Remembering Henry

The telephone call dreaded by every parent of a gap-year student came at the ominous hour of 4.30am.

Alex van Straubenzee, lying in bed next to his wife Claire, answered. It was the headmaster of Ludgrove Prep School, where their son Henry was teaching for a term before heading off to what was supposed to be the more dangerous part of his gap-year adventure, working at a bush school in Uganda.

"Your Henry's gone," the headmaster said. Alex asked him what he could possibly mean, but Claire, quicker than her husband to emerge from their joint state of semi-consciousness, answered the question for him as the awful realisation swept over her. "He's dead," she said simply.

The loss of any 18-year-old is a tragedy for the family concerned, but Henry's death, just before Christmas 2002, was an especially pointless waste.

He and a close friend had been celebrating the end of term at Ludgrove where they had been teaching. The music system at the school party had failed, so the pair drove down the school drive to borrow a replacement CD player from a friend.

As they came back along the drive, Henry's friend lost control of the car in the winter fog, and they careered into a tree.

They were driving only a few hundred yards along a private road, so neither boy was wearing a seatbelt; it was an old car, without an airbag on the passenger side.

A mature tree is utterly unforgiving if you hit it head on in a car, worse even than a brick wall, which can shatter. Henry was killed instantly; his friend was gravely injured in the driver's seat.

Informed of this catastrophe, Alex and Claire, uncertain what you do in these circumstances, lay numbly in bed. Their youngest son, Charlie, then 14, alerted by the ringing phone, came to their bed. "Who's going to play with me now?" he asked when told his brother was dead. They got up to make a cup of tea when the police came by to talk about practicalities.

Henry van Straubenzee was by all accounts a delightful teenage boy, handsome, mischievous, and popular with boys and girls.

Bright but not especially academic, a leader of his peer group but not a school prefect type, he could make anyone laugh, his parents say.

He was teaching at Ludgrove, his old prep school, between Harrow School and reading business studies at Newcastle University.

But before going up to university he was to spend six months in Uganda helping out at a school there, as his elder brother Thomas had before him.

Henry had won an army scholarship, so the MoD was to sponsor him through college and he would then go on to Sandhurst for officer training.

Henry's direct ancestors had left Holland in the 18th century and his family had been in continuous military service for the British Crown for at least 150 years.

His father Alex is a former officer in the Royal Green Jackets - since merged into The Rifles - and had been thrilled that Henry was to continue the family's unbroken military tradition. But it was not to be, and as neither of Henry's brothers intends to join the army, that line is severed, to Alex's further grief.

"At first when a son dies you just don't accept it, you cannot take it in, you feel anger, frustration: how could you lose someone aged 18 who, the inquest found, had been in a car doing only 27mph that hit the only tree on the driveway?" Alex recalls.

Henry died in the early hours of 14 December and Claire was adamant that he would not lie in the morgue over Christmas, so his funeral in the Hertfordshire village where they were then living had to be swiftly arranged.

The reaction to Henry's death was extraordinary: some 350 of his and his brothers' friends squeezed into their local parish church, including Prince Harry, Henry's friend and contemporary at Ludgrove, and Prince William, close friend and also a Ludgrove contemporary of Thomas's.

Both princes also came to the thanksgiving service which Harrow arranged in the following month. They have since been a great private support to Alex and Claire, and to the boys.

More than 1,000 turned out for the Harrow service and the substantial sum raised in the collection got Alex and Claire thinking about a suitable memorial for their son.

The practical matters of bereavement - the funeral and the thanksgiving service - propelled Alex and Claire through the first few weeks. By unfortunate coincidence they were already committed to moving house five weeks after Henry's death, which added to the trauma.

As Claire busied herself, brusquely, trying to get on with life and the upheaval of the move, Alex sank into a desperate depression.

A senior colleague at the Telegraph Group, where Alex was then working, had also lost a child. He told him to take three months off, but Alex was adamant that he could handle it.

A former British Army officer does not lightly admit to mental fragility, so he ploughed on, until he could no longer concentrate at work or at home.

"In the end I found that all I wanted to do was sit down and watch television. I had no energy, then I got physical symptoms, my knee swelled up, my shoulder was sore. I realised I needed help."

So Alex reluctantly went to see a psychiatrist, who quickly put him right with therapy and antidepressants, while Claire ploughed on making herself busy.

After Alex hit bottom, as he puts it, he bounced back within six months, but then he felt guilt that Claire seemed still to be deep in profound grief.

At that point, it dawned upon them simultaneously what to do with the money collected at the thanksgiving service: help with the work Henry had intended to do in Africa.

Despite their intense grief, they never became bitter, writing formally to the police urging them not to prosecute Henry's friend who was driving the doomed car.

"Both of them were drunk," says Claire, "either of them could have been driving. It doesn't matter." They both express their sympathy for the Ludgrove headmaster who had to ring with the bad news, wondering what could be worse than having to make that call.

Instead, they focused on what Henry had wanted to do in his gap year; his friends did sponsored runs and rowed along the Thames to raise money. Soon their ambitions widened, to larger events with Henry's friends.

Alex and Claire went to Uganda to learn what Henry would have done there, and found what could be achieved with very modest funds from their late son's affluent friends, and their friends' families.

They were not shy of calling in favours from their privileged circle. They realised that for relatively trivial amounts of money for rich people in London a classroom could be built in Uganda [about £3,200 builds a classroom for 60 Ugandan children], where secondary education for children is unaffordable for many.

The charity is now expanding its ambitions, pumping more and more money into Uganda.

The Henry van Straubenzee Memorial Fund now has ever wider ambitions, and Alex and Claire run the British operation themselves to reduce overheads and ensure all the funds raised go directly to Uganda, where they deal only with headteachers they know and are deemed to be reliable.

Claire is the first to admit she has used the charity as a means of overcoming the grief at her son's death: "Alex works in London, the boys are busy, but for me this has become my main activity."

The family have since moved from Hertfordshire to a converted barn in Lincolnshire, close to her family.

It is almost seven years since they lost their son, but Claire recalls all the details with unnerving clarity, and is clear and unapologetic when I suggest to her that she might have used the charity as a means of dealing with her grief.

She is also clear that it is right that William and Harry should serve as co-patrons of the charity, the only one on which they serve jointly.

"I suppose you could say they have suffered a similar tragedy with the loss of their mother, so they know what we are doing here. But beyond that, they both have a profound interest in Africa."

You could not say that Alex and Claire are now past their grieving. She says simply that the stabbing pain of loss has made way for a dull ache.

Charlie, down from Newcastle University and who joins us for our discussion in the family home, is about to head off for a marathon in Kenya to raise money for the charity. That is 26 miles at 5,000 feet in grotesque heat, but he is looking forward to it.

I wonder if Claire van Straubenzee, who lost her son in such tragically benign circumstances on the drive of a country prep school, worries about her son going off to honour his brother's memory with a run around Mount Kenya.

But Claire is clear that you have to move on from bereavement. When you lose a teenage son, there is a gap when his friends celebrate their 21st birthdays, and now she dreads Henry's friends' weddings, knowing she and Alex will be invited by the proud parents, and she will be thinking why is Henry not there as an usher, or getting married himself.

"You see, if your son dies," she says, "you are just desperate that he is not forgotten."

You can donate money at www.henryvanstraubenzeemf.org.uk, or directly to his brother's Kenyan marathon effort at www.justgiving.com/charlievanstraubenzee