Catherine enjoyed school and was a strong supporter of education.  We would like to do something substantial to help the education of children in poor countries.  Camfed is a charity that supports girls’ education in Africa.  The money raised will be used to provide scholarships to allow girls to attend primary and secondary school.  In addition, we plan to raise money to build school housing in Zambia.
 

For those of you who did not know Catherine, below are a few words about her life.

Catherine was born at Stanford University Hospital in California on 31st August 1995.  I was working at Stanford in the Department of Petroleum Engineering and Clare was a medical researcher in diabetes.

One of my earliest and fondest memories is of taking her and her brother James on a donkey hunt on Sunday mornings.  We would walk through the long, wavy grass to the creek at the bottom of the garden and look for treasure in the river bed before I carried the children to a flood defence tunnel decorated with scary graffiti.  We would then scramble up the bank to groom an old donkey before playing on makeshift see-saws – singing ‘see saw Marjorie door’ and pretending to be pirates with stick swords and the cast-off beer (rum) bottles from the previous night's clandestine under-age drinking – singing ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’  

I would read to her before bed; 'So Much' and 'Annie (I would say Catherine) and the Wild Animals' were her favourites.  Catherine was happy, yet always determined to get her way and would carry around a collection of attachment objects: old and new bear, a plastic bunch of grapes, baa lamb and a blanket, when she felt insecure. 

We returned to England in the summer of 1998.  Clare started work as a GP and I took up my present job as a professor at Imperial.  Catherine started at a Montessori nursery school housed in the cricket pavilion on the village green.  At the age of four she went to Blackthorns Primary School and then spent a year at Oathall Secondary School.  She was on the cusp of becoming a young woman and had started to choose her own clothes and dress stylishly, both for school and at home.  She was fiercely loyal to her friends, schools and always did well in all subjects – there was nothing the teachers could ask her that she could not do.  She was skilled as an artist and had a fantastic quality of written expression – Clare will read one of her poems later; she would write and re-write sentences to perfect her stories and essays.
 

Catherine never wanted to be defined by her illness and only recently had even mentioned it to her closest friends.  However, I will say a few words about the condition that killed her. 

In April 2003 Catherine was diagnosed with a condition called aplastic anaemia where her immune system attacked her bone marrow; she could not make blood properly and defend herself from infection.  She was treated with immunosuppresants and initially got better.  However, she developed a complication called PNH where she was producing blood cells but they were rapidly broken down.  She required regular blood transfusions and she was at risk of blood clots.  The only hope for a cure to give her a normal, healthy life, was a bone marrow transplant.  After careful consideration and on the advice of her doctors, she received the transplant from an anonymous unrelated donor in August this year at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Initially it went well and she left hospital after only five weeks.  However, the main complication of the transplant is graft vs. host disease, where the new bone marrow's immune system, instead of fighting infection, attacks the host (Catherine).  Now a tissue match is performed to find a compatible donor, but this does not guarantee success.  The condition often does, slowly, get better.  Sadly, this was not the case for Catherine.  Furthermore, while the disease is active you are very vulnerable to infection. Catherine caught a fungal infection in her lungs that spread.  This is impossible to avoid, as the fungus is in the air, and almost impossible to treat.  She collapsed on 18th December and spent the last nine days of her life sedated on a ventilator at Great Ormond Street, well cared for and peaceful.  She did not let her illness constrain her and led a normal life. She remained positive until the end and never complained.
 

Catherine had enormous courage, not just in the face of death, but intellectually she would stick to her opinions however unpopular they seemed.  At only seven, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, she had assembled her Playmobil figures on the coffee table and acted out a pastiche of Saddam Hussein's palace.  A Hans Blix doll disguised himself as one of Saddam's wives and slipped into bed with the dictator.  'Excuse me darling, I've forgotten: do you have any weapons of mass destruction?'  'I've told you - of course I don't.'  Whereupon Hans Blix leapt out of bed, removed the disguise and rushed off to tell the UN.  At the time - like most of us - I was not sure, but this blinding clarity of thought was characteristic of Catherine.  Later she wanted Tony Blair to visit her school so that she could kill him, or at least impress upon him her dislike of his policies! 

She had solved the energy and CO2 crisis:  carbon capture and storage (thanks to her daddy) with many nuclear power stations in the North of England, to create lots of jobs and relieve over-crowding in the South. 

She was a believer in good, real food and would only eat (but then in vast quantities) when given meals on which some effort had been spent.  She would refuse convenience foods and anything from supermarkets - she had a particular dislike of Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencers - but would happily help us with our shopping from individual shops in our local village, Lindfield.

She loved helping me in the garden.  The last things she planted were a row of lavender plants around our patio.  She would eat our raspberries straight from the canes in the summer. 
 

She was a great support to her brother and an inspiration to her parents.  We will endeavour to live in a manner that embodies her positive spirit, working hard to make the world a better place, always bold and never afraid to voice our opinions.