Twenty years ago, Louis Mullan was a 15-year old boy, on holiday for Christmas in Takua Pa, near Phuket, with his parents and kid brother Theo, 11.
On Boxing Day the family, from Truro, Cornwall, were planning a day of snorkelling when his father, standing on the beach, noticed something unusual out in the ocean and told his sons to come and take a look.
Minutes later all four of them were swept off their feet by the surging tsunami wave, caused by an earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter Scale, and the brothers would never see their parents Catharine, 53, and Leonard, 49, again.
As a new film prepares to give viewers a step-by-step account of how the disaster in the Indian Ocean unfolded - having sourced 300 hours of previously unseen footage with painstaking research - Louis says he can play back the events clearly in his mind. “I feel like I’ve got really vivid memory of the day. I can play it back minute by minute almost, whether that’s a memory of a memory I don’t know. But it feels like I can remember it all really well.”
In the film, he recalls hearing his father call them over and thinking the odd-looking blur far away on the horizon seemed curious but “wasn't a danger". That changed as the wave drew closer and Louis grabbed his brother and ran. “As we were running we were holding hands. I do recall Theo saying ‘What about Mum and Dad?’. I didn't have an answer really.”
As the older brother he felt he had to cling on to Theo for dear life but soon the power of the water, carrying huge piles of debris including cars and masonry, forced them apart. “Theo and I couldn't hold onto each other any longer - we were pulled apart and once I resurfaced I couldn't see Theo anywhere,” he says, looking anguished at the memory.
Louis was pulled into a building by civilian rescuers and was violently sick. “I remember just throwing up. And then the view, the carnage of rushing water… I was looking out back towards the sea but there was no line where the sea finished. The water was everywhere. I did the only thing I could do, I screamed out for my Mum and Dad and Theo, and I just heard nothing.
“With Theo, I did feel like I should have protected him, I should have kept him closer. But unfortunately the sheer power of the water and what happened, it’s out of your hands. I thought ‘this is just a dream’. This is going to reset itself and go back to normal and I’ll find them and life will be fine.”
Tagging onto a French family he recognised from the hotel, he walked with them as they headed for higher ground. And then came the moment he will never forget. “There was another group coming up and they had a young boy with them. They came round the corner and I recognised immediately it was Theo. I remember seeing him and I was just overwhelmed with joy and relief and love. I screamed and then rushed down and couldn’t let go of him.”
He says watching old footage of the day that changed his life forever, found by director Daniel Bogoda and his team, wasn’t always easy. “It takes my best breath away, to be honest,” he admits.
Now 35, and with his wife expecting their first child, Louis says he and his younger brother have remained incredibly close. “Since the tsunami my relationship with my brother has become the most important relationship, he’s the most important thing in my life.
“I think you are always close to your family, your siblings, you love them, but then losing your parents in that way, and at the same time, it really bonds you together.” Speaking in the film Theo, now 31 and about to get married, is emotional as he thinks back to how he felt as a terrified 11-year old. “It was OK,” he says quietly, “Because I had Louis.”
Every year the brothers pay an emotional visit to their parents’ graves, in Cornwall, on the Boxing Day anniversary of their deaths. But they are also hugely thankful for how their lives have worked out since. When their parents failed to show up in the Thai hospital where they had left many notices, the two kids eventually had no option but to fly back to the UK without them.
There was one particularly painful moment when Louis had his hopes raised - and then dashed. “Every hour or so I’d do a lap of the hospital, the corridors, every ward, every room, just looking for Mum and Dad.
“There was an announcement on the hospital PA saying ‘Louis and Theo Mullen, your Dad is waiting for you in reception,’ sort of thing. Obviously, that feeling, I went straight to reception, and the waiting room was still chaos. But he wasn’t there. And I just went, ‘Where's the microphone? Who said that? Why would someone have said that?’ And there was just no answer.”
Back in Britain they stayed in Nottingham with relatives but yearned to be home in Cornwall. “It was still a missing person's case. We had to tell our story to the police as if they might be found again,” Louis says. “But the reality was pretty obvious. So we just sat there for about six weeks. We'd go down to Cornwall every weekend just to see our friends and have some fix of normality and try and take our minds off the limbo period we were in.”
Finally, Catharine and Leo’s bodies were found and identified, two of the 151 Brits who died that day, among the 227,000 who lost their lives across the whole region in the worst tsunami of all time. “We couldn’t process it, it was shock, disbelief,” he sighs. “A very dark period of time.”
But at that point came a lifeline for Louis and Theo, when a local family that they’d previously known only vaguely offered to adopt them. He says Linda and Paul and their older kids lived 200 metres from their old home, and the teens were at university. “So they said, ‘We'd love to adopt you, take you on.’ We just instinctively said yes because it was so close to home. It meant our lives could pretty much carry on as they were. I think that allowed us to get over it, to get through it.”
Twenty years on he says he and Theo remain close with their step-siblings and think of Paul and Linda as their second parents. “Yeah definitely. They're here. They gave us opportunity and a home and love and accepted us into their family in the most incredible way. We're really close to their kids and we spend Christmas with them every year.”
He says he takes comfort knowing the much-loved parents he lost would be happy to see how he and Theo have got on with their lives. “Absolutely. My mum and dad did an incredible job bringing us up to that age. And then we have Linda and Paul and their family to thank for what's happened since. Yeah, it's a tale of two lives, I'd say.”
He now hopes to honour his parents’ legacy by carrying on what they started. “On a day to day level it’s just continuing to have that sense of adventure. My wife’s expecting in February, it’s those kind of milestones. That’s when it hits home that they’re not here and they won’t see that.”
Director Daniel Bogado says he was aiming for an archive-led documentary, in which they sought out people from the footage to tell their stories. “You want to put the audience there as much as possible from the perspective of somebody that they're seeing. So you need to do much more work to achieve that. But then it's actually quite a simple proposition, in a way. It's just what happened to the people in that day. It can be quite focused.”
Daniel was attracted to Louis and Theo’s story because it had joy and because he’d found archive footage of where they were staying - Mai’s Quiet Zone - on the day before the tsunami hit in 2004. "We found a guy who was doing a story about the hotel. So we knew we could set up the place, we could set up the rooms, we could set up what the beach looks like. I felt very strongly that this would be a very powerful story to have in the first episode.”
He said it was important to seek out uplifting stories, often involving the human heroism and community spirit that comes out of life-and-death situations. “You can't make something that's relentlessly grim,” he says. Sometimes we couldn’t crack the ending and I kept saying ‘I think it's because it's just too much concentrated sadness - we need to manage that, while always being truthful.”
Tsunami: Race Against Time, National Geographic, 9pm, November 25 - and streams on Disney+ on the same day
