The girl torn in two by Britain’s most toxic divorce
Her mother’s an aristocrat. Her father’s an armed robber. But 14-year-old Hero’s shattering testimony will haunt EVERY parent
THE last time I saw Hero Melia she was six months old, being passed proudly between her parents as they did one of those extraordinary interviews that leave you unsure whether to laugh or cry.
The story was sensational. Her mother, Lady Alice Douglas — wayward daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry — had done something quite bonkers even by her standards, and married an armed robber (and former junkie) she had met while teaching drama in a prison.
Unsurprisingly, it caused quite a media frenzy.
Alice and her new husband Simon invited me to their home, a ramshackle old chapel in deepest Snowdonia, and told me the epic tale of how they had met. She had played Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth in a prison production, and the passions had spilled over to real life. It was, they said ‘the greatest love story ever’.
Between them l ay the child Simon described as their ‘happy ending’.
Little Hero — named after a Shakespearian heroine, naturally — was a ‘poke in the eye’ to those who thought the marriage a farce.
With one grandfather who was a Lord, and another who was a binman, Simon pointed out, this little girl was living proof that class in Britain was irrelevant. ‘Her life will have no limitations, I’ll make sure of that,’ were his parting words, as I left them to live out their fairy tale.
Fourteen years on, when my interview subject is Hero herself, there is no debate about whether to laugh or cry. Five minutes into our encounter, my natural curiosity about what has become of this little girl has turned to horror.
That father who promised her the world? One of the very first things Hero says about him is that he used to buy her and her brother KitKats — ‘because he needed the
foil wrapper for heroin. ‘ The thing that my mother failed to appreciate,’ she says, ‘is that you can’t save a drug addict.’
What about the ‘greatest love story ever?’. It seems that even at the age of 14, this child is more pragmatic about such things than her parents ever were.
‘It was quite a cool story for a bit,’ she admits. ‘It’s certainly not boring. The trouble is, sometimes I wanted a boring, conventional family like the ones my friends had, where the parents sat at the table for meals and argued about work and teased the kids. I didn’t have that.
‘My parents would stand at opposite ends of the kitchen and shout at each other, with me and my brother running between them. It was l i ke a war zone — except we didn’t know what side we were supposed to be on. I didn’t see the love story. I saw my mum crying and my dad screaming.’
Over the years, her mother has not been shy about keeping the world updated on her family affairs. Lady Alice has given interviews, and written copiously herself, about her marriage breakup.
Some would say she has overshared: an article in which she documented the lovers she had taken in a bid to mend her broken heart was eyewatering for a stranger to read. How must it have been for a daughter? ‘I didn’t read it,’ says Hero. ‘I always tried to ignore that stuff. Not that it stopped people at school saying “what on earth has your mother done now”.’
Now it is Hero’s turn to be candid about her family.
Last week, it was announced she was to be an ambassador for the charity Kids In The Middle, which helps children who are going through family breakups.
‘I’m not trying to claim that I have it worse than any other kid who goes through bad things,’ she says. ‘At least I have two parents. But I think I’ve had it tough. People who don’t know me think I’m this spoilt rich kid who doesn’t know anything about the real world. That isn’t true.’
Her parents met in Blundeston prison in Suffolk, where Simon, a council estate boy from Prestatyn, was serving nine years.
She understands fully why her parents got together: ‘ At the lowest points I’ve been angry at Mum for marrying Dad, for thinking she could change him, but I also understand why she fell in love with him. He is clever. He was a brilliant actor. He was, is, a brilliant person. It’s just complicated.’
AT
FIRST Hero — blonde and vivacious — seemed to have the perfect life. Living in the mountains made everything an adventure.
‘The good bits were brilliant,’ she says. ‘Dad would take me climbing, canoeing, swimming in the lakes. Those are the memories I treasure. The other ones, not so much.’
She wears the aristocratic part of her background lightly, joking about how her mum — who never uses her title — ‘isn’t one of the posh ’uns’.
‘When we go to weddings on her side it’s like going to the Oscars,’ says Hero. ‘I think, “wow —– look at the family I’m in”. But on a daytoday l evel, i t was never l i ke that. We certainly weren’t rich.’
Nor were they happy, clearly. Until now the reasons for the collapse of this marriage sounded very clearcut.
In 2003, Simon Melia had an affair with the children’s au pair. He moved out of the family home and his wife raged through the newspapers about her hurt and betrayal, and admitted that his drug use had continued to be a problem in the marriage.
It seems that account wasn’t quite r i ght. Hero says t he breakup happened over several years and the affair ‘was just a symptom rather than the whole cause’.
She reckons her parents started having problems when she was about five (her brother Tybalt is 18 months younger). ‘ They split up — but continued to live in the same house, for our benefit, I think. Then they got back together, and it all went wrong. It was carnage, really.’
Mostly, the issues revolved around Simon’s continued drug use. ‘ He would get clean and relapse, get clean and relapse. That’s the pattern. Always has been.’ She says she never saw her dad actually taking drugs, but was aware at a young age of what was going on. ‘When I was really young I’d just wonder why Dad was in bed, or just sitting there, staring. Lots of the time he just wouldn’t wake up — and I didn’t understand why.’
By the point at which she knew why they had KitKats, when she was ‘about seven’, she started to ask questions of her mother.
‘My mum never told me any lies —– she told me straight and upfront. Dad was a drug addict. It wasn’t his fault —– and it turned him into a not very nice person —– but that’s how it was.’
Until Hero was eight, the family lived in this chaotic state. When her father finally moved out, and the lawyers got to work, things became even more volatile.
‘The court case between them took years and all their friends took sides,’ she says. ‘I remember my dad was scared that he would never see us again. I remember one morning when both my parents were in court and we were with my auntie, playing in the garden.
‘My dad stopped by the gate and he was crying and screaming, saying he’d never see us again, he was yelling, “remember Daddy loves you”. And those types of times for me were very, very difficult, for all of us. Dad’s life was falling apart.’
Joint custody was awarded; Hero and her brother would live with their mum, but were to see their father regularly. In practice, it was ‘hell’.
‘It was supposed to be every weekend, but then Mum would say that it wasn’t fair for him to get all the fun times, and he would hit back with it not being fair that she got to do all the school stuff.’
Many of the problems centred on his drug issues. ‘Mum wouldn’t want to stop us seeing Dad, but she wanted us to be safe. I remember once when we went to stay with my dad for the weekend and he didn’t take us home when he was supposed to, and we didn’t go to school either.
‘And I remember the police came around to check we were OK. It’s hard
in th th m Se in on so co H ou a he is th W el al ha
kn
n that situation. I didn’t want to say hat I missed my mum because I hought I was going t o upset my father.’
Simon Melia’s life was clearly in meltdown. His troubled past — he had een in the Army but had taken part n the armed robbery of a post office n his return to Civvy Street — was omething Alice thought she could ope with. He already had a child, from a previus relationship, and went on to have son with another woman. ‘He kind of moved about,’ says Hero. ‘ At one point he had a house, then he was living in a caravan.’ ‘I was just so desperate f or the conventional father, picking me up from school and taking home to do ordinary boring dad things. He wasn’t that sort of dad, and he wasn’t capable of being that sort of dad, but I wanted it. ‘I went through quite a long period of being angry at him — and at my mum for marrying him, for choosing him. But then there were days when he’d take me climbing and I’d be so happy. ‘The thing about Dad is that when e’s clean and got his act together, he s a good Dad. But his selfdestruct hing was stronger than any of that. With the drugs, he became someone lse, someone he really wasn’t. It’s lmost like I didn’t have one dad, I ad two.’ Was she ever afraid of him? ‘Not really, because I love him. I now he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but I remember once when I was very little and my mum and my brother were in hospital and he was on the phone, he got angry and smashed the phone in front of me.
‘I remember sitting in the kitchen thinking, “I don’t know what to do”. That was the closest I’ve been to being really afraid.’
SIMON
now lives in Ireland. Hero has visited him ‘off and on’ over the years, and vice versa, but there is no contact at the moment and she doesn’t want to talk about why.
She sounds much too old and weary of the situation for a 14yearold, though. ‘It’s hard. I’ve got a busy life. I’ve got concerts, endless orchestra practice, I’m away at boarding school,’ she says.
If her father comes out of all this badly, her mother doesn’t emerge unscathed. Far from it.
When I ask Hero how her parents explained the fact that they were divorcing to her, she says ‘they didn’t really. They tried to avoid it as much as possible.
‘They tried to avoid the whole fact that they didn’t want to be together. They tried to make it as though they were still together which actually made it worse.
‘My mum is an amazing woman, but she prolonged things and she shouldn’t have. She thought she could save him. She thought she could hide everything from us and she couldn’t.
‘Sometimes we’d be driving somewhere and she’d just start crying, and me and my brother would sit in silence. Or worse, she keep everything all bottled up and look as if she was churning everything up inside, then just scream at us. But it was like she wasn’t angry at us, she was angry with her life.’
Is Hero angry with how her own life has turned out? Yes, but it’s a quiet, focused sort of anger.
She talks long and plaintively about the lot of the child of divorced parents: the school events, concerts, sports days that become ‘ beyond stressful, not because you are competing or performing but because your parents have to take turns to be there, or argue so much about who is going that no one turns up’.
A story about playing her harp in front of the Queen becomes a lament about the fact that her father wasn’t there. Another about performing at a concert at Wembley is memorable because both parents were there, ‘but that means you don’t know which one to go to first, afterwards’.
Her mother is in a new relationship now and she is on very good terms with her stepfather. ‘Sometimes I do think “why couldn’t he have been my real Dad”, but then I think of the good times with my dad and think, no, he is still my dad, and you never stop loving your parents, do you?’
Speaking out like this will mean, she hopes, that other children like her will get in touch with the charity, ‘because I could have done with something like that. To hear that I wasn’t alone’.
Mostly though, she hopes that other parents will read her account and ‘just stop for a minute, in the middle of all their grief and rage, and think about what it is going to do to their children.
‘One day I will write a book on the perfect divorce,’ she says, with all the confidence that her youth affords her. ‘I’ll tell parents how to do it without screwing up their kids for ever. A lot of it isn’t rocket science — it’s things like promising not to yell at each other when your children are there.’
Mercifully, she is too young to be worrying about relationships, but I ask if she thinks her parents’ experience will make it difficult for her to have a happy marriage, one day.
‘No,’ she says sharply. ‘Because I will do it differently’.