David's mission
It's something all parents dread: a phone call saying your child has been involved in an accident. For David Nicholls, the message brought the most horrific news. His son Dan, just five weeks into a gap year in Australia, had suffered a swimming accident while on Bondi Beach. Standing knee-high in Sydney's alluring waters, Dan innocently dived into a wave and hit a sandbank - it was a carefree move, but one that left the young man a tetraplegic: paralysed from the neck down.
At first David didn't appreciate the severity of the accident. "Initially, when they said it was a swimming accident, my immediate thought was ‘Was he surfing, was he water-skiing or was he rock diving?' When they eliminated those things and said he had gone for a straightforward swim, I thought ‘Well it's a collar - maybe he has damaged a vertebra or twisted a nerve'. Jesus, what goes wrong swimming? I know kids who are like fish - I was, I come from the coast. So there was a complete forestalling. And because it was going on on the opposite side of the world, there was a 12-hour delay. Then, when I spoke to Dan's consultant and he said it was really serious and that I'd better get down there, there was almost a disbelief, a disconnect."
Dan couldn't move anything; he had broken his neck. As the news started to sink in, David started to ask fundamental questions but the replies were packed with medical jargon. Was it really serious, he had asked? "We don't know yet."
"The minute they don't know," David says, "there's hope." Anything could happen in the next three or four months, they had added.
It started to dawn on David how serious Dan's state was. It became clear that Dan could be in hospital for anything up to six months, so David agreed with Dan's mum (his ex-wife) that they would do shifts - she would spend four weeks with Dan, then David would take over. When he flew down to Australia for the first time, the impact of seeing Dan was extraordinary. "It's the worst nightmare a parent can go through. I remember getting a taxi straight from the airport to the hospital and walking through the hospital convinced that
I would see Dan being normal."
But he wasn't. Dan had sandbags on his shoulders and was locked in a frame so he couldn't move. "He was as bright as a button and was reassuring everyone - he said ‘Dad, it's going to be fine'."
It's two years since Dan (now 20) had his accident and yet talking about it still chokes David. He clears his throat repeatedly throughout the interview and fights back the tears. It's hardly surprising, and even my voice wavers as I ask him a series of acutely personal questions. But throughout our conversation, while sat in a sumptuous suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, where David is director of food and beverage and executive chef, David often talks of his and Dan's fortune.
In what respect? Well, in the first instance, Australia's leading neurologist, Charles Theo, was available to operate on Dan's neck.
There was loads of negotiation between us and him and in the end he agreed to do it." Second, something occurred that David describes as "an incredible turn of fate". "When Dan was on Bondi Beach, he was airlifted to the Prince of Wales hospital in Randwick and put in intensive care. An hour-and-a-half later another English boy was put in the next bed to Dan. He'd been in a swimming accident as well: he'd simply been rolled by a wave in the next bay up from Bondi Beach. They formed a friendship - he lives in Sevenoaks, we live in Bromley - and did all their rehabilitation together. They flew back within a couple of days of each other and were in Stoke Mandeville for a year together. So because Mark's parents were there as well, it made it a little bit easier for us as parents - we were both doing the same research together."
Positive thinking How David can find any silver linings in this cloud is quite remarkable, but he says his resolve has to be to think positively. "It's a really bizarre thing but miracles do happen and you just pray that a miracle is going to happen. As time goes by, your hope diminishes - because it's really strong at the beginning. I hadn't been to church since my dad died 33 years ago, but I went to church everyday when I was in Australia. You do anything. I thought ‘If there's a divine force up there, I'm full of remorse if I've done something wrong, but please don't take it out on him'. I just want to swap places with Dan, I want him to have a normal life."
When you are hit with a situation like this there can be one of two reactions, David says: one is to give up and not cope; the other is to do something about it. "I guess there's a third: to accept it. Well I accept it, but only for the time being. I do not accept this is permanent. Ten years ago it would have been permanent, but there's so much development now."
Other circumstances have grounded David too. There was a young man in Dan's hospital in Randwick who had also broken his neck. His mum and dad had visited him once, but never returned - they could not cope with trauma. Members of staff from the hospital, as well as social services, had visited the parents to try and coax them back to see their son, but they didn't want to know. David asked the ward manager if that sort of scenario was a one-off, but the hospital had four cases like that. "Christ, all the things that poor lad has got to cope with and he's got to cope with that? I asked what would happen to him and she said he would have to live in a home."
David walked away and sat down, waiting for Dan to return from his physiotherapy.
"I remember holding a cup of coffee and it was stone cold by the time I got around to drinking it. I was numb. I just tried to imagine how that poor guy must feel and I remember thinking ‘I've got to do something'."
Charles Theo had told Dan's mum that there were two incidences a week of broken necks and backs on the beaches of Sydney alone and the hospital at Randwick is completely overwhelmed and overrun with spinal injuries. David used the internet to see how many spinal charities there were in Australia and found there were tonnes. When he got back to the UK, he found the same. Then, one day, he was given an article by his boss, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park general manager and managing director Liam Lambert, from the Irish Times about a doctor in the USA called Professor Juanita Anders. Anders had paralysed 10 rats and successfully regenerated the growth of the cut spinal cords.
"With something like this, you become an expert in a short space of time," David explains. "In neurology, and neurology includes the spine, nothing regenerates. The human body is brilliant - it grows all your nerves to a point and then cuts them off and says nothing is to regrow. If you break a finger or a leg, it's fantastic because it fixes it. If you break your back or your neck, forget it, they just don't fuse, they don't repair." She had managed to paralyse the rats by cutting their spines, fired low-powder radiation at them for 15 minutes a day for 14 days and nine days later they all walked, normally, and she did this 10 times out of 10. "The medical world went bonkers saying this girl is amazing. Her article in the Irish Times said paralysis would be beaten in 10 years with her type of surgery and that would include people like the late Christopher Reeve. I then looked to see how many of the charities I had read about funded research and found there weren't many."
New charity Initially he thought about supporting other charities, rather than setting up his own, but when he looked into some charities' results, he was appalled. "If I give a donation to a charity, I really want to know how much money goes to the cause. I started to write off for results and some of them are horrific. One charity's administration costs were £240,000 and their receipts were £267,000, so they made £27,000. That's just not right, it cannot be right. I didn't want to support things like that. So I thought I'm going to do my own charity."
David discovered that many organisations used their funds to supply a wheelchair, a ramp and so forth, but he knew he didn't want to do that himself so he decided to form his own charity. If he was going to get Dan walking again, it was going to cost a significant amount of money. He'd already spent £350,000 making Dan's house suitable for him so that his son could live independently of his parents and is currently in the process of selling his own home - without an ounce of regret - in order to meet Dan's requirements. "We all have things for a rainy day and you hope your rainy day never comes, but when it does come there's no point in being bitter and twisted about it. You've just got to get on with it. So there we are."
David launched The Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation with the help of many close friends - too many to credit - but among them were literary agent Ed Victor and PR Ann Scott. Among the suggestions that David came up with to raise money, was to write a cookery book - interestingly, something he'd avoided doing previously in his career. He spoke to a lot of his chef friends in the UK - among them Gordon Ramsay, Gary Rhodes, Heston Blumenthal, the Roux family (Albert, Michel, Michel Jnr and Alain), Raymond Blanc, Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, who all said they would gladly make contributions - but Victor suggested that David should make it global. "The big, big market," he said, "is the USA."
David already knew Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud and Gray Kunz, but with the help of US-based Adam Tihany, who redesigned the bar and Foliage restaurant at the Mandarin four years ago, he drew up a definitive list of chefs with US-based restaurants (bringing in the likes of Alain Ducasse, Charlie Trotter, Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa). With strong links with most of the leading culinary lights in the USA, Tihany willingly made the approaches.
The concept mushroomed. From an initial plan of having 20 or 30 chefs contributing to David's book, he was suddenly faced with 48. Victor suggested that a neat twist might be that the chefs supply recipes for dishes that they cook only at home. "All the chefs have just been so overwhelmingly kind. I guess you all say ‘I'm friendly with him and I'm friendly with him, but you just don't really realise the depth of friendship until you have to ask for it and I didn't really have to ask for it, it was given without condition." And so Off Duty was born.
Self-published by David (he raised £250,000, much of it against his own assets) and distributed by HarperCollins, it launched last month. The print run of 70,000 is almost exhausted and he will no doubt take up his option to reprint. From the cover price of £25, 25% will go to the foundation. With gala dinners in mind (in London, New York and Las Vegas in 2006) and the US book tour kicking off in March (fingers crossed, with Oprah's help), David hopes to raise around £1.5m in the first year. Dan will not benefit directly.
The support David has had from within the industry and from Lambert and his team at the Mandarin Oriental, in particular, is phenomenal. In fact it goes beyond the Hyde Park, the company as a whole couldn't have been more supportive, he says. "I've often said to people that you couldn't work for a better company than Mandarin and it's absolutely true; their level of compassion has been extraordinary. I'm hugely appreciative."
His working life has had to change since the accident. The man who once worked an 80-hour week, now works 60 (partly down to fitting in Dan's physio) and David has been forced to delegate more than he did previously. "You try to do things at 100 miles an hour, but that's not great if you're issuing instructions about guidance. The changes to the team have been huge because I've had to let them manage."
Has it resulted in mistakes? "The world evolves from mistakes, it's how you deal with them that matters. I hope we've moved on and we're able to look at something and say that could be a bit better. But I'm never frightened of mistakes."
The five-star Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park is one of the most beautiful and luxurious hotels in London. The guests are beautiful, too, and I wonder how hard it is to serve these people - people who seemingly have it all - with a heavy heart. But David is unwavering: "There are commercial forces and the commercial forces are that if I don't deliver, they will go to the next-best place and get deliverance. I can't do Margaret Thatcher's birthday party and accept that part of it is going to be a flop and then say afterwards that I've got these personal issues in my life. At the end of the day, money makes the world go round and I've got to try to do a good job and increase profit. It's important, and, ultimately, it's important to me. I've got a life that runs alongside my professional life that needs to be funded."
Support Behind David's strength (much of it supported by his partner, Claire, and his other son, 16-year-old Dean) is a guiding force and a belief that Dan will walk again. "I have said to Dan a number of times, we're playing a game of cards and we've got a shitty hand - we've got one of the worst hands you could have - but we've got two choices, we can either play it or we can throw the cards back in the middle. If we throw the cards back in the middle, that's the end of the game. So we've got to play, and you know what, we're going to play it so well we're going to get a result.
David says if he allowed his pain to become evident, it would consume him - and he has a bigger vision than that. "The vision is Daniel, the vision is crystal clear of Daniel walking again and I hope that when that happens I have a feeling of elation. There may be an equal risk that you have a feeling of hurt and depression then, because it might allow you time to reflect. But at the moment, we don't have time for reflection, we have an agenda.
"Going back to that of game cards, there are people around this table who have hands worse than ours. But there are good cards out there for us, I just know that. People in the medical world are united in telling us a breakthrough will occur."
Very recently Dan has started to move his right leg very slightly. "The good news is a neurological message is getting through to the brain," David says. "It's very encouraging."
Off Duty book offer
At the time of the accident David, like most of us, knew very little about paralysis. Today he could lecture on it - and not just paralysis, but stem cell research. In an attempt to transform his son's life (and the lives of others like him), earlier this year David launched The Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation. To help raise funds, he recently compiled a book, Off Duty, which features "off duty" recipes from some of the world's finest chefs. With introductions from Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay, the book includes recipes from Heston Blumenthal, Raymond Blanc, Wolfgang Puck, Nobu Matsuhisa, all four Rouxs, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Charlie Trotter and Rick Stein as well as many other leading culinary luminaries.
Caterer and The Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation have joined forces to offer the first 20 readers to a discounted copy of Off Duty. If you would like to receive Off Duty for £20 (actual price £25) including postage and packaging, please ring 01933 664437 quoting "Off Duty Caterer Offer". Payment can be made by credit card. If you miss out on the Caterer offer, you will still be able to buy copies of the book, at its normal price, through the foundation. Cheques should be made payable to TNSIF Ltd and sent to Arch Villa, 23 High Street, Bozeat, Northamptonshire NN29 7NF. Although the books are available in the high street, buying from the foundation gives more to the charity.
Charity dinner for Dan
While fundraising for The Nicholls Spinal Injuries Foundation will take shape in various forms, chefs throughout the UK have wanted to do their bit to raise money specifically for Daniel Nicholls. Michel Roux, chef-patron of the Waterside Inn in Bray, Berkshire, who has judged alongside David Nicholls for many years at the Roux Scholarship, decided to set up a trust expressly for Dan, called the Daniel Nicholls Discretionary Trust.
On 11 May, executive chef Simon Young and his brigade will be hosting a fundraising dinner at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower for 350 guests. Called the Daniel Nicholls Champagne and Diamond Dinner, guests will sit down to a meal prepared by Raymond Blanc, Gary Rhodes, Brian Turner and Michel Roux - some of David's closest friends. The meal will cost about £150 per head and guests will have the opportunity to win a diamond which will be buried among a tower of 350 Champagne-filled glasses.
Young says it's an honour to be hosting such an event. "I worked with David many years ago at the Royal Garden Hotel and so I've looked up to him for some time. I aspire to be David - he's running a five-star hotel with a Michelin star and tops the wow factor in banqueting. I think David feels uncomfortable raising money directly for his son, but we felt we could do something for Dan."
Caterer will be supporting the event and will have more details in the New Year.
