Pollyanna Hope's mini-marathon for limbless charity It may have been five years since the crash, but to me the events of that day were still as vivid as they had ever been. It was a normal Wednesday morning, April 25 2007. I had just arrived at my desk in the news room of The Daily Telegraph, a cavernous room that used to be a trading floor for a major City bank. As usual, the telephone rang. I expected it to be a reader. Instead, a male voice was screaming something - I could not make out what he was saying. Gradually it became clear. A bus had lost control, mounted a kerb and smashed into Sarah, her mother, Elizabeth, and Pollyanna, on a pavement near our home in south-west London. I ran out of the office. Forty minutes later I arrived at Mortlake bus station, where the accident had taken place, to be confronted by something that resembled a scene from the television drama series Casualty. Police cars and ambulances were parked haphazardly, blocking the road. Blue-and-white police tape flapped in the breeze, only 200 yards from our front door. Sarah was lying on her back in an ambulance. I had to stand directly over her to speak to her as her head was squashed between two large orange blocks to keep her neck and spine straight. I wanted to know what to do. She said I should be with Pollyanna, who had already been taken to Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in west London. A police car was on hand to drive me there, its blue lights flashing. Pollyanna was lying in her nappy on a bed in the hospital's Accident & Emergency department, wearing an oxygen mask. I stood over her and said her name. She looked at me and said, 'Daddy," - one of the few words she could say at that age - and tried to take off the mask. I put it back on and held her. Her blond hair was flecked with blood. I noticed what I took to be a deep cut just below her right knee and was alarmed to see that below the cut the skin had turned pale grey. Nurses were trying to push the right leg up towards her knee, as I found out, to help the blood to flow. One of the nurses took me to a side room. They had bad news: Elizabeth - who had been staying with us to visit Sarah's twin sister, Victoria, whose son, Rollo, had been born two days earlier - had died as a result of her injuries. I burst into tears. The tears were momentary - I had to pull myself together. Pollyanna was being taken to an upstairs operating theatre so surgeons could try to save her leg. I asked if she would survive. The doctors hoped so but could not be sure. Everything was a risk. I kissed her goodbye and went with the police to see Sarah, who was lying in a bed in the A&E department of Charing Cross Hospital, a few miles away. Her hair was matted with blood, but mercifully she said that she could move her toes. Elizabeth's body was in a small room yards from Sarah's bed. After a short while I left Sarah with two friends, and went home to collect some overnight clothes as it was likely that I would be in hospital with Pollyanna for a few days. Two traffic detectives from the local police station arrived. They had picked up the driver, they said, and he was being interviewed. By now it was late afternoon and The Daily Telegraph's management had swung into action and arranged an emergency nanny to look after Barnaby and Sapphire, then six and four, who had been collected by a friend from their primary school. I met the nanny and told her that she was hired. I did not learn her surname for a week. My mobile telephone rang. It was the Chelsea & Westminster, saying the surgeons needed to see me urgently. The detectives pushed me into their car, and - with blue light flashing again - we cut through the static A4 traffic in minutes. On arrival, I was taken to a room on the fifth floor of the hospital. One of three surgeons who had worked on Pollyanna came in, still wearing his gown and blood-splattered white wellington boots. He had bad news, he said: they had not been able to save Pollyanna's right leg, and had amputated it. Pollyanna was otherwise fine, although her legs were heavily scarred - she was nearby in the recovery room, in a deep sleep. I walked in. The lights were dimmed. It felt like a night nursery. I went over and kissed her. I felt below her right knee, hoping that I had dreamt the past few hours. The bone continued for an inch and a half, and then - nothing. Her right thigh was bandaged, too, the bone having been stapled back together. Pollyanna stayed in hospital for six weeks, visiting the operating theatre 14 times so that surgeons could find out whether - as they initially feared - her right knee was infected and would have to be amputated as well. Most nights I slept next to her bed, or in a parents" room in the hospital. She was too young to be able to articulate what was wrong, so my main role was to keep her calm and happy. If she cried out, I had to decide whether she wanted me to ease her pain by manually squeezing more morphine into her body, or to put another episode of Peppa Pig on the portable DVD player. Sarah - with a scar the width of a tyre on her leg - was moved to Chelsea & Westminster to be near us the day after the crash. At night I would leave Pollyanna sleeping and try to soothe Sarah, who was screaming for her mother and asking doctors to cut off her leg, because she could not bear its unsightliness, and because she wanted to share Pollyanna's pain. A year later the driver of the bus was jailed for his part in the crash. It was tempting to leave it all there, to move on from the tragedy. But two years after the accident I wrote an account of what happened, published in the Telegraph Magazine on April 25 2009, the two-year anniversary of the accident. Headlined 'Pulling Together," the article ended on a positive note, detailing how we drew huge strength from colleagues, friends and family. Some neighbours ran a meals service, leaving homemade pies on our doorstep; in the garden a dozen dads took down a shed, built a wall and laid a new lawn. I wrote about how Sarah, who is now 40, had started running, on the advice of her surgeon, to deal with depression and to strengthen her damaged leg muscles. She was raising money for the Limbless Association, a charity providing advice for amputees, and I suggested that readers might want to sponsor Sarah. The response was overwhelming. A tidal wave of cheques amounting to thousands of pounds swamped my desk. Within six days readers had sent in more than £6,200. Most of the cheques were for small amounts, ranging between £5 and £25. Some of the money came from friends and family we had not heard from in years. But the vast majority of cheques and letters were from strangers. The money kept flooding in, and Telegraph readers donated £80,000 in all. Altogether - including a summer charity ball organised by friends in Shropshire - Sarah raised £140,000. This posed its own questions: what to do with all this money, which far outstripped the sum we had been hoping to raise? We originally wanted the Limbless Association to spend some of the money on developing a special limb so Pollyanna could point her toes in ballet, just like all her friends, and to help children like our daughter to walk in poorer parts of the world. The Limbless Association wanted to help, but movable toes have yet to be developed for prosthetic limbs. Furthermore, the charity abandoned its international remit while we were still fundraising for it, so - after a great friend stepped in and offered to help with the administration - we decided to set up our own charity, using half of the money raised for the Limbless Association. And so Elizabeth's Legacy of Hope was born, set up by Sarah and Victoria in memory of their mother, Elizabeth, who had died in the accident, to raise money for amputee children in the poorest parts of the world. The need is definitely there. In Britain the number of child amputees is mercifully small. Few children lose limbs through trauma such as road accidents. But in the poorest parts of the world children are more exposed to danger, and amputation is used as a means of preventing infection from spreading. Elizabeth's Legacy of Hope - or ELoH, as it is known in parts of Africa - finds reputable partner charities operating on the ground and gives them money to spend on specific projects. ELoH is already active in Sierra Leone and Tanzania, where a child can be kitted out with a new leg for the price of a meal for two in London. The charity helps children who really have nothing at all. For them it seems as though a glimmer of light has started to shine at the end of a very, very dark tunnel. In Sierra Leone the charity is paying for new prosthetic limbs and physiotherapy for 66 child amputees. It is hoped that it will pay for hundreds more. The problems here are particularly acute. Many adults lost limbs in brutal attacks during the civil war that raged in the late 1990s, and children suffered as collateral damage, mainly through coming into contact with landmines. The marathon was organised by Street Child of Sierra Leone, one of ELoH's partner charities. Before the start of the race we met some of the children whom the charity was going to help. Some seemed so traumatised that they had forgotten how to smile. Eleanor, 18, told how she was 'walking with my mum when I stepped on a landmine" as a toddler. Her foot flew into a bush and her mother was hit in the waist. Another, Mariatu, crawled on to a landmine at the age of seven months. She lost her leg below the knee; she has only ever had one prosthetic leg and she is now 10 years old. Meeting these children had a big effect on the family. Barnaby, Sapphire and Pollyanna were not meant to be running in the marathon; we were planning to line the route and cheer Sarah on. But then, on the evening before the race, the three of them decided they wanted to take part, too, in the shorter, five-kilometre run. The course stretched out into the west African bush from Makeni, Sierra Leone's fifth largest city, in the centre of the country. Planning the route some months earlier had presented its own challenges. The most recent map for the area from Sierra Leone's Ministry of National Statistics was drawn up in 1964, and Google Maps, which gave only a few local street names, was out of date. Some of the local police and representatives of the Red Cross were unaware that a number of the villages on the route of the race existed. So Ben Hodgson, the race director, bought his own GPS software and mapped the course from the pillion position on the back of a scooter. Hodgson says, 'I drove around in circles for days on end, marking interesting things and places. I spoke to people in Makeni saying, "If you were to run, hypothetically, 26 miles around Makeni, what would be good to see?" Most people said, "Well the clocktower is nice, Wusum Hill is nice, the cathedral..." I really wanted to go out into the countryside." There were 60 marshals and 90 police along the course, as well as doctors, paramedics and 62 first-aiders. This being the first organised marathon in Sierra Leone, many of the stewards had to be briefed on what to do and say. At times their enthusiasm got the better of them. One told several exhausted marathon runners - no doubt with the best of intentions - that they were only two kilometres from the finish - when in fact it was an agonising six kilometres. So on June 9 a 386-strong field from 20 countries - including 150 from Britain, Lithuania, Gibraltar, Spain and the Netherlands - gathered in the darkness at a sports field in Makeni. A local brass band started up at dawn, playing the Sierra Leonean national anthem, and General Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British Army and a patron of Street Child, counted down from 10 to start the three races - the marathon, the half-marathon and the five-kilometre. We headed off into the African gloom, stumbling on the mud roads in the half-light through villages, some of which had no name. This was a running race like no other. One of the early runners found a topless woman washing herself in a puddle at first light. Another competitor was cheered on by a woman with a dead chicken stuffed under one arm. One local trader tried to sell bric-a-brac to an exhausted runner as he wheezed towards the finishing line. Another runner was overtaken by an old man in flip-flops carrying a baby. Unlike in other charity marathons, where the goal is raising money for an abstract cause such as medical research, many of the crowd watching the passing runners were likely to benefit directly from their efforts. Perhaps aware of this, some villagers gave runners high fives, saying, 'Thank you, thank you. Either they knew who we were supporting - or they were simply glad to see visitors. There were cultural differences, too. While friends and supporters of the international visitors cheered wildly at the sight of any runner, most locals looked on mutely, excited only when the leaders were in view. Some locals kindly offered lifts. Others tried to encourage, shouting, 'You run fast for a white man. Ben Hodgson blamed a 'lack of familiarity" with the idea of running so far in the broiling heat. He said, 'The concept of why anyone would want to run 26 miles, or 13 miles - there are two reactions. One is seeming indifference and the other is this brilliant, incredulous sound - eeeeeh? - this really shrill sound. You have to tell people two or three times, "It's 26 miles." The whole idea of doing it is foreign, just absurd. Why not take a bike? Why not, indeed. In the midst of all this activity, at the back of the field, in the sweltering heat, Pollyanna was still running, her NHS crutches clicking away on the hard ground, her face gripped with determination, sweat pouring down her face. The course was never the same for more than a few hundred yards: one moment it was a muddy track, the next it was tarmac, then solid volcanic stone, which made the going difficult for Pollyanna on her rubber prosthetic leg. Locals were running alongside us shouting 'oporto" (the standard name for anyone with a white face, after the first Portuguese settlers) and 'little girl." Others said 'club foot," mistakenly imagining that Pollyanna's hobble was because of a diseased leg, which afflicts many local children (in fact Pollyanna's prosthetic leg was too short after a growth spurt, and she was waiting for a new one). We crossed an open sewer that snaked across the road. I jumped across, momentarily forgetting that this represented a major challenge for Pollyanna. But then I turned to see a small local boy, who had been jogging with us for 10 minutes, lifting her over the trench. On one of the small hills she started to cry, saying she was too hot. I offered to carry her, but she waved me away. If I tried to pass her so I could see her face, she sped up. She kept asking, 'Are we there yet? The marathon was won by Idrissa Kargbo in two hours 38 minutes, a triumph given that the farthest he had ever run in his life was 20 miles. Kargbo, a member of the Sierra Leone Athletics Association in the capital Freetown, won $120 - enough to pay for a child to go to a private school for a year. Lord Dannatt had feared that someone would die from heat exhaustion. He said he had seen enough tragedy for the families of soldiers without more lives being lost in the heat of Sierra Leone. 'I don't mind who won, or how quickly they ran it," he said. What I really mind about is the fact that 386 people ran over five kilometres, a half-marathon or a full marathon and all completed it, and they are alive and well and having a laugh. That's success as far as I am concerned. Only five of the runners needed minor medical treatment. Elizabeth's Legacy of Hope - born from the most awful tragedy - had its own reason to celebrate, too. More than an hour after starting out, Pollyanna crossed the finishing line, to a heroine's welcome. She was last, but she had set her own record by going for five kilometres on her crutches. When all the fuss had died down I asked Pollyanna why she would not let me carry her. That would be cheating," she said. elizabethslegacyofhope.org. A video of Pollyanna's five-kilometre run can be seen at telegraph.co.uk/christopherhope. If you would like to sponsor her, please visit justgiving.com/pollyannahope. The next Sierra Leone Marathon will be on May 26 2013 (sierraleonemarathon.com; street-child.co.uk)