Countess Mountbatten: 'I cried every morning for six months'
Last Updated: 12:02am GMT 20/02/2008
Few people have known such appalling family tragedy as Countess Mountbatten. She tells Elizabeth Grice how she used the experience to help others
On the calm, fine Bank Holiday Monday morning of August 27, 1979, the Mountbattens' old green fishing boat, Shadow V, was making its last lobster-pot excursion of the summer holidays.
As it puttered into Donegal Bay with three generations of the family and a local boy on board, 50lb of gelignite concealed under its floorboards was detonated from the shore by the IRA.
The wooden boat was blown into the air and came down as splinters. Two adults died, two young boys were killed and three other people were left fighting for their lives.
"My own memory," says Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, "is of a vision of a ball exploding upwards and then of 'coming to' in the sea and wondering if I would be able to reach the surface before I passed out.
I have very vague memories, now and again, of floating among the wood and debris, being pulled into a small rubber dinghy before totally losing consciousness for days." In her lucid intervals, unable to open her eyes, or speak, or even weep, she began to realise that a monstrous swathe had been cut through her family.