Diana had a healing power

When army surgeon John Black examined six-year-old Saga and four-year-old Adnan at the British medical centre outside Basra in Iraq, he knew neither would survive beyond their teens without urgent heart surgery. The children, brought to him by their desperate fathers, both had holes in their hearts. Corrective surgery for "blue babies" is routine in the UK, but in Iraq there are no facilities for heart operations on infants and, at present, no surgeons to perform them.

Then Major Black remembered a British charity called Chain of Hope, established by the ground-breaking heart surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, a former colleague at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex.

Chain of Hope treats children with heart defects or disease from all over the world, both by bringing them to London for surgery and by sponsoring groups of heart surgeons from the UK to perform operations in poor countries.

Specifically, Major Black remembered seeing Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting by the bedside of Chain of Hope children at Harefield - talking to them, holding their hands and even painting their toenails.

"She was the link in my mind," says Major Black. "I'd seen her when I was working at Harefield and I remembered her interest in the children."

"She was a fairly common sight about the place," agrees Lisa Yacoub, 33, who is Professor Yacoub's daughter and Chain of Hope's UK manager. "She'd never announce that she was coming. She always said: 'I don't want people to know, I don't want to meet the hospital dignitaries every time I come, I just want to see the children.' So the doctors and nurses would just bump into her at the hospital."

Prompted by the memory of the "anonymous" Princess at Harefield, Dr Black contacted Chain of Hope from Basra and after several weeks of negotiation and organisation, the Iraqi children were airlifted to Kuwait by the RAF and then escorted by a British doctor to London. Saga's operation was the more complex, involving the repair of two holes and the replacement of a valve, but last weekend at Harefield she was given the all-clear to go home. Her hugely grateful father could barely speak for emotion.

Exactly seven years today since her death, Diana is still inspiring good works. "She was, and still is, a huge inspiration for the charity," says Prof Yacoub, 68. "She would follow the progress of each child very carefully and ask why I wasn't doing more for them. She would gee us on. 'Why haven't you done this? When are you going to do that? What can I do to help?' We feel that her spirit is still here somehow, that she is still encouraging us, almost in a mystical way."

Chain of Hope was set up in 1995 and the Princess, though never an official patron, was a dedicated supporter from the start. Much has been written about Diana's charitable work, yet the detail and rigour of her commitment to humanitarian causes, the focus of a new book, Diana: The Portrait, is still startlingly impressive.

The extent of her devotion to Chain of Hope was never made public while she was alive. "She did it under cover," says Prof Yacoub, who pioneered heart transplantation. "She would come into the hospital at 6.30 in the morning with a bunch of flowers for a child. That early-morning visit was typical. And then maybe she'd come back at 10.30pm to see a child who'd come out of surgery. She wanted it all to seem very normal. I'd say to her: 'How are you getting home?' 'Oh, I'm driving,' she'd say. This would be on her own, along the A40, with no security or any kind of escort. 'I'll ring you when I get back,' she'd say. And then 25 minutes later, I'd get the call: 'I'm home!'"

Chain of Hope works on a largely voluntary basis. Medical staff offer their time for nothing; British Airways flies sick children to London for free; and host families in the UK volunteer to look after the children while they recuperate.

Often the only cost is the £3,500 per child charged by the NHS for use of its facilities. Diana paid for several children herself ("She didn't want anyone to know how many," says Prof Yacoub) and was planning to become a host parent herself. She was scheduled to accompany Chain of Hope doctors on a mission to Jamaica, but was killed two months before the trip.

Diana first met Prof Yacoub by accident, at the Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea. "She was visiting a friend of someone who worked for her, and I walked into the room while she was there. I said, 'Oh, excuse me,' and turned to go. But she said, 'No, you excuse me, I'll stand outside' - and she left the room. I was very impressed by this modesty and humbleness. Later, she asked me whether she could come to my office to talk about the operation. And then we got talking about the charity."

One of the first Chain of Hope children to be brought to London was six-year-old Arnaud Wambo from the Cameroon, who had a degenerative heart condition and needed immediate treatment. He came to the UK alone and was then placed with "host" parents. Diana met Arnaud and chatted to him, and later asked Prof Yacoub if she could attend his operation. The answer was yes - although Diana would later regret it.

By chance, Sky TV had also arranged to film the boy's surgery and the next day the now-famous picture of a unfortunately doe-eyed Diana dressed in a surgical gown and mask appeared in a national newspaper.

Diana was heavily criticised for wearing make-up and for apparently courting publicity. Nurses' leaders complained that she might have been a distraction in the operating theatre.

"It was so unfair," says Prof Yacoub. "She was a very intelligent person who cared deeply for the children and just wanted to understand the physiology of it all. She quizzed me all the time. She would ask me to explain the operations in detail. When it came to the surgery, she'd say: 'Just ignore me, take no notice of me.' She stood in the corner [of the theatre] or sometimes she sat on the floor. She was never a distraction."

When asked by a Sky journalist why she was at Arnaud's operation, recalls Prof Yacoub, she replied with instant assurance. "I'm here because I'm proud to belong to this country where this kind of work takes place, and this kind of charity exists."

Yet she was deeply stung by the criticism. "She ended up crying down the phone," says Lisa. "She said: 'I've messed up again. The press has missed the point again. They're talking about my make-up rather than Arnaud and the charity'.'" But it did not diminish her interest in surgery. She attended between 10 to 15 heart operations at Harefield.

Towards the end of her life, Diana had "healed herself ", says Lisa, who became a good friend. She was still frustrated by her portrayal in the media, but was also confident in her ability to help other people, and had great ambitions as an ambassador for humanitarian causes.

"When she was campaigning against land-mines, I collected some facts and figures from scientific journals for her," says Prof Yacoub. "I said: 'You know this is a mega-issue.' And she said: 'Yes, but someone has to deal with the megaissues.' She knew what she was doing."

Lisa adds: "She said that when she walked into a room full of new people, she felt she had to break down their perception of her, which was a perception that came from the media. People thought she was this dumb, naïve blonde, but she wasn't that at all. She was very smart, very witty, always cracking jokes.

"She had come out of a broken marriage and she had been desperate, but we met her at a time when she was happy in herself."

Diana wrote letters to Lisa containing quotes that inspired her, from the sayings of Mother Theresa to maxims from The Little Prince. One spoke of "soaring flight free from entanglement ... lifting yourself above the endless ebb and flow of ordinary life to acquire broader vision".

"I think she used those quotes to motivate and encourage her," says Lisa. She also used humour to leaven the tone, signing off her letters: "Here endeth another lesson of wisdom from Kensington, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

But the children at Harefield and the Royal Brompton were her priority. They were not always Chain of Hope children. Diana became a special friend to 12-year-old Victoria who, because her kidneys had failed while on a heart-lung machine, was stuck in hospital for months on a dialysis machine. "Twice a week Diana would paint Victoria's finger and toenails a different colour," remembers Prof Yacoub.

Victoria once confided that she thought Prince William was a very handsome boy, so Diana brought her letters from both William and Harry - presumably having sat her sons down and made them write them.

"She wanted the boys to understand what life is like for other people. Both letters were very sweet and they made Victoria very happy," says Prof Yacoub.

"It's no exaggeration to say that she had a healing power. I do believe you can turn someone around by showing them that someone cares, by giving them happiness and confidence. She felt that that was doctoring, if you like - and it was. I mean, I'd do a round after she'd been in, and the children were different. Physically, they were better."

When Diana died, the Yacoubs were both devastated. Prof Yacoub believes that the outpouring of public grief was inevitable: "The philosopher Karl Popper said that all human beings are endowed with the power to recognise the truth when it is presented to them squarely. And so the public, I believe, recognised in Diana someone who was very, very special. They saw this truth. Hence the massive grief."

It is time for the doctors to check on Saga, the Iraqi girl. Neither she nor Adnan were born when the Princess of Wales died, yet their lives have been saved, at least in part, because of Diana's devotion to Chain of Hope. "She was very very conscious of human suffering," says Prof Yacoub. "She would have derived great pleasure from knowing that those children have been helped."