Page 30 Daily Mail, Thursday, August 8, 2019by Richard Pendlebury
THE BATTLE TO RE
previous day. He was not expected
to survive.
This summer marks the tenth
anniversary of the bloodiest period
of Britain’s most recent war in
Afghanistan. In July and August
2009, 41 British soldiers were killed.
Many more were wounded, often
sustaining life-changing injuries.
The legacy of those wounds and
the post-traumatic stress disorder
suffered by thousands of veterans
remains with us. But this is a story
of how something rather wonderful
and unexpected can emerge from
a disaster.
I have been privileged to witness
the Hill family’s journey unfold over
the course of the past decade. I was
with Stewart when he was grievously
wounded. I first met Liv four months
later, at Sandringham House on the
Queen’s Norfolk estate, when she
was presented to the Prince of
Wales, Colonel-in-Chief of the
Mercian Regiment. Small and
sombre, dressed in a smart winter
coat, she was terribly shy.
‘I still am,’ she says.
Up to a point. She has become one
of the most acclaimed British actors
of her generation.
Aged 16 and in her first profes-
sional role, she was nominated for a
BAFTA as one of the trio of leads in
the BBC’s multi-award winning 2017
mini-series about the Rochdale
child abuse scandal, Three Girls.
She received international festival
awards for her debut feature film in
2018, Jellyfish, about a girl from a
dysfunctional family who discovers
a talent for stand-up comedy.
Now 19, this summer she has been
starring at the Royal National
Theatre in the critically garlanded
revival of Caryl Churchill’s play Top
Girls about a career-driven woman.
And Liv will play double Oscar
winner Glenda Jackson’s younger
self in a BBC television adaptation
of the novel Elizabeth Is Missing
about dementia.
And her father?
He survived. Just. But as a different
Stewart Hill from the man who led
his men into battle on the morning
of July 4, 2009.W
E THREE met again
recently around the kitchen
table of the Hills’ home in a
Derbyshire village.
Liv was back for a brief visit from
London. She has never spoken
about her family’s trauma and she
later described our discussion as
feeling like a ‘therapy session’. Often
father and daughter were asking
questions of each other.
Back in July 2009, Stewart had led
a spearhead of the biggest British
ground offensive of the Afghan war,
codenamed ‘Panther’s Claw’.
His company was to push into an
area near Babaji which had been
controlled by the Taliban for the
previous two years. The aim was to
enable locals to vote in the national
elections later that summer.
I was embedded with his unit,
along with Mail photographer Jamie
Wiseman. Stewart cut an impressivefigure. Before the operation, he
gathered his men and quoted Field
Marshal Montgomery: ‘Decision in
action, calmness in crisis.’
We spent the first night sleeping in
a farmyard before moving to the
‘start line’ for the operation on the
other side of an irrigation canal.
As the troops crossed the water-
way, Wiseman took a photograph.
This was later used by Stewart as
the subject of one of his first paint-
ings, which in turn inspired the
Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson
Perry to interpret it as a tapestry.T
HE Taliban response was
swift. For the rest of a blazing
hot day, the troops were hit by
ambushes in the dense jungle
and small agricultural fields of the
‘green zone’.
But it was not until the light began
to fade that casualties occurred.
First, an accompanying armoured
vehicle was struck by a Taliban
rocket. One of Stewart’s soldiers,
18-year-old Private Robbie Laws,
was killed instantly.
The vehicle commander lost a leg.
A medical evacuation helicopter
was called to take the casualties. As
Stewart and his company HQ group
moved away from the landing zone,
another soldier, Lance Corporal
David Dennis, 29, of the Light
Dragoons, stepped on an enormous
improvised explosive device.
The explosion killed Dennis and
wounded everyone else in the near
vicinity, including Stewart. Two
pieces of shrapnel entered his brain,
causing irreparable damage.
As he hung between life and death
in Afghanistan, his family and
friends rallied round at home. Liv
recalls being taken strawberry-
picking for the day by a friend of her
mother’s — a very English response
to crisis.
Eventually, Stewart was evacuated
to the military wing of a hospital in
Birmingham. Though conscious, he
had lost large areas of his memory. ‘I
thought it was 2001 and Olivia was
still 12 months old,’ he recalls.
‘I did not recognise her photograph
when they showed it to me. I did not
have a nine-year-old daughter as far
as I was concerned.
‘Melissa would not allow Olivia to
see me until my memory had
returned sufficiently to recognise
her in the picture.’
The first visit was testing for both
father and child. ‘Dad smelled really
‘‘gravelly,’’ ’ recalls Liv. ‘He still hadA
CTRESS Liv Hill remembers
‘every vivid detail’ of the day a
catastrophe changed her
family’s life for ever.
She had woken with the golden glow
of a summer morning flooding her bedroom.
For a while she lay and imagined that celestial
figures were flitting about her bed. It was the
charming daydream of an artistic but
introverted nine-year-old girl.
Eventually, she went downstairs to find her
mother, Melissa. ‘I’ve been talking to the
angels,’ she told her.
The effect of this statement was unexpectedlytraumatic. ‘Mum already looked unhappy but
as soon as I said that she burst into tears,’ Liv
recalls. ‘I had no idea why I had made her so
upset. Of course she thought it meant that
Daddy was dead.’
Unknown to Liv, there had been a knock on
the door at 1am that same morning; a visita-tion that any family with a loved one serving in
Afghanistan had come to dread.
On the step was an Army officer with
devastating news. Liv’s father — Melissa’s
husband — Major Stewart Hill, Officer
Commanding B Company, 2nd Mercian, had
suffered a serious head wound in Helmand thehnrn h s r d eLeader: Stewart addresses his
troops before battle in Afghanistan
Picture: JAMIE WISEMANПОДГОТОВИЛА
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