BBC presenter Monty Don has shared his regrets after twin sister Alison’s devastating car crash, which left her blinded and tetraplegic, in an emotional interview
Ahead of presenting Have I Got News for You this evening, an evidently emotional Monty Don has shared his heartbreak over a devastating car crash that left his twin sister severely injured when they were teenagers, and the distance that has grown between them now.
Monty and his sister Alison were extraordinarily close during childhood, as he explains: “We grew up together completely for the first six years, barely ever apart.
“We were always in the same class at primary school… we slept in the same room, we shared the same bath, we did everything together,” Monty revealed to podcast host Gyles Brandreth.
Despite growing somewhat apart as they matured – with Monty attending boarding school and developing different interests – their fundamental connection, he insists, “can’t be broken. It’s there. It just is there”.
However, while Monty was enjoying an extended gap year in the south of France, he received a telegram that he immediately recognised as dreadful news: “It just said, ‘Ring home, Alison, accident’,” he remembered.
Monty explains that during the mid-1970s, such a telegram would only have been dispatched in the direst of circumstances, but his profound bond with his sister meant he instantly sensed Alison was in grave danger: “I knew that she hadn’t just fallen off a horse,” he recalled.
Monty reveals that Alison sustained catastrophic injuries in the terrible collision: “She was blinded and made tetraplegic and her lungs … a bag of cement burst and coated her lungs. She was given the last rites.”
His voice breaking with emotion, Monty recounted how he rushed to his sister’s bedside at Stoke Mandeville hospital: “I would lie under her bed and talk to her, and she was blind, and sort of nuts and bolts on her head, and all that sort of thing, and then go out and weep, and then go back and tell her jokes, and tell her about the dogs, and tell her about the garden.”
Further heartbreak awaited Monty when, shortly after Alison’s accident, their mother suffered a heart attack and was also hospitalised: “I had to cook for my father, who was furious,” Monty explained. “Because that was the only way he could express emotion, and he couldn’t cook, and he wouldn’t eat anything my mother hadn’t cooked.”
Yet despite the severity of her injuries, Alison went on to make a remarkable recovery, Monty reveals: “She got married, had children…although she never got the use of one arm and one eye, and she had endless operations, about 50.”
With a tinge of sadness, Monty, now 70, acknowledges that he and Alison are no longer as close as they once were: “I adore my sister.
“I do adore my sister. I love her as much as it’s possible to love another human being who isn’t your partner in life. But we don’t share it very much.”
Concerned that his sister might feel “hurt” by the gulf that has developed between them, Monty adds: “There is no day to day sharing of life. And I feel sad about that. I feel sorry about that.”
Monty Don is hosting Have I Got News for You tonight at 9pm on BBC One.
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