Miracle boy makes it home

MASTERTON'S miracle boy is back in his mum's home town for Christmas and New Year, full of beans and no worse for wear a year after his incredible survival in last year's Boxing Day tsunami.
William, son of Kathryn Thurston and her husband Brent, was running around in the sun at grandparents Robert and Sydney Thurston's home in Roberts Road on the anniversary of the day he was swept out of his mother's arms when a gigantic tidal wave hit the Seychelles off Africa's east coast.
The little boy ? then only a six-month-old baby ? was swept inland to be later found, virtually unharmed, wedged in a tree 1.5m from the ground, almost upside down.
As William played with his Christmas toys on the floor of his grandparents' home, his mother said the traumatic experience seems not to have affected him at all.
William has no fear of water and, in fact, loves to paddle in the sea when back home in Kuwait where Kathryn is deputy principal of a school in Salwa.
Her theory is that on that dreadful day William was light enough to bob along on top of the huge wave and thankfully become lodged in the tree that was to prove his lifeline.
Memories of the incident are not pleasant for her.
She recalls being struck by the wave, having her glasses stripped away leaving her without proper sight and having the clothes torn from her body by the force of the water.
Frantic for her child she remembers seeing "something white" flash past and making a grab for it thinking it could have been William ? it wasn't.
It wasn't until a girl cried out in the clamber of the moment and as rocks and trees tumbled about in the water that she had seen a baby that Kathryn and Brent were able to get a line on where William had headed, and were able to retrieve him
Apart from a few scratches the little boy was okay.
Kathryn said when Boxing Day dawned this year she, of course, thought back to the events of a year past.
It was a case, she said, of being "in the wrong place at the wrong time".
"Had we been on a different part of the beach, or had realised sooner what was going on, it wouldn't have happened to us.
"Still, what we went through was nothing compared to the suffering in India and Sri Lanka."
In the aftermath of the tsunami William woke up at night crying but Kathryn said it was most likely due to teething rather than to what had happened to him.
William was born in Kuwait so is a citizen of New Zealand by descent, unlike Kathryn's next child who is due fairly soon and will be born in New Zealand.
It's a girl so William, the boy who conquered the sea, will have a little sister to tell his story to in the years ahead.