From chapter three of Guarding JESS: My Life With One of The Three by Paul Craddock (co-written with Mandi Solomon).

The press attention after Jess was medivacced to the UK was like nothing I could have imagined. The three ‘miracle children’ were fast becoming the story of the decade, and the UK public’s thirst for news on Jess’s condition was unquenchable. Paparazzi and tabloid hacks had taken up permanent residence on the steps of my apartment building, and the hospital was practically under siege. Gerry warned me not to say anything too personal on my cellphone, just in case it was being hacked.

I will say that the public support Jess received was overwhelming. The gifts from well-wishers soon filled Jess’s room; others left messages, flowers, cards and legions of soft toys outside the hospital–there were so many that you could barely see the railings that ringed the grounds. People were kind. It was their way of showing they cared.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Marilyn and the rest of the Addams Family was deteriorating daily. I couldn’t avoid encountering them in the waiting room, and side-stepping Marilyn’s demands for me to hand over the keys to Stephen and Shelly’s house was becoming unendurable. But the real cold war didn’t start in earnest until January 22nd when I overheard Jase haranguing one of Jess’s specialists outside her room. She still hadn’t woken up at that stage, but her doctors had assured us that there was no sign of impaired cognitive functioning.

‘Why the fuck can’t you wake her up?’ Jase was saying, while jabbing a nicotine-stained finger into the poor doctor’s chest. The doctor assured him they were doing everything they could.

‘Yeah?’ Jase sneered. ‘Well, if she ends up being a fucking vegetable, you lot can fucking well look after her then.’

That was the last straw. As far as I was concerned the Addamses had shown their true colours. I couldn’t stop them visiting Jess, but I could let it be known that under no circumstances were they going to take care of her once she was discharged. I contacted Shelly’s solicitor straight away and instructed her to inform the Addamses of Shelly and Stephen’s custody arrangements.

A day later, there they were on the front page of the Sun. ‘Jess’s Gran Cut Out Of Her Life.’

Fair play to the photographer, he’d caught them in all their thuggish glory, Ma Addams glaring into shot, the brothers and various offspring scowling around her like an advert promoting the benefits of birth control. Marilyn especially wasn’t shy about letting her views be known:

‘It’s not right,’ Marilyn (58) says. ‘Paul’s lifestyle, it’s not moral. He’s a gay and we’re upstanding citizens. A family. Jess would be better off with us.’

The Sun didn’t miss a trick of course. They’d got their hands on a photograph of me taken during last year’s gay pride parade, dressed in a tutu and laughing with my then-partner, Jackson. This was displayed in a full colour spread opposite the Addamses’ mug shots.

The story spread like wildfire and it wasn’t long before the other tabloids managed to procure similarly compromising photographs of me–no doubt courtesy of my friends or ex-friends. I suppose I couldn’t blame them for cashing in. Most were struggling artists themselves.

But the tide really turned against me when Marilyn and I were invited to appear on the Roger Clydesdale show. Gerry warned me not to go on it, but I could hardly let Marilyn have her say unchallenged, could I? I’d met Roger at a media launch a few years before, and on the few occasions I’d caught his morning ‘current affairs’ show, he’d been rather harsh on what he called benefits scroungers. I suppose I naively assumed he’d be on my side.

The atmosphere inside the studio was electric with anticipation; you could tell that the audience was gagging for a showdown. They weren’t disappointed. At first, I’ll be honest, I thought it was going my way. Marilyn slumped on the studio couch, mumbling inarticulate answers to Roger’s trademark, ‘Why aren’t you actively looking for a job?’ questions. Then he turned his gimlet eye on me.

‘Do you have any experience dealing with children, Paul?’

I told him that I’d been looking after Jess and Polly since they were babies and reiterated that Stephen and Shelly had chosen me as Jess’s guardian.

‘He just wants the house! He’s an actor! He doesn’t care about that kid!’ Marilyn squealed, for some reason getting a round of applause from the audience. Roger paused for several seconds to let the furore die down, and then he dropped his bombshell. ‘Paul… Is it true you have a history of mental illness?’

The audience erupted again, and even Marilyn looked a bit thrown.

I wasn’t prepared for the question. I stuttered and stammered and did an appalling job of explaining that my breakdown was a thing of the past.

Of course, this revelation spawned countless screaming headlines along the lines of: ‘Nutter to take care of Jess.’

I was devastated, of course. No one likes to see things like that written about them, and I only had myself to blame for being too open. I’ve been harshly criticised for how I dealt with the press after that. Among other things I’ve been called a publicity whore and an ‘alleged egomaniac and narcissist’. But whatever the press chose to say about me, I had Jess’s best interests at heart. I’d put my career on hold for the foreseeable future in order to devote all my time to her. Quite frankly, if I was interested in exploiting her for monetary gain, I could have made millions. Not that money would be an issue, Shelly and Stephen’s life policies were fully paid-up and there was the compensation that I was intending to put into trust for Jess. She would always be looked after. The reason I appeared on the various morning shows was nothing to do with money and everything to do with setting the record straight. Anyone else would have done the same.

As you can see, I had a lot on my plate, but Jess was my priority. She was still unresponsive, but apart from her burn injuries, physically she was doing well. I needed to start thinking about what to do about her living arrangements.

Dr Kasabian, who was pipped to be Jess’s psychologist when she eventually woke up and started talking, suggested that it might be best for her to be in familiar surroundings, which meant moving into Stephen’s house in Chiselhurst.

Walking in there that first time was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everything, from the wedding and school photos on the walls, to the dried-up Christmas tree in the driveway that Stephen hadn’t got around to throwing away, was a reminder of what Jess and I had lost. When I shut the door behind me, the shouts of the hacks outside filtering through (yes, they even followed me on this painful errand), I felt as bereft as I did when I first got the tragic news.

But I made myself confront the scene. For Jess’s sake I had to be strong. I walked slowly through the house, finally breaking down completely when I saw the photos of me and Stephen as kids that he’d put up in his office. There was me, pudgy and gaptoothed; him, svelte and serious. Physically, you would never have known we were twins, and our personalities were similarly diverse. Even at age eight I knew I wanted to be on the stage, whereas Stephen was far more retiring and serious. Still, even though we didn’t run in the same circles at school, we were always close, and when he met Shelly, our relationship actually deepened. Shelly and I got on like a house on fire straight away.

Though it broke my heart, I made myself stay the night in the house–I needed to acclimatise for Jess’s sake. I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamed of Stephen and Shelly. The dreams were so vivid it was as if they were right in the room with me, their spirits clinging to the house. But I knew I was doing the right thing where Jess was concerned, and I know they gave me their blessing.

To date, their bodies haven’t been recovered. Nor has Polly’s. In some ways that’s a blessing. Rather than a terrible trip to identify them in some soulless Portuguese morgue, my last memories of them are of our final dinner together: Polly and Jess giggling, Stephen and Shelly talking about their last-minute holiday. A happy family.

Through all of this, I don’t know what I would have done without Mel, Geoff and the rest of the good people from 277 Together. Remember, these are men and women who had lost their own loved ones in the most horrendous way possible, but they sprang to my defence at every opportunity. Mel and Geoff even accompanied me when I moved my belongings into the house, helped me decide what to do about the family photos displayed everywhere. We decided to put them away until Jess had had time to fully accept her parents and sister’s deaths. They were my rocks, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

The bile spewed by the Addamses and their tame hacks wasn’t all we had to deal with, especially when all the conspiracy stories started going viral. Mel was especially incensed by this–you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s a staunch Catholic, and she was genuinely offended by the horsemen conspiracy theory in particular.

Around that time, we got the news that a memorial service was being planned. The few bodies that had been recovered wouldn’t be released until after the inquest, which could be months away, and all of us felt that we needed some closure. They still didn’t know what had caused the Go!Go! crash, although terrorism had been ruled out, as it had in all of the four disasters. I tried not to catch too much of the ongoing investigation on the news–it just made me feel worse–although I’d gathered that they suspected it might have had something to do with an electrical storm that had caused severe turbulence for other flights in the area. Mel told me she’d seen the footage from the Navy sub they’d sent down to try and retrieve the black box from the wreckage on the ocean floor. She said it looked so peaceful down there; the middle section of the aircraft looked barely damaged, settled forever in its watery grave. She said the only thing that kept her going was the thought that it had been quick. She couldn’t bear the idea of Danielle and the other passengers knowing they were going to die, like those poor passengers on the Japanese flight, who’d had time to leave messages. I knew exactly what she meant, but you can’t think like that, you just can’t.

The memorial service was going to be held at St Paul’s, with an additional service in Trafalgar Square for the public. I knew the Addams Family would be there, no doubt with their favourite hack from the Sun in tow, and I was understandably nervous.

Again, Mel, Geoff and their army of friends and family came to my rescue. They stuck to my side throughout that fraught day. To be honest, they were from the same background as Shelly’s family. Geoff had been out of work for years, and they lived on a council estate in Orpington not far from where the Addamses lived. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for them to take Marilyn and co’s side, especially as I was being painted as a ‘public school snob with artistic aspirations’. But they didn’t. When we arrived at the service, coincidentally at the same time as the Addamses (how’s that for fate? There were thousands of people there), Mel jabbed a finger in Marilyn’s face and hissed, ‘You cause any trouble here and you’ll be out on your ear, you hear me?’ Marilyn was wearing a cheap black fascinator that resembled a giant spider, and although she remained stony-faced, it quivered indignantly. Jase and Keith bristled but they were both stared down by Gavin, Mel and Geoff’s oldest son, a shaven-haired fellow with the build and look of a strip-club bouncer. I found out later he was ‘connected’. A geezer. Someone you wouldn’t want to mess with.

I could have hugged him.

I won’t dwell on the service itself, but one part in particular touched me–Kelvin’s reading. He’d chosen that W. H. Auden poem, ‘Stop all the Clocks’, the one most people know from Four Weddings and A Funeral. It could have been mawkish, but here was this huge dreadlocked fellow, reading with quiet dignity. When he read the line, ‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead’ you could have heard a pin drop.

I’d barely made it outside the cathedral when I got the call from Dr Kasabian. Jess had woken up.

I don’t know how Marilyn and the Addamses found out that she’d emerged out of her coma–I assume one of the nurses must have called them–but when I arrived at the hospital, my emotions threatening to swamp me, there they were, waiting outside her room.

Dr K knew all about our fraught relationship–he didn’t live under a stone–and insisted that the last thing Jess needed right now was a tense atmosphere. Marilyn grumpily agreed to button her lip, told Fester and Gomez to wait outside, and we were ushered in to see her. Marilyn, her fascinator still quivering, made sure she reached Jess’s bedside first, practically pushing me out of the way.

‘It’s me, Jessie,’ Marilyn said. ‘Nana.’

Jess looked at her blankly. Then she reached out a hand towards me. I wish I could say that she knew who we were, but there was no recognition in her eyes, which was absolutely understandable. But I can’t help but think that she looked at both of us, sized us up, and figured out, right then, who would be the lesser of two evils.