The Day I Died

MARCH 2008

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond is used to cheating death, until he tests a jet-powered vehicle.

Another hotel room, another night spent away from home in the service of Top Gear. I rang my wife Mindy – we always ring each other last thing when I’m on a trip. Our children, Isabelle (nearly six) and Willow (three), were sleeping soundly.

The menagerie of four horses, five dogs, three cats, a small f lock of sheep and a handful of chickens had all been fed and bedded down. My dog TG (Top Gear Dog) was fine, and booked in to visit the groomer the next day – she’d been pretending to be a sheepdog and had got her long, woolly coat full of spiky grass burrs. We wished each other goodnight. In less than 24 hours the jet-car drive would be behind me and I would be setting off for home.

It had been my idea, after all. I’d been on the Top Gear show for four years, and the show works best when people tip ideas into the mix and something comes out at the other end.

“I think we should do a piece on going faster than we’ve ever gone before,” I announced. “Straight-line speed. I’ve driven at 321 km/ h in a car and on a bike. What does it feel like to go faster? And I mean a lot faster.”

Andy Wilman, the editor, looked up from his desk. I continued my pitch. “We can be the fastest car show on earth. What about that?” Andy nodded.

On September I strode across Elvington airfield, near York; a man in

his 30s, living the dream he’d had since childhood. I was walking confidently towards a jet-propelled car, the Vampire, which I would be driving in front of not only the Top Gear production crew but, thanks to the efforts of the crew, millions of TV viewers the world over. It doesn’t do to get too self-congratulatory in life – pride comes before a fall and all that – but as I slipped the blue padded neck brace on to the shoulders of my silver racing suit, the ten-year-old boy still inside me was giggling with excitement.

The Vampire looked like the dragsters I had loved when I was a kid. I would sit in front of the telly and rummage about in my plastic tub of Lego to build drag racers that looked exactly like this car, with its long, skinny body, big chunky rear wheels and little front ones. But my models had never had the strange, cylindrical addition that lay immediately behind the driver’s head. This was the jet engine, the heart of the machine and the very reason for its existence.

I pulled my crash helmet on, climbed in past the roll bars and lowered myself into the seat. The car was towed into position at the head of the

runway. I was strapped down under the broad harness so tightly that my breath came in ragged gasps as my chest adjusted to what little space was left. I looked at my race gloves as my hands gripped the wheel: two small handles, each like the end of a garden spade. One more crazy roar up the runway, a piece to camera about the car and then I could go home.

That morning, before I even sat in the Vampire, I watched as its owner and builder, Col in Fal lows, had taken it for a shakedown blast up the runway, something he’d done hundreds of times before. I felt a twinge of nerves in the pit of my stomach.

Essentially, the car consists of an engine, a parachute to stop and the seat. No clutch, no accelerator. No speedometer. Just a dial for turning the engine up to the required level and a large metal lever which cuts the engine and deploys the parachute. And a footbrake, only used to hold the car stationary as the engine got up to speed. My left foot would rest on a “dead man’s pedal”; if something happened, my foot would come off and the engine would be cut. And there was a tiny switch to operate the afterburner, which sent a flame shooting down the centre of the engine, igniting the unburnt fuel to produce something like a cross between a standard jet engine and a rocket. The power would instantly be doubled to 10,000 brake horsepower.

My first two runs got me acclimatised to the sheer power delivered by the jet engine and the technique needed to keep the car straight – Colin advised me that to counter the camber and the crosswinds I had to apply a constant 30 degrees of steering input. On the third run the afterburner failed to ignite properly. But the next time the car exploded into action, a manic, violent thing. Just 23 seconds after hitting that little switch, the run was finished. I’d ridden a wave of power that ten Formula One cars together would struggle to achieve. I was ecstatic. Colin and the crew knew from the on-board telemetry (but didn’t tell me) that I’d hit 505.9 km/h; faster than the official British land speed record.

I’D HIT 505.9 KM/H; FASTER THAN THE BRITISH LAND SPEED RECORD. TIME FOR ONE MORE RUN

There was time for one more run. Colin begins the start procedure. The engine’s noise builds to the whine of a jet engine as Colin gives the allclear. The power dial is set to 125 per cent. I hit the switch and release the brake. In under eight seconds we’re doing 321 km/h.

14.25 seconds in; 463.9 km/h

By the time my senses have sped up enough to keep pace with what’s going on, I realise that something is wrong. This is not the usual push and pull of the steering as the front end scrabbles to keep the one-ton car and its passenger heading in a straight line.

14.64 seconds; 459.1 km/h

I am counter-steering now and battling something. Unknown to me, the front right tyre has suffered a catastrophic and total failure. On video footage, the front of the car leaps high enough with the explosion to lift the other front wheel clear off the ground.

15.0 seconds; 449 km/h

The car veers off to the right. My foot hits the brake – instinctive but useless. I am still fighting. But I am losing.

15.71 seconds; 373.3 km/h

I know that I’m going to crash. I remember the parachute lever. I pull it. The car does not stop and begins to roll over. The next thing to happen, I am quietly convinced, is that I die. I am not scared, my life does not flash before my eyes, there is just a calm resignation. And I pass out as the G-forces generated by the crash exceed those at which I can maintain consciousness.

The roll bars protect my head, but they dig into the grass, slowing the car from 372.3 km/h to 307.3 km/h in just 0.46 seconds. My brain is

thrown forward, distorted; its shape elongated, hitting the front of my skull. The force my brain experiences overstretches some of the nerves and causes them to break. The resulting injuries could leave me paralysed, deaf or blind, or wipe out my personality, the person I recognise as me.

Part of the car touches down on the grass and digs in, sending the entire structure into another roll that turns into a f lip. The avalanche of mud and stones kicked up by the roll bars f lips the helmet visor up, exposing my face. My left eye is damaged, the surrounding tissue pulverised. My mouth and nose fill with soil and

“The arm-restraints and harnesses do their job, keeping me pinned in place as the car rolls”

mud. As my head slews to the right, the side of the helmet is dented, cracked and caved in when it hits the crash structure. The right-hand side of my brain sustains more damage.

It ends. Just five seconds after the front right tyre blew the car lies upside down, the wheels still turning. Inside, I am unconscious still, but changes are happening. My brain, thrown around inside my skull by the immense G-forces, is beginning to swell. My breathing is severely constricted by the soil in my mouth and nose. I am in a critical state. As far as I am concerned, I have just met my own death and answered the big question.

MINDY

It was Andy Wi lman who rang with the news early on Wednesday evening, September 20, 2006. “Mind, Richard’s had an accident.”

“You mean he’s crashed? How bad is it?”

“He’s moving his arms and legs. They’re taking him to Leeds General Infirmary. I’ll meet you there.”

Andy hadn’t been at the shoot and was driving up from London. I knew that meant it was serious. I rang Richard’s mum and dad, who immediately offered to come and help look after the girls, then my mum, who said simply and calmly, “Drive carefully. Please promise me. Let me know what I can do and ring me when you can, love.”

I prepared to tell Izzy and Willow. “Daddy’s gone and bumped a car again.”

“Oh, not again!” said Izzy, rolling her eyes.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. And he’s ripped some clothes, so I have to go and take him some new ones,” I explained.

In the car, the BBC news came on. It said that Richard was in a critical condition. Critical! It was the blackest night, blacker than black. On the four-hour drive to Leeds all I could see were the lights of cars and lampposts. I was shaky and crying – no, weeping. My amazing, funny, brave, beautiful, lovely, adorable husband was ahead of me. But maybe it wasn’t him anymore.

I pulled myself together in the last six kilometres. I wiped my face, blew my nose and pulled on my armour, ready for battle. Andy met me at a side entrance and we were smuggled in to avoid the gathering press.

A ventilator tube was secured in Richard’s mouth by a bandage wrapped round his head. There were drips in both arms, monitors stuck to his chest and hand. His swollen face was yellowed with bruising, a bizarre lump the size of a fist on his forehead and his left eyelid was four times its normal size and deep crimson. He had dried blood round his nostrils, mixed with earth. He was still. Not a flicker of life. “Hello, my darling.” The tears were dripping off my chin as I spoke, but I was half-smiling. Awful

as it was, I knew, with every ounce of being, that he was there. Buried, tired, exhausted. But not dead. I’d just have to wait for him.

The hospital staff warned me that the first 48 hours were vital. He’d been conscious after the accident, but anaesthetised in A& E to prevent him damaging his brain further. The drugs were soon switched off and their sedative effect ceased, but then the effect of the brain injury had taken over. There was no clear boundary between conscious and unconscious. He had haemorrhaged and he had suffered most damage to the right frontal lobe, the part of the brain that deals with recognition, the abilit y to judge distances, decision-making, problem-solving and personality. We could only watch and wait. It’s very strange to live through a scene you’ve watched so many times in TV dramas. There’s a sense that the situation just can’t be real.

Every 30 minutes a nurse would carry out observations (obs), asking Richard to do various things. Open his eyes, say his name, wiggle his toes, squeeze her fingers. For a while, his obs showed a slight improvement. But then, about 4am, he started to dip. He wasn’t trying. I looked at the nurse.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It’s not good,” she admitted. She’d tried causing him pain, to stimulate a ref lex, but it hadn’t worked. She was shouting at him, “Richard! Richard!”, her index fingers inside his limp hands.

“Can I shout at him? The way I do when he’s drunk?” On those rare occasions when he’s been on a boozy night out with the boys, shouting is the only way to get him off the sofa and into bed.

“Ri cha rd! You squeeze those fingers. Squeeze those bloody fingers. It’s important.” The tears were running down my face. As I finished, he made a very tiny movement with both middle fingers.

Richard remembers thinking he was tired and there was a nice, easy route – he could just drift away. Check out. That was what he’d decided to do. He remembers being jolted back. Exhausted as he was, he made the effort to pull himself back.

On the day shi ft a di f ferent nurse, Jim, tried to stimulate a response for the obs. Richard reacted violent ly to the pain: thrashing about, he threw himself into a sitting position, grabbed the three

THE NURSE WAS SHOUTING AT HIM, “RICHARD! RICHARD!”, HER INDEX FINGERS INSIDE HIS LIMP HANDS

cent imet re- diameter vent i lator tube with his right hand and started yanking it. When two nurses tried to restrain him, Jim told them to let go. As I watched, horrorstruck, Richard gagged like an animal regurgitating food. But each time he retched, he yanked another few centimetres of tube out of his mouth. Once it was out, he coughed and moaned, then collapsed.

Without the ventilator, his breathing was very weak. I sat there staring at him, at the monitors. Unexpectedly, his right arm began to move. He fumbled around under the bedclothes and his hand found what it was seeking.

Jim was beaming. “He’s a scrabbler. That’s what we want to see.” He explained it was common in men who’ve had a similar injury. “They regress. He’s a little boy. He’s back to basics, and he’s checking his most important part is still there.”

Later that morning Richard found another foreign body inserted where he didn’t want it – a catheter. He grabbed at the tube and gave it a tug.

“Richard, no! Don’t!” I tried to catch his hand, but he pushed me away. As he did so I realised his good eye was slightly open. “Hello,” I said gently.

He looked straight at me, but there was absolutely no recognition.

While Jim sorted the mess out, I walked to the loo, locked myself in, and cried. “Where are you?” I was

“Mindy understands me better than I understand myself. When I fell in love I knew I had found a soulmate”

whispering as I held my head in my hands. “Please come back, please.”

Despite trying to remove the finger monitor, the drips and the oxygen mask, Richard was making progress. He hated being roused from his deep sleep to do obs and was really irritable.

In a more peaceful moment, I was stroking his forehead gently when he moved his head towards me and mumbled something.

“Sorry, darling?” He repeated, and I just made out the word “gearbox”.

A few days earlier something had gone wrong with my Land Rover. I was sure it was the clutch and Richard said it was the gearbox. The local dealer discovered differently.

“No,” I told Richard, “it was the master cylinder.”

“Oh, OK.” He went back to sleep. I was grinning like a Cheshire cat. He was remembering a piece of his life, recalling his world – our world.

Almost the entire Top Gear team was encamped in a boardroom opened up for them by the hospital. Both Jeremy Clarkson and James May had driven up the night before, as soon as they heard the news. I took a break when they were allowed in to see Richard on Thursday evening. He amazed them by opening his eyes. As I dashed back into the room, he was, incredibly, sitting on the side of his bed. He looked straight at me, a great dopey grin on his face, his good eye half-open. “Hello, baby.” He knew me! How I loved to see that cheeky, naughty, lovable look again. He insisted on standing up and going for a pee. I took one elbow and a nurse the other, with a second nurse wheeling the drip as we headed to the loo. Richard was surprised at this lack of coordination, but kept looking at me and grinning. I thought my face would explode, I was smiling so hard.

That night, after phoning the world, I was able to grab a few hours’ sleep.

Given his improvement over the past 24 hours, it was decided he could be moved from intensive care to a high- dependency unit. Every time he became lucid we asked him if he knew where he was. He’d kind of understood that he was in Leeds and when you asked him where, he’d respond “hospital”, but he had no idea why he was in hospital. I explained that he’d had an accident.

“Oooooh s***,” he responded calmly, and gave me a disbelieving look. “You crashed, darling,” I whispered. “Did I? Was it good?” “Pretty impressive,” I told him. “Oh.” His attention was drawn to a passing nurse with a cup and saucer in her hand. “Shall we have a cup of tea?”

He was suffering from post-traumatic amnesia and for the majority of the time he had the memory of a goldfish (around five seconds). When he talked to people he might seem normal, until the conversation turned full circle and started all over again. It was all new to Richard. It did mean that he was always delighted when cottage pie arrived for lunch. “My favourite! How did you know?” he’d ask, despite having ordered it himself from the hospital menu. He could remember scraps of past history, just very little since the crash. He was described as being “clinically confused”.

Also, he had appalling pain in his head, and he was given morphine regularly, together with a cocktail of other drugs. The one thing he knew absolutely was that I was his ally. What he couldn’t be sure of was whether I really existed or was simply a figment of his imagination. But I couldn’t bear to leave his side.

I was sitting on his bed talking

to him, when he said, “This is very nice. You’re very lovely. But I have to go now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got to go back to my wife.” That was a shocker!

“No, darling, I’m your wife.” “No, you’re lovely, but my wife’s French.”

There was a big hole in Richard and I was wor ried we’d never find all the pieces.

On Sunday the girls arrived. Richard was overjoyed to see them.

I’d done my best to prepare them and Izzy tried to talk to him about home and the games she’d been playing, but he wasn’t able to concentrate. He was nodding, but his eyes were heavy.

“Time to say goodbye,” I whispered to them. Willow gave Richard a kiss.

Izzy’s eyes really started to fill. “Bye, Daddy.” He’d ripped off the eye-patch covering his gory left eye and it was a horrific sight. Her voice was breaking, but he was half asleep. His eyes closed and we walked out. Izzy exploded into uncontrollable sobs.

“Iz, he will get better. OK? He will, he’s just tired.’’

“OK, Mummy.” She bravely wiped away her tears. But I’m not sure she believed me.

Just a week after his accident, the doctors agreed he could be transferred by air ambulance to a hospital in Clifton, Bristol, to be closer to home. His care was taken over by neurosurgeon Rick Nelson, who was always very calm and softly spoken, and would listen patiently to Richard’s animated exchanges, seeing past the bright and breezy persona. He recognised that Richard was trying to demonstrate how articulate, how well recovered he was and yet ... ask him what town he was in and there was instant confusion.

His mind remained jumbled. The doctors compared the state of his mental function to a filing cabinet that had been knocked to the floor; all the notes and papers contained within each file were spread all over the room. We were trying to help him put it all back together.

Richard would be frustrated; he’d become angry and despairing, but patience was the key. Patience and rest.

The brain, as we often forget, is not simply a tool for thought and consideration, for mental calculation; it also drives every minuscule action. When you move your finger or twitch a toe, the brain is working.

THERE WAS A BIG HOLE IN RICHARD AND I WAS WORRIED WE’D NEVER FIND ALL THE PIECES

His brain was exhausted and the best therapy was sleep.

I spent every night with Richard, rushing back to see the girls during the afternoon, but Richard was going stir crazy. Now he could walk and was even going to the gym, he really wanted to get out of hospital.

The issue was to find somewhere that was peaceful and quiet and get him out of hospital without massive press attention. The f lashing lights from a bank of press photographers could quite possibly put him at risk of a seizure and he couldn’t put up with being a prisoner in his own home.

A remote cottage in the Highlands was the answer and a team of highly trained ex-Special Forces men went into action, smuggling us out of hospital to a rendezvous with a Winnebago containing the girls and two of the dogs.

In our hideaway the next step of the healing process began. Unexpected emotions bombarded Richard: he was terrified of strangers, angry at being scared, frightened of the responsibility of being alone with the children, frustrated at his inadequacies. But every day he got a little better. Finally, we could go home.

This didn’t feel the same as a homecoming after a long holiday. I had been away for just five weeks. I walked from room to room, standing in each one and taking it in. I was surrounded by memories and artefacts.

Yet, standing in my own house, I felt sad. This was the first time I had been somewhere I could remember from before I damaged my brain. This was the first time I had met myself. The house was the same, but I would never be the same again.

I found Mindy and we held each other. I didn’t need to tell her I was sad, or why. She knew. Without realising it, I had come to rely on her as I rely on air and water; she was my refuge, shield and strength.

Now, more than a year after the accident, I’m no longer terrified of strangers and I can get through a day without needing a nap. The doctors, medics and nurses saved my life and gave me back my mind. But I then had to relearn subtle lessons in how to use the fully functioning brain they had given me back. It’s still going on. And I thank every one of my lucky stars that I am able to make that trudge.

I got back to the Top Gear studio

RICHARD WOULD BE FRUSTRATED; HE’D BECOME ANGRY AND DESPAIRING, BUT PATIENCE WAS THE KEY

too. The boys cooked up a few gags for my return to the show and we played it partly for laughs. But at the same time, we knew that we were dealing with something difficult and sensitive, not just for me and the team, but for anyone affected by the thousands of car crashes that happen every day.

The doctors had been very worried about possible flashbacks when I first drove. In fact, it never really crossed my mind. What happened to me happened in a jet car. If l had fired up my Morgan and heard a jet engine start immediately behind my head, I might have had a bit of a moment. But this was different, this was just driving, and I loved it. We laughed a lot. So did Izzy and Willow when I first took them for a drive a few days later.

“Daddy, are you driving?” “Yes. Yes, I am, because the doctors said I can now.”

“Cool.” They sit in silence and exaggerated concentration. “Daddy?” they both ask together.

“Yes?”

“Don’t go upside down and bang your head again, will you? We’ll all have to go to hospital then and who will look after the horses?” They laugh and laugh and laugh at their joke.

If l can help it at all, I shan’t.

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