Polly Brooks knows better than anyone how suddenly bad things can happen, but she also insists that she is living proof of how good things can happen just as unexpectedly.
She was 29, married for just five weeks and the happiest she had ever been when her life was blown apart as she was caught up in the 2002 Bali bombings.
Polly barely survived, but lost her new husband Dan and eight friends, including her best friend and bridesmaid Annika Linden, in the terrorist attack.
Last October 12 was the 20th anniversary of the bombing, a painful reminder of everything Polly had lost, including the future she might have had with the man she had been so in love with.
Then, four days later, her new boyfriend, Paul, asked her to marry her.
Speaking of her engagement for the first time, Polly, 49, says: “We met playing tennis on Friday evenings. Because of lockdown, he was working from home, otherwise our paths might never have crossed. We were friends for six months before he asked me for lunch.
“But I had a real tussle in my head, a fear of loving and then losing again. I wasn’t sure I could even go there again.
“Paul wanted to wait until the anniversary was out of the way. He took me to our bench at the top of a hill where we’d done a lot of walking and talking over the past year. He asked me to marry him and I said yes.
“We’re so happy together. We’re in the process of selling our houses and buying one together, then we’ll get married next year. My life has been a series of extreme highs and extreme lows, but now I just want a happy, calm rest of my life.”
Polly’s story features in a new dramatisation of the atrocity, Bali 2002, which starts tonight on ITVX. The mini series, where she is played by Bridgerton star Claudia Jessie, follows the stories of five survivors.
Losing Dan has not been the only tragedy in Polly’s life. She went on to marry Andy, with whom she had two children, now aged 13 and 15, but he also died suddenly, in 2020, two years after the couple had separated.
Her fiance Paul, a wealth manager, also knows about bereavement. He lost his wife to cancer, and has two children of similar ages to Polly’s kids.
Polly says: “Very few people could take on my life and cope, but he does and he gets it. I get what he feels, too. We both have children dealing with losing a parent. We understand one another.
“When you’ve lost someone, you don’t want to miss out on the happy moments because you don’t know what’s coming. That’s what we do, we celebrate all the small stuff and make the most of every second. Bad things can happen when you least expect it, but so can the good things. For me that happened twice because I’ve been widowed twice.
“But here I am getting married again, so I’m proof that things can change for the better as well as for the worse.”
Polly, from Guildford, Surrey, was one of a group of 10 friends who had gone to Bali for a rugby tour shortly after her honeymoon with Dan, who she had met and fallen in love with on a previous visit to the Indonesian island.
She was heading to the dance floor at the Sari Club while Dan ordered drinks at the bar when an Islamic terror group detonated three bombs, which killed 202 people from 33 nations, including 28 Brits, and injured hundreds more.
Polly was thrown into the air, then crashed to the ground as the building collapsed, covering her in debris.
She says: “I looked down and saw my legs were on fire, but my first thought was whether Dan was OK. I pulled myself up through a gap in the ceiling that had collapsed, ran across the roof, and down into the cul-de-sac below. My legs were still on fire and I was screaming for help. A young Aussie found a blanket and thew it over to put out the flames.”
Polly, who was airlifted to a hospital in Brisbane, Australia, had burns to 43% of her body and needed 11 operations. It was while she was in hospital that she found out Dan and her friends had died.
She says the hardest part about seeing her story on TV was not the bombing scene, but the depiction of the years of sadness and heartache that followed.
She says: “I’ve talked about the explosion quite a lot, it was part of my counselling, so watching that was weirdly OK.
“The thing I found difficult was the filming of me back in London when I was very sad and life was grey.
“I was catapulted back to crying on my bed, reading letters of condolences and writing letters to Dan. I was heartbroken, my soul was destroyed.
“I used to lie in bed and tell my mum I wish I’d died. She was amazing and she used to say, ‘I’m so glad you’re still here, and with my dying breath I’ll make you happy again’.
“My life went from the picture-perfect kind of life – nice upbringing, uni, travelling around Asia, getting married, and then in a split second it was completely blown to smithereens.
“It took a long time and a depth of strength to slowly piece it back together.
“But it never goes away. It still rears its head from time to time. I just feel so lucky to have a lovely fiance now who’s taken me on with all my baggage.”
Polly set up a charity, Dan’s Fund for Burns, which raises money to support burns survivors, and buy equipment. To date, they have raised more than £2.5million and donated Meek Mesher machines, which expand donor skin before grafting, to seven hospitals.
The charity also installed the first full-time clinical psychologist in the main London burns service, prompting the NHS to roll out psychological care to patients nationwide. Polly was awarded an MBE for her work in 2020. The charity was part of her healing process. She says: “When someone does something like that to you, you feel your innocence taken. But the goodness that came from everyone restored my faith in humanity.”
She can even see positives in the trauma, even after losing two husbands.
Polly says: “In a weird way it’s given me an innate confidence and strength, because I’ve got through the worst that life can throw at me and I’m still happy.”
She not only believes she was lucky to survive the blast, but also that she was meant to. She says: “You never know how your body’s going to react – fight, flight or freeze? I could have frozen and just been burnt alive. But my instinct was to fight tooth and nail to get out. I battled through the night to stay alive.
“I feel like a survivor, and on my grave I want the words, ‘Never Surrender’.”
* Bali 2002, a four-part series, is exclusively on ITVX from today.
