hospital but I was able to lead a family normal life from thereon. I had no loss of limbs but although I had lost the sight in one eye and some of my hearing, I had no ongoing injuries except that I found later that there was a certain degree of emotional and mental overhang that really came from the fact that I had been unable as a fourteen year old to go back and to address the emotional wounds. Particularly I never had the chance to say goodbye to my dead twin. That was something that really had a terrible grip on me in later years.

Roger Hearing
How did that manifest itself?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well amongst other things I carried around some emotional and mental scars. One was that very often I would imagine that I heard the sound of the bomb, time and time again. Sometimes half a dozen times in a day. Often triggered by some sort of electrical impulse: the ringing of a phone, the turning on of a light switch, as if what was being brought back in my mind subconsciously was a connection between the electrical wiring or a radio signal. It was believed the bomb was triggered by a remote control signal.

Roger Hearing
So a kind of echo of what happened?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Indeed and I decided after many years, in 2003 and by then I was happily married with children, I had a level of emotional security in my life where I felt strong enough to go back and do what I’d always wanted to do, which is to go back into the West of Ireland. I went and spent a week there in August 2003 to coincide with the 24th anniversary of the attack. And then each month after that, very quietly, I slipped back and spent a week in the West of Ireland in order to make contact again, to ask questions, to talk, to reflect with the people that we had known in my childhood – our neighbours, our friends, our relatives in the West of Ireland. And to learn from them, share with them my thoughts, my aspirations, hopes and questions. Because really I found when I looked into it that I was not as able as I wished to enter into a really deeply forgiving mindset for what had happened.

Roger Hearing
Of course some of the people who are sympathising with that are now, if you like, the establishment in Northern Ireland. Some who expressed at the time even, a measure of acceptance of the people who had done that and why they had done it. That must be hard?

Timothy Knatchbull

  No it isn’t hard. I think we all have a responsibility to remember what small creatures on this earth we are. There are bigger forces at work and it’s for the sake of oncoming generations we need to embrace, salute and applaud those who have been part of this process. Whether or not they have been implicated in the murders of yesteryear we have to dig deep and remind ourselves of the need and the healthy impulse of always looking to the future and being prepared to lay the rest to past, to let old wounds heal and above all not to open up fresh ones.

Roger Hearing
Can you understand the motivation and the level of the people who put that bomb on the boat?

Timothy Knatchbull

  I’ve written in my book that at some deep level, I accept that had I lived through the events of the 1970s, had my life been informed by circumstances through which they had to live, circumstances they had to endure, I can’t say for certain that my life would have ended up in a different path from theirs. And at that level even those who were involved or supported this attack, even from them I feel ultimately inalienable. I understand a great deal more now about the need for forgiveness on both sides of the equation.

Roger Hearing
Do you forgive the people who destroyed part of your family and injured you?

Timothy Knatchbull

  I’m benefitting hugely from this process of reaching a greater state of mental and emotional forgiveness which is a life long journey and I’m pleased to be in it.

Roger Hearing
But you’re not there yet?

Timothy Knatchbull

  Well I certainly feel that the events of going back to Ireland 2003 and 2004 were enough to push me across that divide. So I can say, yes, I’m much healed and much more forgiving. I’m hesitant to come up with these neat clipped expressions, like ‘I have forgiven’ because I think forgiveness is a much more complicated process. It’s a chronological process, it’s an ongoing process. You have to be a bit like being healthy in your body, or your mind, or your soul. It’s about working at it continually and reminding yourself of the need for forgiveness. But if you want to push me in one direction or the other, yes, I would say, forgiveness is where I am at now.

People like Timothy Knatchbull are always good enough to see beyond the bad days and recognise the innate goodness in so many people here [in Ireland]. Something that has always been here but was often overlooked. Alan Boyd 17 January 2012

Beautifully constructed book

Timothy Knatchbull is an astonishing person to have been able to write such a beautifully constructed book that balances his personal journey with such in-depth analysis of others’ experiences and the culture at the time of those awful events in 1979. Josephine Atkins

14 January 2012

The Troubles

Unfortunately I was touched by the Troubles from a very early age. I came across Timothy Knatchbull’s book by chance and am in awe of how he managed to continue with his life. He is an inspiration to us all. Nadine Williamson 3 January 2012

Got under my skin

Timothy Knatchbull’s book quite got under my skin. I read it slowly absorbing every detail, emotion, event…it’s a great book. Lorelle Harker 9 December 2011

Forgive and let go

In the past I haven’t found it easy to forgive and let go. In 2009 I saw Timothy Knatchbull’s TV interview in which he spoke of forgiveness and it made me feel humbled. His is a truly remarkable story and I feel a better person for reading his book. Jane McDermott

6 October 2011

Summer reading

Timothy Knatchbull’s book was the highlight of my summer reading. Mary Carney

21 August 2011

How easily we accepted the madness

In August 1979 I was a student working near Cliffoney, Co Sligo. Reading Tim Knatchbull’s book has made me realise how easily we all, myself included, accepted the madness that was going on all around us at that time. Steve Carty 8 August 2011

Pursuit of the truth

I congratulate Tim Knatchbull on writing such a wonderful, inspirational book. He is a talented writer who handled this horrific tragedy with such thoughtful honesty. I admire his pursuit of the truth no matter where it took him. Bernadette Lynch 2 August 2011

Quite extraordinary

Timothy Knatchbull’s ability to find forgiveness and compassion was, and remains, something quite extraordinary, from which we could all learn. Dr Sophia Hillan, author of

‘Mary, Lou and Cass: Jane Austen’s nieces in Ireland’ 19 July 2011

An author’s integrity

I was deeply moved and very impressed with Timothy Knatchbull’s book. I missed his company when I’d finished it, as if I’d made a valued new friend whom I had to part from – a sure sign of an author’s integrity. Ann Henning Jocelyn 23 May 2011

Immense courage

From a Clear Blue Sky is beautifully written. Only immense courage could support such openess and compassion. Arnold Hiatt 15 May 2011

Let spirits rest

I admire Timothy Knatchbull’s courage … the life he has built around him… and [having] reached closure to let spirits rest. Nargis Jamal 9 May 2011

The brutality and thoughtlessness of conflict

The clarity of thought and its portrayal is remarkable. The captivation of thoughts and memories as a young boy is exceptionally and emotionally depicted so that the reader enters Tim Knatchbull’s innermost personal moments. His book is an open message to others who may have suffered because of the brutality and thoughtlessness of war and conflict to see what they have lost or are missing. Tim’s style is simple and heart-driven with no malice or bias. His phraseology, in its context, is flawless and I find his expressions to be spontaneous and heart-wrenching at the same time. Ros Thomas 23 March 2011

Non-judgemental

What really sets this book apart from other human journeys and tragedies is Timothy Knatchbull’s own personality and attitude to life… The non-judgemental tone, the integrity, the humour and above all the love and compassion with which it is written make it so important and life-affirming. Marita Crawley 16 March 2011

The audio book was beautifully read by Tim Knatchbull

When I was given this audio book for Christmas, and found there were 12 discs I thought this would take months to hear. I was wrong. I found it all so fascinating that in a fortnight I had completed it. I thought the book was beautifully read.

John Crammond 12 March 2011

Gripped by a stirring of deep feelings

From the very title to the last page I found myself gripped by a stirring of deep feelings. Once I started to read I found it very difficult to put down, but when it was time to continue I found myself troubled at the knowledge of how it would affect my innermost thoughts…The portrayal of the love and bravery of the Knatchbull family were so poignantly expressed.

Colonel RL Cowling 28 February 2011

A great resource for others

A great resource for others searching for some understanding. Jenni Thomas OBE

(Grief Support, Training & Facilitation) February 2011

Those moments in time

I lost my own daughter aged two in 1986. Timothy Knatchbull’s book about himself, his brother and family touched me deeply. I appreciated the detail, those moments in time.

Fenella Dunn 5 January 2011

Powerful writer

Timothy Knatchbull has dealt with all aspects of that dark time in as sensitive and as intelligent a manner as any other work I’ve read that deals with tragedy of this proportion. He is a powerful writer with an incisive understanding of the best in the human condition; and I found his book inspiring. Michael Goodspeed 13 January 2011

Total honesty

Knatchbull’s total honesty touched me deeply. Most of the time people do not have the capacity of detaching themselves from their emotions to analyse intelligently others’ reactions and anger. I was very moved. Artur Reis e Sousa 27 January 2011

A magnetism

I have just read Tim Knatchbull’s book for the third time. Each time I get something else from it. The book has a magnetism yet it is so sad. Betty Heath December 2010

An original book

An original book, it moved me very much and made me feel awake to the fragility of life, death and mourning. Jasmine Dunne 9 November 2010

Tremendously moved

I loved Timothy Knatchbull’s book, and read it non-stop on the plane. So much so that a flight attendant came to me three quarters of the way through the flight to ask what book was so absorbing me. I really couldn’t put the book down and I was tremendously moved by it.

Barbara Taylor Bradford 1 November 2010

Courageous at every level

A magnificent account – courageous at every level, frank, fair, moving (intensively so), altogether admirable. David Sutcliffe 18 October 2010

A story that has great potential to promote peace and true understanding

Tim Knatchbull’s story is not intended to be in any way political. And yet it is a story that has great potential to promote peace and true understanding between the British and Irish peoples. It is a story written by a man who has fought hard to come to peace with himself. We cannot give in life until we first make peace with ourselves. He says that if he were to be reborn and God asked him how he would like to come back, and there were no places available as an Englishman, he would be sorely tempted to come back as an Irishman. As far as I am concerned, he would be very welcome. Niall Lenihan 6 September 2010

An unpretentious account

A good, unpretentious account with no ‘splother’ as my father would have said.

Alan Bennett 19 August 2010

Courage and tenacity

This book and Knatchbull’s struggles are a lesson to all of us.

Lieutenant-General (Ret’d) RR Crabbe 17 August 2010

Enthralled

I do not know when I have been so moved, and entranced, and enthralled by any book.

Mary Strathmore 11 August 2010

Dispelling Victorian attitudes

Devastatingly frank and open… the Knatchbull family example could serve to help dispel some of the Victorian attitudes to coping with tragedy. Michael Billett OBE 26 July 2010

Eloquent account of a magical place

An eloquent account of coming to terms with the pain of loss, it is also a powerful evocation of Mullaghmore. Reading this book awoke many memories of that magical place. Philip Browne

4 June 2010

An extraordinary achievement

I enjoyed it – if that is anyway the right word – every page of it and thought it was an extraordinary achievement written with remarkable candour, sensitivity and generosity.
David French 8 May 2010

If I was on a desert island, I’d take it with me

I recently read From a Clear Blue Sky. What a book, in fact if I was on a desert island, I’d take it with me. It is easy to read, full of so many explanations of Ireland, the complications that lie there … it makes me feel very humble. Liz Edwards 23 April 2010

The chord of love between brothers will resonate with me for a very long time

I found From a Clear Blue Sky compelling and chastening and at times unbearably moving. The book does what it set out to do, nothing could be clearer than that and it has been done extraordinarily well. I sometimes had to stop for a moment to gulp back a sob. The chord of love between brothers will resonate with me for a very long time. Timothy was brave to go to the very end of the quest. And of course there’s Paul Maxwell and his father too. The grown-ups teach a lesson or two as well. Details supplied

A love story

I am the father of identical twin boys. My wife said, how can you read such a terrible story, and I was able to answer her, “It is a love story”. This brave and unflinchingly honest book touched me profoundly. Jeremy Wayne 19 March 2010

Careful recounting of the legal proceedings

…entrancing part of the book was the careful recounting of the legal proceedings against the attackers. It was a great moment to an American, enmeshed as we seem to be on our side of the Atlantic in trying to figure out how to deal with terrorist attacks without losing our democracy. With lapses in ancient jurisprudence to be sure, the UK seems to have done a saner job in that area than we have. I was interested every step of the way, in the apprehensions and subsequent court proceedings of the assassins. That it was described clinically, without rancor or bile, attested eloquently to the success of the project of healing.
Saul Diskin 2 March 2010

A cathartic voyage and a ripping yarn

I am not sure what Tim Knatchbull has produced. Neither novel nor memoir, nor self-help nor blog but a work which combines elements of all. It is like accompanying him on a therapeutic, cathartic voyage and a ripping (very sad) yarn at the same time.

Hannah Alexander 2 March 2010

The exotic experience of identical twins

The book is one of the few which delves into the healing necessary to be undergone by the surviving twin. It is also one of the few that does not either descend into the technical nor the revoltingly mawkish. The straight, declarative rendition of the events and the aftermath, describing Knatchbull’s journey toward health, becomes more powerful in its understatement. It invites the reader into the exotic experience of identical twins. Saul Diskin 2 March 2010

The book exudes such compassionate humanity

I think the book is the best account of grief I have ever read and because Timothy so eloquently names and speaks of feeling and processes that are usually hidden from the conversations of everyday life, I found it enormously comforting. The book exudes such compassionate humanity too, due I think to Timothy’s evocation of political, social and economic drivers along with the deeply personal. Such a painful journey but ending with hope and resolution. Inspirational. Pamela Leadbetter 15 November 2009

Gobsmackingly intelligent

A gobsmackingly intelligent book with, among many deeply personal insights, some highly interesting analysis of the Irish psyche. Peter Mantle 26 October 2009

A very human account of a terrible event

I know how … difficult some of the research and the writing must have been. But Timothy Knatchbull has produced a very human account of a terrible event and his compassion and his feeling for his twin come through very clearly. John de Chastelain 22 October 2009

Intolerable suffering

I was struck by the subtlety of the words, the intelligence and lack of ego, the sense that Timothy Knatchbull could only have arrived at such alchemy from an intolerable suffering, the braveness of his engagement with it. I met him years ago at a Lone Twin Network meeting. I congratulate him so much for the book and all he is doing. Kate Behrens 21 October 2009

Journey back into the darkness that captured all my attention

The structure, pacing and presentation make the narrative not only compelling but impossible to put down. The depth and scope of the research is unbelievable. And the personal details of not only the writer and his family, but the details of friends, witnesses, investigators and other victims adds greatly to the richness and power of the narrative. Yet it is the journey back into the darkness that captured all my attention, empathy, sympathy and, most importantly, respect. Peter Van D Emerson, Harvard College, 31 August 2009

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