Libby Purves
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 Knatchbull.
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 Mountbatten, 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.
