Hearing about the tsunami on Boxing Day, I remembered Keith and Nicki. Keith Lake used to be my driver when I was editor of the Daily Telegraph and remains a great friend. He and his wife Nicki were on holiday in the Maldives. I felt certain, knowing Keith, that a) he would have got into trouble and b) he would have got out of it. Keith rang when he reached home, in response to our messages. He told me that he had been snorkelling in two feet of water when suddenly the sea level rose to his chest. He and his party heard a great roar. They ran, and reached the shore, but the wave sucked him out to sea, to the bottom. The force of the water pulled even the wedding ring from his finger. As he lay on the ocean floor, he remembered a conversation he and I had once had about drowning being painless; he felt calm and peaceful, and accepted his death. Then the air in his body pushed him to the surface, and again he heard the terrible roar. He had been swept past the tiny island but, by incredible luck, he was a few feet from ‘H’ (full name Helena Benge-Nilsdotter), ‘a leggy Swedish blonde’, one of his snorkelling group. H, a qualified lifesaver, could see that Keith was in trouble, with all the energy knocked out of his body, so she made him hold on to her hips and they swam back towards the shore for 20 minutes. Then a second huge wave hit them, dragging them twice as far out as before and creating a whirlpool into which Keith was sucked. Keith is a big man — six foot four and strongly built — and in his panic, he tried to pull H down with him.
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