Multi-millionaire superwoman Nicola Horlick: The agonising day I let a 'Child Whisperer' into my home... to take my daughter to a US boot camp (and why her teenager Antonia says she was right to do it)



Facing the future together: Nicola Horlick (right) made the agonising decision to send her daughter Antonia (left) to an American boot camp

Back in the early 90s, Nicola Horlick became known as ‘superwoman’ as she juggled a top City job with the demands of raising a large family.

But in 1998 she lost her eldest daughter Georgie to leukaemia, a tragedy that shattered her family and had profound consequences for her then youngest child, Antonia.

By the time she reached her early teens, Antonia was drinking and taking drugs that delivered a so-called ‘legal high’.

Psychiatrists said her increasingly unruly behaviour was linked to emotional damage suffered when she was separated from her mother during Georgie’s long illness.

In desperation, Nicola – who had a sixth child after Georgie’s death – made the agonising decision to send Antonia to an American boot camp.

Here, mother and daughter, now 17, describe how the experience proved to be Antonia’s salvation...

NICOLA: At the age of 14, Antonia was almost beyond our control.

She was involved with some pretty disturbed children and, despite the fact that we gave her very little money, was immersed in a London social scene that largely revolved around tobacco, alcohol and legal highs.

More worrying, some of Antonia’s friends were using ketamine as a recreational drug. I could not understand why anyone would want to take it voluntarily.

When Georgie was in Great Ormond Street having bone marrow tests she was given ketamine as an anaesthetic and would come round crying, saying she had been chased by green monsters.

In March 2010, I returned from a weekend away to find the house wrecked. Antonia had invited a group of friends to a party via Facebook.

Our cream sitting room carpet was soaked in Ribena – they had been mixing it with vodka – which proved impossible to remove. Antonia refused to apologise.



At this time, she was in a tutorial college where things were unravelling in similar fashion.

Road to recovery: Antonia, now aged 17, poses for a snap during her time at a second boot camp, in Georgia

Out of control: By the time she reached her early teens, Antonia (pictured in 2011) was drinking and doing drugs



Antonia’s father Tim and I were summoned to a meeting and told she was absent and disruptive when there.



It was then that we began thinking about American wilderness programmes.

ANTONIA: I started going out with friends when I was 14, and while this may sound young it is totally normal for my generation in London.

At first I was just having fun: dancing, talking to people, but I started drinking at the weekend and getting involved with ‘the wrong crowd’.

Then a friend introduced me to a drug that gives you a legal high. Nobody in my family had ever taken drugs and I had not been educated about them at school.

The substance I had taken was legal, so I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But during the summer, I became lost in a cycle of compulsion. Despite the comedown from the drug, I wanted more of it.

' I lost all sense of value in my life. I was young, fun, and invincible - or so I thought'

- A ntonia Horlick

My family and friends became secondary to me – getting high and dancing the night away was far more important. I lost all sense of value in my life.

Mum was ignorant about substance abuse and was becoming increasingly worried about me.

Looking back, I believe it was the broken child within me that was subconsciously calling out for my mum to help me.

In the summer of 2010, I was surrounding myself with people who had broken homes [Antonia’s parents divorced when she was seven] or something I felt I could relate to.

I became thin, pasty, wide-eyed, and hollow; I lost my identity and it felt like I had sold my soul.



Everything in my life should have been great: I had a wonderful family, endless opportunities and strength and intelligence that I was oblivious to.

Traumatic time: Nicola is pictured in 1997 with baby Antonia and, from left, Rupert, Alice, Georgina (who died aged 12 the following year), Serena, and their nanny. A sixth child, Benjie, was born after Georgina died

Yet I spent my days locked in the confines of my saddest childhood memories. I hated talking about anything emotional and instead enjoyed going out in London.

I was young, fun, and invincible – or so I thought.



NICOLA: Boot camp is a misnomer. Most of the camps that take troubled teens are therapy based.



The idea is to give up all of your possessions, connect with nature and talk to a therapist about your issues.

Trawling the internet, I came across a camp in Utah that had apparently won awards.



Antonia agreed to fly out to the States with me to take a look at it. I didn’t tell her that I intended to leave her there.

We flew to Chicago, then Salt Lake City, but when we arrived I was told I would not be able to see the camp after all.

Bond: The multi-millionaire 'superwoman' poses with daughter Antonia in the 1990s (left) and today (right)



Instead I would just hand Antonia over to the staff running it. I worried about the idea of leaving my daughter with people that I knew nothing about.



I got cold feet and took Antonia home to London. Tim and I then found an educational consultant who helped us select another camp, also in Utah.

This time, I did not want to lie to Antonia. The camp told us that this could be very damaging to the parent/child relationship.

They told us that they would send a guy to collect her at 6am one morning but not to tell Antonia. I was told that the guy was a genius. His nickname was the Child Whisperer. I had visions of Robert Redford in the film The Horse Whisperer.

'Unruly behaviour': Antonia started going out with friends at the age of 14. She began drinking at the weekend and got involved with 'the wrong crowd'

The plan was in danger of going seriously wrong when by midnight, the day before she was due to leave, Antonia had not come home.

My eldest son Rupert and I established that she was at a friend’s house. When we arrived, the parents had just returned from the opera and didn’t even know that Antonia was in their house.

The father looked upstairs and I heard her shout, ‘Tell her to go away’. It took some time to get her downstairs and into the car.

The Child Whisperer, who was moustachioed, 6ft 3in tall and about 18 stone, arrived at 6am the next morning with his wife, as arranged.



Tim and I were told to stay in the kitchen with the door firmly shut.



The Child Whisperer went upstairs and we heard cries of protest, but these were followed shortly afterwards by laughter, then silence.

After a while, I crept upstairs. They had gone. The Child Whisperer had worked his magic. It was June 8, 2011 – two days before Antonia’s 15th birthday – and she was on her way to boot camp.

ANTONIA: I had a bit of a wild night before I left for America. At 6am, my dad came into my bedroom and took away my BlackBerry. I tried to grab it back and a glass smashed on the floor. My mum swept up the mess. I think I said something pretty rude.

Five minutes later, an enormous guy appeared in my bedroom, with his wife lurking behind him.



Sitting down on my bed, he told me that he was taking me to a ‘summer camp’ for three months.

His wife helped me throw clothes into a case and he let me have a cigarette. I asked if I could take a shower. He said: ‘No, we have to get to the airport.’

Rehabilitation: She was later sent to Redcliff Ascent, where the Channel 4 reality show Brat Camp was filmed

We went without me even having a chance to say goodbye to my parents. I was crying. The couple told me my parents didn’t think things were going well and that the camp would help and it would be like being in the Boy Scouts.

We flew first to Las Vegas where I was handed over to another couple who put me in a truck and drove me for a couple of hours until we finally pulled up at a building.

It was pitch black and when I asked where we were, I was told we were in Utah. I was extremely angry by now. I was ordered to remove my earrings and to strip and when I refused they said they would get two guys in to restrain me.

'They told us that they would send a guy to collect Antonia at 6am one morning, but not to tell her'

- Nicola Horlick

After I was searched and gave a urine sample for a drug test, I was kitted out in thermals and a sweater and a pair of rubber shoes – Crocs.

Finally, I was driven to the camp, Redcliff Ascent [where they filmed the Channel 4 reality show, Brat Camp] by a man who called himself Rising Wolf. All the staff had Red Indian names. On the way there I was blindfolded.

I said I wanted to pee and I was told to do it on the ground – they called it ‘watering a bush’. I tried to escape. A woman ran after me and grabbed my arm. It hurt and added to my despair.

I was convinced that Mummy could not possibly know how terrible the place was and there was no way that I could tell her.

Because I tried to run away, I was put in a red jumpsuit, given a number and told I had to call it out whenever I needed to go to the loo. At night, I slept on the ground under tarpaulin slung between two trees.

I was assigned to a group of girls called the Ravens and given a ‘phase book’, which explained what I needed to do to complete the programme.

There were eight phases altogether and I would have to address certain issues in each of them with a therapist.



Tragic: Nicola's daughter Georgina was treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London before her death

I could not complete a phase until my parents also made contributions, which would be made online. I also had to learn the rules of the camp, which included no profanities and not asking staff what was going to happen next.

This meant that I did not know how long I would be there.

Once I had got over the shock, I began to enjoy it. It was sweltering and the daily 15-mile treks made me ultra-fit. I began to realise how unhealthy I had felt on a diet of cigarettes and alcohol in London.

At first I had to carry my stuff in a bag that I had made out of tarpaulin. I was given an ‘earth name’ – Lightning Shimmering Storm.

There were wild horses and mountain lions and one day a rattlesnake came dangerously close to us when we were sitting around our campfire. A staff member reached for a knife, skewered the snake, cut off its head, skinned it and then cooked it.

'Our children ran out of the desert, one by one. Antonia’s name was called and a beautiful, bronzed girl came running towards me'

- Nicola Horlick



Mummy finally came to fetch me in September 2011. I had been in the camp for 83 days. I ran out of the desert and into her arms, sobbing. I was so happy to see her.



NICOLA: I’d spent the night before our reunion sleeping on the floor of a wigwam with other parents.



The next day our children ran out of the desert, one by one. Antonia’s name was called and a beautiful, bronzed girl came running towards me, crying and smiling at the same time.

The wilderness camp had been a success but it was just the beginning of Antonia’s road to recovery.

She still hadn’t confronted the issue that lay at the heart of her problems: the emotional damage she suffered because of her sister Georgie’s illness and death.

Antonia was born at the wrong time – the year after Georgie, my eldest child, relapsed. Nearly all my time was spent with Georgie, who was in agony and on high doses of morphine.

A few days before Antonia was born, Georgie asked if Antonia could have Georgina as a middle name.

Family: The successful businesswoman reads to her children, from left, Alice, Serena, Rupert and Georgina

I asked why and she said that she was worried that she might not survive leukaemia and she wanted Antonia to have her name. And so it was that Antonia Julia Georgina Horlick was born on June 10, 1996.

Over Christmas and into the New Year of 1998, Georgie embarked on a course of chemotherapy and I ended up spending the entire year with her in hospital.



For Antonia, this was devastating. She was separated from me for most of this period and during the ten weeks that Georgie was on a transplant ward, I could not hold her because of the risk of infection.

Our nanny would bring Antonia to the glass partition outside the ward and hold the intercom telephone to her ear. ‘Hello, darling,’ I would say and she would hold her hands out. It was heart-breaking. She could not understand why she was being deprived of her mummy.

No support: Nicola says British parents need to take a 'hard look' at how they are raising children

Georgie died on November 27, 1998, when she was 12 and Antonia was two-and-a-half.

After her death I was plunged into a dark, black hole of loss and grief. I can only imagine how confusing that must have been to a little child. This confusion shaped Antonia’s early life.

It wasn’t until years later, when she left the boot camp in the desert and started at a therapeutic boarding school in southern Virginia called Carlbrook, that she began to change for the better.



ANTONIA: When my mum showed me Carlbrook on the internet, I knew that it was the school for me.



The children in the pictures looked happy. It had high academic standards and helped troubled teenagers come to terms with their issues and move on to college and succeed in life.

When I arrived in Easter 2012, two girls showed me round and as we went into each of the classrooms the children stood up, said hello and shook my hand.

As well as the emphasis on academic work, we were also taught in a practical way about the dangers of substance abuse. We passed around the pickled brain of a monkey that had inhaled cigarette smoke and they showed us a video of a drunken youth whose head was split open in a car crash.

I was intimidated, however, by the way everyone expressed their emotions during therapy sessions.



In contrast, I made it clear that Georgie was off limits. I left Carlbrook temporarily to go back to the wilderness, to a camp in Georgia.



NICOLA: The school told us that there was an amazing ex-Carlbrook therapist at the camp.

She immediately recognised that Antonia’s troubles stemmed from Georgie’s illness and used something called the empty chair method.

She sat with Antonia in a tent and put ‘Georgie’ in the empty chair. The therapist told us that it was electrifying to watch Antonia have a conversation with Georgie about her resentments, fears and sadness that all related to Georgie.

'A new child': Nicola says Antonia's experiences in America have left her happy, graceful, articulate and witty

One thing that came out was that Antonia had been terrified of Georgie towards the end of her life because of the distorting effect that the steroids had on her appearance.

We were told that Antonia had finally been able to access her deepest fears and anxieties.



ANTONIA: The therapist made me confront the issues that had haunted me. I will never forget that when I visited Georgie in hospital there was a smell of illness and death everywhere.

I spent a month in Georgia and wrote A Declaration Of Antonia – a series of guidelines that I would follow when I got back to Carlbrook.

They included how to handle bitchy girls, how to avoid conflict, how to learn.

I finally believed in myself and began to excel academically. There are so many troubled teens in the UK who don’t have my opportunities. We need our own Carlbrook.

'She now has a grace and presence which is striking. She is extremely articulate and witty '

- Nicola Horlick

NICOLA: After her second spell in the wilderness, Antonia was like a new child.



She started taking responsibility, rather than trying to rebel. She now has a grace and presence which is striking. She is extremely articulate and witty.

Above all, she looks happy, and is applying to college.

Doubtless many people will disagree with our drastic course of action but the truth is there is little support for children like Antonia in Britain.

In America, there is a strong culture of talking about issues and no stigma associated with going to a therapist. That is not true of the UK.

We need to take a hard look at how we are raising children, especially in London. They grow up too quickly and get little support when things go wrong. Issues are brushed under the carpet and troubled teenagers grow into troubled adults.

Inevitably, it will be difficult for Antonia to adjust to the real world having spent two-and-a-half years in various treatment centres, but we face the future with optimism.