The Giddings family; Tony, Mandy and their children Laura and Jacob were on holiday in South Africa at the invitation of Tony's parents. One evening the whole family set off to have a treat - a meal in a cape Town restaurant, but they never got further than the front door.
Tony explains " as we were walking across the room the bomb exploded. At that point the world fell in. It appeared that we'd all been blown in different directions. I found and spoke to both my parents and Mandy but I never actually found the children immediately after the bomb blast." Tony was taken to hospital but to a different one to his family "during that time I had no idea whether they were alive or dead, the emotion is totally indescribable."
Mandy takes up the story "luckily the rest of us managed to get into the one ambulance and were all taken to the same hospital ...it was chaos...I wanted to be with my children but they wouldn't allow me to be because I'd had a head injury which they wanted to get sewn up and I was leaving puddles of blood all over their floor."
Tony's mother who was the only member of the family not to be injured went from hospital to hospital in search of Tony as Mandy explains"It was very easy for me lying there on a hospital trolley to saying we need to find Tony. But she was in Cape Town, she'd lost her glasses, she'd no money the cellular phone had been blown up, she didn't know where she was and it was obviously a very difficult thing for her to do and although she said later that they'd destroyed our family because we were there at there invitation, but I really don't know what I've had done without her because I couldn't be with the children but she was and at least they had somebody familiar."
Three people were killed and twenty seven people were injured in the bomb explosion. Mandy and Tony's daughter Laura had suffered a serious leg injury which meant amputation " She took it very well, I really don't think it hit her for a number of days. She asked me, whether it was ever going to come back again and I said no but we'd get her the best pretend one we possibly could. She was terrible depressed and the only person she would respond to was her little brother....she would just look through you as though you weren't there which is a heart-rending thing for a parent to see."
Were they able to talk about what had happened? Mandy says "Right from day one we started talking about it particularly with the children because we felt it was important that they knew that we felt they same way they did, that we were scared, that we were frightened by what happened"
As Tony explains, "I think that one thing most people don't appreciate is that our 'normal' has changed. It has become part of our everyday life that Laura is an amputee and to an extent disabled and Jacob is a constant worry because he still has shrapnel in his spinal canal and we are very aware that a knock could result in the shrapnel going into his spinal cord and in the worst case could cause paralysis."
How have the children coped? Do they really understand what happened to them?
"Jacob is still coming to terms with it; the other morning he came into the bedroom with his teddy bear wrapped in a blanket and said that Teddy had been blown up and had lost his leg like Laura, It's very difficult to explain to a child that young what happened. Laura has a very good understanding of what happened to her but in no way feels sorry for herself, she understands that other people died ..." says Mandy.
Mandy says that they had some professional counselling "We saw a trauma counsellor who had counselled people in the Clapham Train Crash. He was very useful to us and gave us very good advice but I think we saw him four times and he told us to go away. There was nothing psychiatric about us and we were the most together family he'd ever seen."
Tony adds "The truth is that anyone who finds themselves in the circumstances that we did or similar circumstances, well you have two choices; either you get on with it, or it takes you down, and you go under. I hope to spend more time with my children and actually enjoy them. Perhaps like most fathers I was so busy with bringing an income in to the family that I tended to overlook the children and I'm not going to let that happen again.
What about the future? Mandy explains "We just get on with life, because it puts life into perspective. You really don't know what's going to happen in the next five minutes and so we live every day as though it's possibly our last."
