‘If we die tonight, do you think that Meghan will come to my funeral?’: Why drinking PG Tips with Thomas Markle as his 19th-floor Philippines apartment was rocked by an earthquake was the most surreal moment of my life, writes CAROLINE GRAHAM

As reunions go, it was not at all what I expected. Two hours after greeting my friend Tom Markle, the Duchess of Sussex’s estranged father, in his 19th floor apartment in Cebu in the Philippines, on Tuesday night, the building started to sway violently.

As the high-rise block rocked from side-to-side for more than 15 seconds, we could hear the screams of neighbours. I looked at the clock on the wall, 9.59pm. Then I turned to Tom and said: ‘I’m terrified.’

A 6.9 magnitude earthquake had just hit.

As we opened the front door and looked into the hallway, I noticed a long crack on the wall that ran the entire length of the corridor.

A woman from Chicago, a single mother, was hysterical as she hurried past in tears towards the emergency exit. ‘Get out!’ she yelled as she prepared to run down 19 floors to the street because the lift was out of action.

But for Tom, running down the stairs was never an option.

At 81, he has slowed down considerably and these days uses a cane to get around.

While there have been reports this week that he was ‘trapped’ on the 19th floor, this was not the case. Tom’s son, Tom Jr, who lives in the flat next door, said: ‘Dad, if you walk down 19 floors at some point you are going to have to walk back up 19 floors.’

For a man who suffered two heart attacks on the eve of his daughter Meghan’s wedding to Prince Harry in 2018 and had a stroke four years later which nearly killed him, taking on such an enormous physical challenge was intimidating to say the least.

In the end, we decided to stay put. While the Philippines sits in the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’, an area notorious for volcanic eruptions because it is where the earth’s tectonic plates merge, Tom’s building is relatively new, built to strict safety codes and designed to withstand earthquakes.

‘It is what it is,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s ride it out up here. This building isn’t going anywhere unless the next quake is bigger. And chances are we will only have small aftershocks. We’re as safe up here as we are anywhere.’

Riding out a disaster with Meghan’s dad was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

Tom, a retired award-winning Hollywood lighting director, is an old school gentleman and immediately started cracking jokes to try to lighten the mood and calm my frayed nerves. ‘Welcome to the Philippines. You do realise this has cost me a fortune to arrange – not just the quake but the light show,’ he quipped, pointing out of the window where a tropical thunder and lightning storm was raging.

The quake was the biggest to hit Cebu – an industrial city with a population of just under a million – in more than 400 years. So it was no surprise when the power was cut. But the building’s emergency generator kicked in and Tom’s flat had wifi, TV and air conditioning. We also had the gifts I’d bought from an English shop in Los Angeles: Tom’s favourite PG Tips and ginger nuts. With shaking hands, I made two cups of tea.

Outside the window, the city had plunged into darkness. A large suspension bridge, usually festooned in red lights, disappeared in the gloom. Dramatic footage emerged on social media of the bridge swaying violently.

As we talked for hours, Tom turned reflective. ‘If we die tonight, do you think Meghan will come to my funeral?’ he asked.

Then, with a chuckle, he added: ‘Will I get a better funeral because my son-in-law is fifth in line to the throne?’

This wasn’t what I anticipated when I made the long journey from my home in LA to Cebu, which Meghan’s father and half-brother Tom Jr have called home since January when they left the US to start a new life on the other side of the world. I drove them to Los Angeles airport on December 31 for their 16-hour flight to the Philippines, gave Tom a hug and promised to see him soon.

‘I’m not running away from anything,’ he assured me. ‘I’m heading towards a new life with lovely people and, hopefully, more peace than I’ve had in a few years.’

The story of how Tom became estranged from Meghan and Harry, who he has never met, is well known. On the eve of their wedding, he made the mistake of posing for some pictures which were passed off as paparazzi shots because he had been hounded for months by photographers and claimed he had received no support from the couple despite repeatedly asking them for help.

We discussed it again as we rode out this week’s drama.

‘I believed the photographer when he said posing for nice pictures would make my life easier, that people would leave me alone,’ he said. ‘That was a terrible mistake and I’ve been paying for it ever since.’

When The Mail on Sunday revealed that Tom had co-operated with the paparazzi, Meghan and Harry were furious.

Within days, Tom suffered two heart attacks and was forced to miss the royal wedding when doctors declared him too sick to fly. As a result, he was forced to watch King Charles walk his daughter part-way down the aisle at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. The only member of Meghan’s family to attend was her mother Doria Ragland, Tom’s ex-wife.

‘I’m still deeply grateful to the King for doing that,’ he said.

‘I wish it could have been me.’

His rift with Meghan is a wound which has never healed. ‘I have never stopped loving my daughter. I have always loved her and always will. Nothing will ever change that.’ I was finally able to leave him at 4am when the building manager turned the lifts back on.

At least 72 people died in the earthquake and 350 were injured and, as I walked back to my hotel, I saw scores of people sleeping in the streets.

The rest of the week was less dramatic. Tom and I hung out and watched his favourite old black and white Hollywood films, including The Little Rascals and Charlie Chan.

On Thursday, a show popped up on TV about Prince Harry’s recent visit to the UK where he undertook several charitable engagements and met his cancer-stricken father for their first face-to-face meeting in more than a year.

According to the show, Harry gave King Charles a framed photograph of his two children, Archie, six, and Lilibet, four.

Tom became subdued. ‘I’d love to see my grandkids. There are two grandfathers who would both love to see those kids. One happens to be the King of England.

‘I wonder, do they have the Markle nose? When you are a grandparent, you think about things like that. I’d love a photograph. I would like to speak to Charles. Of all the people on the planet, he knows what it feels like to be estranged from a child and how tough it is.

‘I don’t want anyone’s pity. It is what it is. I’m not getting any younger. When things happen like it did this week with the earthquake, it makes me think about my own mortality, which I do a lot these days. I’m 81, Markle men never usually make it past 80. If I die and Meg and I are estranged, will she care? Will she show up to my funeral?’ 

Mr Markle’s life in the Philippines is, for the most part, a good one. He and Tom Jr live in a complex which has a shopping mall with residential towers at one end and a hotel at the other.

The apartments have a swimming pool, gym, pool room, cinema and entertainment area where Tom Jr recently threw a party to celebrate his 59th birthday. The two apartments cost £500 a month each. In LA, similar flats in a building like theirs, would cost at least £3,000 apiece. Mr Markle said: ‘I love the Filipino people. They are so sweet and friendly, always smiling. You can live a good life here on not much money. Rent is cheap, the food is fresh and inexpensive.

‘When we first got here, we lived in a hotel for a few weeks and I was recognised a couple of times. But, on the whole, they don’t know who I am over here and I like it that way.’

Tom Jr, who has his own YouTube channel, takes care of his dad’s day-to-day needs, organising medications and bringing him food.

He has also been dating a Filipino woman called Rose, 27, for six months.

The earthquake has made them realise that the 19th floor is not the best place to be and Tom Jr is now looking for a one-storey home for his father, with a flat nearby for himself and Rose.

‘I want a place where I can sit outside on a patio and watch the world go by,’ Tom Snr said. ‘I want to get a cat. We always had cats when Meghan was growing up. I would love to adopt an older cat for company.’

Looking out of Tom’s window for the final time before I fly home to LA tomorrow, an overwhelming sense of sadness struck me.

I have considered Tom a friend for many years. He’s a good man and a compassionate one. When he sees commercials for charities on TV, he immediately donates. He is a fount of knowledge about old Hollywood and loves talking about the stars he has worked with, including Demi Moore. He cannot pass a child in the street without handing over a few coins.

He worked hard all his life. For years, he was the lighting director on two hit US TV shows – General Hospital and Married… With Children – and gave Meghan the best private education his money could buy.

It has always struck me as odd that even when she was making a reported $40,000 (£30,000)-an-episode while working as an actress on Suits, her father continued to pay off her $250,000 student loan bill for Northwestern University.

But he is a man of great pride, explaining: ‘I told her I would pay for her education and I kept my promise. That’s what a dad does. You give your kids the best start you can in life and then you send them out into the world.’

Before she met Harry, Meghan gushed about her father on her now defunct blog ‘The Tig’, famously telling how, when a teacher asked her to tick a box defining her race – which gave the options ‘black’ or ‘white’ – her dad told her: ‘Draw your own box.’

He has storage units in LA packed with family mementoes and the contents of Meghan’s childhood bedroom, which he wonders how he can ever return to her now she has ghosted him. ‘I’d like to give Meg the chance to get her things but I don’t know how to get in touch with her,’ he said.

This week we were lucky to be in a modern tower block when the quake hit. But it could have ended differently.

And it struck me that Meghan, who will receive yet another humanitarian award in New York later this month, is forgoing so much – particularly when it comes to her children. They are missing out on a relationship not only with their royal relatives but an American grandfather who longs to meet them.

Surely, if Meghan is a true humanitarian, it is time to show forgiveness and bury the hatchet.