How Princess Diana's bridesmaid proved a child can love TWO mothers: The heart-warming story of how India Hicks took a boy of 12 in to her family in the Bahamas when his mum died

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As a child she thought nothing of galloping bare-back across acres of family land in Oxfordshire. When asked to be a bridesmaid to Lady Diana Spencer, she complained about having to wear a dress rather than her usual jodhpurs. Later, she would turn her back on traditional country life for bohemian freedom in the Caribbean.

It’s fair to say, then, that convention has played little part in the life of model-turned-businesswoman and author, India Hicks.

Yet even by her own unorthodox standards, her decision to take in and effectively adopt a young ‘orphan’, raising him in her family home in the Bahamas, is a remarkable one.

India Hicks adopted Wesley Cleare (pictured together) and raised him in the Bahamas after his birth mother died when he was 12 years old

The boy, Wesley Cleare, had his life turned upside down when at the age of 12 his mother Lynne died from breast cancer.

Bringing up her family by herself, she had survived by working as a waitress on Harbour Island – and it was here, despite their wildly different backgrounds, that she first met India, the woman who eventually took over her duties as a mother.

Today, Wesley is very much India’s fifth child, a brother to her children – Felix, 20, Amory, 18, Conrad, 14, and ten-year-old Domino – with David FlintWood, 57.

The 21-year-old makes up the seventh member of the family, rubbing along with three dogs, two cats and a tortoise called Vincent at their Colonial-style villa set in three acres of rolling garden with jungle on two sides and a forest of coconut palms on the other.

The story of their unusual bond is proof that maternal devotion can bridge any divide.

It was the shared experience of pregnancy that first got India and Lynne talking. ‘I happened to be having dinner one night and had a big belly,’ India recalls. ‘This very lovely waitress was pregnant too. We became friends.’

When the children were born, India offered to help look after both of them.

Wesley, now 21, had his life turned upside down when his mother Lynne died from breast cancer. Pictured: Wesley as a baby with his mother Lynne

‘Lynne had other children and many different jobs,’ she explains. ‘I was lucky enough to have the space for an extra child. I had care in the home. It was easy for Wes to be dropped off at our home, which was better than him going to childcare.’

She remembers Wesley as a spirited child, climbing on roofs with her own son, Felix, and, as she admits, ‘they handled machetes before they should have done’.

‘They grew up in a very tropical way. I suppose if you looked from the outside in, it did look quite wild but, for us, it felt normal.’ It was certainly a world away from India’s own Oxfordshire childhood, first at Britwell House and then The Grove, a Grade II-listed farmhouse.

The granddaughter of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India who was killed in 1979 by an IRA bomb, India spent a lot of time in the care of nannies and was driven to school in a chocolate-coloured Rolls-Royce.

Her mother, Lady Pamela Hicks, 88, served as a bridesmaid at the then-Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip, and then as her lady-in-waiting.

India still has a rose from Princess Diana’s wedding bouquet on an old wooden desk in her home.

If Wesley ever felt any unease at having a very different background, India says he never showed it. ‘The Bahamas is a country in which people from all sorts of walks of life have mingled together,’ India says. ‘Because he was around us from such an early age, there were no sudden contrasts.’

Even before his mother’s death, Wesley travelled with the family and spent every June in England with them. He came for Christmas dinner; India’s mother gave him birthday and Christmas presents; if the other children got an Xbox, so would Wesley. ‘In the Bahamas it’s quite frequent that children travel between families or friends look after them,’ India explains.

One of the family: Wes with India, David and their four other children

In 2008, Wesley’s mother moved the family some 50 miles away from Harbour Island over the water to Nassau. It meant India didn’t see much of him until 2010 when, by chance, she found herself sitting beside him on a tiny inter-island plane. ‘He said he’d just seen his mother for the last time,’ India recalls. ‘I’d heard she had cancer. His life was chaotic. His mother was ill and he was shuttled between family members.’

Two days later, Lynne died. Attending the funeral, India remembers Wesley, then just 12, broke down when his mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

‘That moment triggered the reality,’ she says. ‘Having had such a close relationship with him, it was really heart-breaking.’

His family situation was complicated – two aunts had also died of breast cancer. So when Wesley’s father, who had not been a big part of his life, suggested to India that she take Wesley for a while, she agreed without hesitation.

‘It felt natural for me,’ India says. ‘He had the support of his aunts but we were able to offer Wes a bed. By the time my other half David returned from a trip, Wes had moved in. David felt exactly the same about Wes as I did – that we are very lucky to have him in our lives.’

It was not always easy – Wesley was grieving his beloved mother and the life he’d left behind. ‘It was an impossible time,’ India says. ‘I had a kid in the house whose mother was dead. There’s no text book that tells you how to cope with that.

‘The school would sometimes call me and say I had to come and pick him up because he wasn’t responding. He went through a period of talking about himself in the third person: “Wesley wants breakfast”, for example. He was so lost. You can’t step in to being a mother. I didn’t have the right words. We were in a lifeboat together just clinging on, just trying to survive.

‘The mistake I made was to put him in the guest room thinking, in an adult way, that Wes would need time, space and privacy to grieve.

‘After a couple of weeks my son Conrad said to move him to his brother Felix’s room because he needed to feel he was not a guest.’ Indeed, the two boys became so close that it was only a year ago that they decided it was time to have separate rooms.

‘There has never been conflict between the children. Wes has his chair at the table and no one would ever dare to sit in it or question the fact it’s there. We’ve had the very normal, very boring mother-son conversations: this phone bill is too high; your wet towels on the floor are driving me mad,’ India says.

The small island community supported the unusual family arrangement and the only time race has raised its ugly head has been at the airport. ‘Wes was stopped at immigration when travelling with us because he didn’t have our name and was an unaccompanied minor,’ India says. ‘They thought we were trying to take him away. Those were difficult moments.’

Formal adoption might have helped, not just for administrative reasons but to formally seal their already-strong emotional ties. ‘I said to Wes, “Shall we make this permanent so you really understand how much we want and love you?” ’

They sat down with a lawyer in Nassau in 2015 but were told that adoption in the Bahamas was almost impossible. ‘I told Wes, “We can do this. It may take years but then you’ll know how much we want you.” He said, “I think I know anyway.”

‘From that moment it felt right. We didn’t need a piece of paper.’

Today, India can barely contain her pride in Wesley who, at 21, has his first girlfriend and a passion for marine mechanics. ‘Out of all of my children, he’s the one who has a vocation,’ she says. ‘He’s a bloody good example to lots of kids. When we were looking around the college in Orlando, which he is now at, he was asked who I was. He said I was his mother.’

India herself is hesitant to use the term. ‘He went through a stage of calling me “Mum”,’ she says.

‘It didn’t feel right. I will never be his mother and no one will ever replace her. So I’m his “mama bird” and I love him like a son. We’ve got a deep bond. My family is never complete unless Wes is with us. My children feel the same. He’s completely and utterly their brother.’

Wes’s birth mother, Lynne is by no means forgotten. Her photographs are displayed in Wesley’s room at the family’s villa and today, Mother’s Day, India, 50, has just completed an exhausting 100-mile cycle ride in her memory, raising much-needed funds for breast cancer.

The annual Ride For Hope – India’s fourth – took place yesterday along a stretch of Eleuthera Island, part of the Bahamas archipelago. It raises awareness of the disease that robbed Wesley of his mother and kills so many others in the island nation due to a cruel mix of genetics, poverty and geography. India has raised thousands.

Wednesday, meanwhile, will mark the eighth anniversary of Lynne’s death. ‘Bahamian women of African descent are more predisposed to breast cancer,’ India says. In the Bahamas, the disease is being diagnosed in women two decades earlier than anywhere else in the world.

‘If you’re a white woman living in London, it’s much simpler to stay on top of a disease like breast cancer. For a black woman in the Bahamas – women like Lynne – it’s a much bigger undertaking.’

But then, India is determined to make a difference in any way she can. ‘I can only hope Lynne’s looking down and thinking I’ve done a good job with her son.’

To donate to orphans and adoptive families in the Bahamas visit https://rideforhopebahamas.com/2018-event/how-to-donate-to-a-friend-or-family-member/.