I MADE MY DREAM LIFE A REALITY!
How TV star Camilla went from minefields to motherhood (via a horrific crash, a holiday with Prince Harry and a VERY racy stint on Love Island)
WHEN Camilla Thurlow was 18 years old, she almost died in a car crash. ‘I was returning from a training weekend for the upcoming Under-19 Lacrosse World Championships and had been picked up at Edinburgh Airport at about 1am,’ the former Love Island contestant writes in her new memoir, Not The Type.
‘In a moment that I remember with startling clarity, the car clipped the verge on the left and then spun, sending us over the edge and down into the steep valley.
‘The car continued to somersault, with our heads smacking against the dashboard and then back against the headrest, before coming to a stop upside down.’
Although the car was a wreck, Thurlow – onetime reality TV star, bomb disposal expert and now author – walked away with minor injuries.
‘I remember the police coming to speak to us in the days that followed, telling us how lucky we had been,’ she wrote. ‘They had been expecting fatalities.’ And yet that one incident, 13 years ago, continues to impact on Thurlow’s life today.
‘It was my first real understanding that you can try and do everything right, you can follow the path that’s laid out in front of you but everything is very chaotic and it’s all subject to luck and chance,’ she told the Borders Book Festival last weekend.
‘At that stage I realised, well, if life is going to be quite chaotic anyway I might as well live in a way that serves me, rather than looking to the world around me to guide me along the path. Maybe I should be allowed to choose my own path.’
Thurlow, now 31, is a mass of intriguing contradictions. She first appeared in the public eye wearing a silver bikini, yet felt more at home in body armour as part of her work as an explosive ordnance disposal specialist for the Halo Trust.
She chose to appear on tawdry ITV2 show Love Island, where every aspect of one’s romantic life is placed under the microscope for constant dissection, yet has never spoken a word about her rumoured relationship with Prince Harry.
She writes poetry but also has her own beauty range, a natural brand she runs with her fiancé Jamie Jewitt, whom she famously met on the show, with products with names such as ‘CamJam natural balm’.
And while she continues to promote the Halo Trust as well as myriad charities, including ones which work with refugees, her Instagram feed is littered with ‘paid partnerships’ (read: products she receives money to promote) with firms that make deodorant, laundry detergent and even one with Disney Plus.
‘I have actively looked for discomfort, and then allowed that to spur me on to the next challenge,’ says Thurlow, who will give birth to her first child next month.
‘I would still opt for it every single time, because it meant I felt things I never knew I could feel and saw things I never knew I could see.’
CERTAINLY, Thurlow’s path both into, and out of, the well-worn reality TV star role is an unusual one. She grew up in a cosy, middle-class family environment near Dumfries, where her father, Robert, works as a vet. She describes herself as the girl next door, and says she was meant to live ‘an extremely conventional life’.
She attended Fettes – the private Edinburgh boarding school where Tony Blair and Tilda Swinson were both educated – and excelled in sports and in the classroom.
She achieved four As at AS level and three As at A Level, was named Outstanding Sportswoman of the Year and represented Scotland in the Under-19 World Lacrosse Championships in Canada, despite the horrific car crash only months earlier.
She studied sports and exercise at Loughborough University (and even found time to enter the Miss Earth pageant, where she was crowned Miss Edinburgh) but on graduating found herself adrift, unsure of her career path.
Attracted to the idea of doing something in the combat arena, and having grown up near the Halo Trust’s Scottish headquarters, she speculatively applied for a job.
She was shocked when, after a gruelling interview process, she was offered a job as a project manager in Cambodia.
‘I was so fearful I was going to spend the rest of my life unhappy, I thought I might as well give it a go,’ she says.
Before she left she had to make a will. As a 23-year-old barely out of university it included lines such as ‘I bequeath my second phone charger’. ‘I think I was, if anything, pretty glib about the whole business,’ she says now. In her memoir, Thurlow recalls some of the challenges as she rose to the role of explosive disposal specialist, working in countries including Afghanistan and Mozambique, clearing and detonating mines in some of the world’s most dangerous places.
Some of the difficulties in her work with the Halo Trust were practical: lack of toilet facilities in the field, for example, or giving instructions in places where a 5ft 3in twenty-something woman was rarely in charge of anything.
The vast majority of her colleagues were male and exmilitary, and she had little in common with them.
Her rumoured relationship with Prince Harry is believed to have started in the summer of 2014 when she met him in Tonteria, a nightclub owned by the Prince’s best friend.
The two apparently went sailing in St Tropez with a group of the Prince’s friends, and royal watchers, aware that
the Prince had recently split with Cressida Bonas, wondered if there was potential for a serious relationship.
THURLOW, however, was the one who is believed to have broken it off, keen to get back to her work with the Halo Trust. Of that period in her life, she said once: ‘I was in a place where I knew exactly what I wanted to do workwise. It sounds awful.
‘I was going through a selfish moment and I knew what I wanted to achieve, so everything was about that. I didn’t want to give that up.’ yet ultimately, Thurlow made the decision to walk away from the job.
even now, it is something she says upsets her and that she feels guilty about.
But the pressure of the position, along with the long hours, separation from family and friends, and what she now suspects was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (for a long time afterwards she would wake at the slightest noise and felt dislocated from the people around her) meant she felt she had little option than to quit. Returning to the UK she turned to alcohol to numb her feelings, and now says she was in ‘a bad place’ when the call came asking her to audition for Love Island.
‘I was struggling to process the events that I’d seen in the years preceding and I was struggling to reconnect with my friends and family,’ she said once. ‘I couldn’t quite work out the best way to figure out my future, I couldn’t work out how to balance everything.’
Her appearance on the show surprised a lot of her loved ones.
Love Island – half Blind Date, half Big Brother – is set in a villa in Majorca and features a gaggle of twenty-somethings encouraged to pack little more than swimming shorts and bikinis and romp under the covers as much as possible. It seemed an unlikely choice for a woman who might arguably have been more at home on the panel of University Challenge than at a Love Island pool party. ‘It didn’t feel like the obvious move but then that’s the exact thing I’d spent my life trying to avoid,’ she says. Initially, she hated it so much that she actually asked to leave in her first week. Of her entrance, she says: ‘I was so nervous and awkward, I managed to spill a glass of prosecco down my front. I was so worried it’d be the first thing people saw. ‘I wasn’t really thinking about the coupling-up bit.’ Her first liaison, with bad boy Jonny Mitchell, ended in tears when he dumped her for another girl. But the rejection made her something of a fan favourite.
Social media went into overdrive when her romance with Jewitt, a handsome Calvin Klein model who entered the show several weeks in, started to blossom.
The pair were exchanging ‘I love yous’ days into their relationship and raised eyebrows when they had sex on camera. ‘My grandmother may have skipped that episode,’ she said wryly.
In the end Thurlow and Jewitt took second place on the show, just missing out on the £50,000 grand prize, but walked away with huge media profiles and the sort of celebrity that can only be created through appearing on a hugely popular reality TV show.
ONCe again Thurlow’s career trajectory after Love Island was unusual, to say the least. While most former contestants pose provocatively for magazines and queue to be photographed falling out of nightclubs, Thurlow, with Jewitt in tow, headed to a relocation camp in Greece housing refugees from Iraq and Syria, where they distributed food and water, played with children and sat in on school lessons.
The trip was documented for a short film and heavily promoted on their social media pages, reaching an audience more used to seeing gratuitous bikini and toothwhitening products on the feeds of their favourite Love Island stars.
Since then Thurlow has carved out a unique space in the celebrity world: she has walked the runway at London Fashion Week and supported a number of charities.
She signed a rumoured £500,000 deal with beauty retailer Look Fantastic while her book, a thoughtful, intelligent take on how young women can reinvent themselves in a world that expects them to behave in a certain way, appears set to become a bestseller.
Perhaps most surprising of all she is still with Jewitt, despite a relationship forged in the highpressure environment of reality television. The two got engaged last Christmas and their first child is set to be born in October.
Will her life become less chaotic now? Don’t bank on it. Recalling that car crash all those years ago and how it changed her path, she says: ‘I am a nervous driver to this day. But perhaps I became a little less nervous of living.’