Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Lucky I’m so my husband survıved IT WAS TOUCH AND GO
Natasha Kaplinsky, the newsreader who won the first Strictly, on her life-changing boat accident – and how she’d wake up wondering if her husband had made it through the night with coronavirus
By the time her son Arlo had turned three in 2012, Natasha Kaplinsky and her husband Justin had grown so tired of constant trips to the park in London they decided to move to the country. Along with their infant daughter Angelica, they upped sticks to a 14th-century property on a large, non-working arable farm in East Sussex, ten minutes from where Natasha had been brought up after her family came here from Kenya.
The farm had no animals when they arrived but now boasts two Highland cows called Mabel and Bertie, four sheep, two goats, lots of chickens and three ducklings that recently hatched in their kitchen. ‘My husband is absurdly proud of them and walks around the garden with them following behind him. To be honest, he’s gone a bit bonkers,’ says Natasha. Finally, there are ten alpacas. ‘They’re serene and beautiful creatures and my refuge in times of stress. And they’ve just had a haircut which made me very jealous.’
There are also two cats and four dogs: an elderly Tibetan terrier called Molly, two Labradoodles called Scribble and Doodle, and a tiny coton de Tulear called Dot. ‘It takes about 40 minutes each morning for me to feed all the animals but I don’t mind,’ she says. ‘My best day starts off in wellingtons in the fields and ends up in stilettos in London, when such a thing is possible of course.’
Natasha is known for her career in news – she’s presented on every channel from Sky, Meridian and Carlton to ITN, Channel 5 and the BBC, both at six o’clock and on the breakfast shows. When she walked away from all that she was still fronting documentaries and getting involved in corporate work, and since lockdown started she’s had more time to concentrate on her charitable activities.
She’s been an ambassador for Save The Children for a decade now and was last year appointed president of Barnardo’s, and it’s no accident that these charities are child-oriented. ‘That’s because I feel so lucky to be a mother,’ Natasha says. ‘I had a series of miscarriages and it looked as though I’d never have children of own. It’s amazing that you can achieve what you want in your career and then the one thing you’d love above all else seems beyond your reach.’
Eventually she was referred to the recurrent miscarriage service at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. ‘You only qualify if you’ve had more than three miscarriages.’ In the end, she was able to carry a baby to full-term. ‘I feel so lucky to have become a mum,’ she says. ‘It’s the best job in the whole world.’
Motherhood has also produced the most challenging point in her life. On holiday in Corfu in June 2018, staying at the villa she and Justin own there, the family went out with her parents on a boat trip. Three miles offshore, leaking petrol was spontaneously ignited by the heat of the boat’s engine, resulting in a sudden fireball. Natasha, her dad and her then eight-year-old daughter suffered burns to the face and arms and spent 45 minutes in the sea before being rescued. Fortunately, the salt water helped diminish the worst effects of the damage to their skin.
Two years on, have the emotional scars receded? ‘I would love to say yes but the reality is that it was such a life-changing experience – sorry, I’m getting tearful – that it’s proved hard to shrug off. As a mother, looking at your daughter suffering was incredibly frightening and that doesn’t go away easily.’
All three victims, along with the rest of the family, were airlifted to England and given incredible support, says Natasha, nowhere more so than at the burns unit in East Grinstead near the family house. Back home, Natasha engaged Angelica in a light-hearted race to see which of them could grow their eyebrows and eyelashes
back first. ‘And of course Angelica won. It was almost better that we were both injured in the same way,’ she says now. ‘I couldn’t have taken watching her go through it. I didn’t want Angelica to see her own reflection in the mirror, so we took all the mirrors off the walls in the house and stayed home for six months.’
It makes you realise the transitory nature of life, she says. ‘I remember thinking that this was as idyllic a day as I could imagine and yet, moments later, we could all have been killed.’ To this day there are still triggers that bring back the memories. ‘For instance, Angelica won’t get into a car if it’s powered by petrol.’
They were helped through their trauma by scores of people, some of whom she’d never met. ‘We were engulfed in a tsunami of kindness. Angelica was overwhelmed with love.’ And how is she now? ‘All her physical scarring has gone and she’s as beautiful as she ever was.’
Some of that kindness came from Claudia Winkleman, whose own daughter Matilda was badly burned on Halloween in 2014 when her costume caught alight on a candle flame. ‘I talked to Claudia and she was very generous with her advice. She recommended a particular form of therapy, although in the end we went down a different route called EMDR.’
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing is a form of psychotherapy developed in the 1990s in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images. The therapist then directs the patient to one type of sensory input, such as side-to-side eye movements or hand tapping. ‘We found that very effective but Claudia was extremely supportive and very understanding. She knew exactly what we’d been through.’
The horrific boating accident must have spoiled Corfu for the whole family. ‘Well yes, it has rathmy
‘I had to change his sheets three times a day’
er. But I was determined that on the first anniversary of the accident we should go out on a boat trip when we were staying there. It was very, very hard and hugely emotionally charged, but we did it.’
She knows how lucky she’s been to sit out lockdown at her idyllic country home. ‘My heart goes out to all those people struggling with jobs on the line, stuck in tower blocks with no outside space and a bunch of kids tearing down the walls,’ she says. The pandemic is no respecter of its victims though, and at the end of March Justin developed Covid-19. ‘He was extremely ill,’ says Natasha. ‘At one point I called an ambulance because I hadn’t been able to control his temperature for ten days. He didn’t have a cough but he had every other symptom.
‘It was frightening. I had two children, 47 animals and a husband running such a high temperature I had to change his sheets three times a day. There were a couple of mornings when I wasn’t sure whether he would have made it through the night.’ In the end he wasn’t hospitalised. ‘The paramedics examined him and decided he’d be safer at home. They were wonderful. As a result, we made a monumental sign we’ve erected outside our home praising the NHS. We are so in awe of those selfless frontline workers who put their lives at risk every day trying to save ours.’
Like his wife, Justin is 47. ‘That’s one of the things that shocked me most,’ she says. ‘He was very fit and healthy. But the virus seems indiscriminate. The children and I also had the disease but more mildly. Although he’s not quite back to full strength he’s through the worst of it now. I’m so fortunate to have him back.’
That aside, the lockdown has had its positive elements, says Natasha. ‘Justin used to be abroad on business almost every week. He works in private equity which isn’t the same as finance, apparently. As far as I understand it, he’s a bit like Cilla Black with a firm he set up in 2010, introducing interested parties to each other and hoping they’ll fall in love. ‘In the last three months we’ve had more meals together than we had in the preceding seven years. When all this is over we’re determined to make our life smaller and not work as frantically as we have done.’
The lockdown has also given her more time to enjoy the natural world around her at home, the perfect place to take part in our Wildlife Census. ‘Hasn’t nature been putting on a good show?’ she says. ‘Imagine if all of this had happened throughout the relentless rain in February. But the sky’s been blue, the air is cleaner and everything seems quieter.
‘That means you can hear birdsong like never before. We hear owls at night, and there’s a woodpecker in the wooded area at the back of the garden. We get lots of blackbirds too, and collared doves. Just yesterday I saw the sweetest thing: a duckling chasing a holly blue butterfly. We’ve also had small whites and peacock butterflies in the garden.’
There’s a pond, too. ‘At the beginning of May what seemed like hundreds of frogs appeared right outside our front door and started mating – or giving each other piggybacks as we told the children. There are fish in the pond and slow worms basking in the sunshine. We’ve got dormice and ladybirds and crane flies. Then the other day I saw a badger strolling beside me as I walked along a hedgerow. We see lots of foxes after dark, and there are moles and grey squirrels. Sometimes I see deer roaming the farmland. Last year I even saw an albino deer, a very special treat.’
The teachers at the children’s school have been setting lots of wild
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‘Seeing your daughter suffer is frightening’
life projects, everything from dissecting flowers to building bug houses. ‘I help them during the day as part of the home schooling that’s been going on since late March. I’ve taken to gardening in the evening – doesn’t that make me sound middle-aged? – but you’ve only got to pick up a log to see that underneath it’s teeming with wood lice and all sorts. It makes you realise we’re sharing this planet with so many other creatures.’
Which is why Natasha is keen that as many people as possible take part in our census by noting down the wild animals they’ve seen in their gardens during June (see the panel on previous page). ‘If anything good has come out of the pandemic in relation to the world around us, it’s taught us to reconnect with the planet,’ she says. ‘And what better way of recording our fellow creatures than filling in the Daily Mail Wildlife Census?’
Natasha is also famous of course for having won the very first series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, in the arms of Brendan Cole. She chuckles at the memory now. ‘The glitterball is on a bookshelf somewhere gathering dust, but every year when the show comes on I can’t ever quite believe that I did it.
‘I was so anxious. I sometimes wish I could do it all again and feel relaxed enough to enjoy it. Being the first series no one knew if it would be a success, whether it would damage or make careers. I’d just taken the seat at BBC Breakfast, so on one hand I was asking to be taken seriously as a journalist, and then on the other I was dancing around on Saturday nights in sequins and skirts so short they looked like curtain fringing. My heart doesn’t thump any more when I hear the theme tune, but I clearly recall thinking I was going to be sick on the top of those stairs in front of millions of people every week.’
Does she ever see Brendan now? ‘Oh yes, we bump into each other at industry events and chat away.’ But then they forged a unique bond. ‘Absolutely. Dancing with a world-class professional is the most extraordinary experience.’
Ask her how she sees the future panning out post-pandemic and she doesn’t hesitate. ‘I just want my life to stay the same. I’m so fortunate to represent the charities I do and be able to take on broadcasting jobs as they come up. But more than all of that, I love being a wife and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a friend.’