A Cold Monday in December

Photo Credit - chrissi

I was at home because I was due to leave later on a business trip to Chester and that was a pretty long drive from my then home near Southampton. I decided to do some Christmas preparations - wrapping presents, writing cards and the general stuff that we all do in December. I had the radio on - Radio 1 in fact, for I was still in my 20s. All of a sudden, at about a quarter past 8, there was a newsflash that there had been a train crash between two or three trains near to Clapham Junction station. My heart froze for a moment. I worked for a company that had offices in Oxford Street so I regularly travelled into London through Clapham Junction. I knew people who travelled regularly. I could know people on those trains.

Now, this was before mobile phones and internet usage were commonplace so there was no way to ring anyone I knew. There was also no 24 hour news channel to tune in to for updates. For a while, it was unclear which trains had crashed but soon, they said that one of the trains involved had come from Poole. Which only meant one thing. It stopped at my station. I knew people on that train. I felt sick.

I made sure I rang my mum at that point. She worked then in a factory and listened to the radio. She didn't know enough about my movements to know if I was on the train or not. I don't think she was overly worried but she was pleased to hear from me.

As the morning wore on, the news got worse. It was becoming obvious that people had died. There was no information from anyone commuting - if they weren't involved, they would have been behind the crash and therefore stuck on a train.

I left for Chester. All I could think about the whole time were the people involved in the crash. The number of deaths reported went up and up and up throughout the day. By the end of the day, they had confirmed more than 30 people died. Hundreds of people were injured. I got to Chester and watched the television news in horror.

As it turned out, my trip was a waste of time. Late on the Monday evening, I started to feel ill and had to cancel the course I was meant to run the next day. I had to drive all the way home again, still not knowing whether everyone I knew was OK. It might be different now but long distance commuters were often friends on the train only and didn't have contact numbers for each other at work or home.

It was another couple of days before I managed to speak to someone "from the trains". People I had been worried about were OK. As usual, with these things, plans had changed, people missed trains, and their lives were possibly saved. Others, not so. I remember the words that the man I was speaking to used:  "We lost two of our number". Both women, Gill and Bev. Lives cut needlessly short. Another was the Hat Lady, who I've blogged about before. I was ill the whole of that week with 'flu. I felt sorry for myself at home, but it seemed trite to complain.

I, along with many other commuters, went to the memorial service at Winchester Cathedral in late January. I remember the words sung by the choir. "May light perpetual shine upon them." Sadly, one of the victims, who remained in a coma for some time after the crash, died after the memorial service.

Only a couple of months after the crash, I started a job that required me to commute full time into London. I got to know people who were on the Poole train that day, mainly in the buffet car. They were fortunate but they didn't feel that way. Some of them saw terrible, terrible things - and yes I know what they were, some of them couldn't help talking about it occasionally - which I won't repeat on this blog. Those things haunted them, which took its toll mentally and physically, no doubt on their relationships and their families too.

They built a memorial and a garden for the victims, above the crash site. Services were held there annually until the 10th anniversary, when it was decided that no future memorial service would be held, which frankly shocks me when you consider that other disasters that happened around the same time are commemorated in some way regularly. The 35 victims - and the crash itself - have been forgotten. Last year, there was even a story about how the gardens beneath the memorial were being neglected by Network Rail.  The railways that failed these people, that caused their deaths, seem intent on trying to forget them, in the hope of writing them out of history perhaps. I wonder just how the families of the victims feel about the way that the memory of their loved ones is treated with apparent contempt.

I, for one, will not forget what happened. The news images from that day stick in my head. I think, as I blogged before, of the ones I knew alive from time to time. Once, I read through as much as I could of the report from the Hidden Inquiry - if ever there was an apt name, that is it - and it's a depressing account of the events leading up to the crash. Some of the recommendations from that report have never been fully implemented. Shocking. Shame on those who allowed that to happen.

Today is the 22nd anniversary of that cold, clear day in December. Monday 12th December 1988 at 08:10, thousands of lives changed. 35 of those lives ended as a result.

When I was looking for an image to illustrate the post, I found this. It has a factual error in the words on the screen - no-one in fact died on the Basingstoke train on the front - but it is a fitting tribute to those that died. I am not afraid to admit that it made me cry a lot when I watched it. I often find I react more to such disasters since becoming a mother - everyone who died was somebody's child, and many children were robbed of parents and grandparents.



To end, I'm going to list the names of the victims, because they deserve to be mentioned and not forgotten. They were:

Gillian Allen, Clive Attfield, Jane Aubin, John Barrett, James Beasant, Michelle Boyce, Timothy Burgess, Glenn Clark, Arthur Creech, Norman Dalrymple, Brian Dennison, Stephen Dyer, Romano Falcini, Paul Hadfield, Edna Hannibal, Geoffrey Hartwell, Stephen Hopkins, Everett Lindsay, Stephen Loader, Joseph Martin, Alison McGregor, Christopher Molesworth, David Moore, Teresa Moore, Michael Newman, Beverlie Niven, Austin Perry-Lewis, Alan Philipson, John Rolls, Alma Smith, Tracey Stevens, and Alan Wren.

As the choir sang during their memorial service, may light perpetual shine upon them. RIP.

Uncle Pat

Let me tell you the story of my Uncle Pat. He was my uncle through marriage - he was married to my aunt Ilene, who was my mother's older sister. Pat was his middle name - given because he was born on St Patrick's Day - but he always used that and not his proper first name.

Growing up, I never knew any different but Pat was in a wheelchair so I accepted this as normal. He was a paraplegic, but it didn't seem to affect his ability to lead a decent life. My aunt and he moved to a bungalow near the sea in Bexhill when I was quite young, he drove a specially modified car, and they had grandchildren a similar age to my sister and me. To me, as a child, he seemed a jolly enough man, if slightly loud at times. He just had a chair to move him around instead of his legs.

As I grew older, I gradually began to understand that Pat had not always been in a wheelchair. I don't know how I came to know the story but I guess as I was old enough to understand about wars and so on, it was something that we got to talk about. I learned that he had been injured in World War II. Pat was 24 when war was declared on 3rd September 1939 and he had married Ilene shortly before he was conscripted to join the Armed Forces.

His injury, and the end of his war, happened when he landed on a beach in Normandy, and a German grenade was thrown at him which then exploded. I think that this happened at D-Day in 1944, but as that is 5 years after he joined up, it might well have been at Dunkirk, which happened less than a year later.

All this information came from my parents, and I am remembering this through the eyes of a child. I don't think I ever heard Uncle Pat talk about the war or his injury. Then again, they lived quite far from us - too far for day trips generally, we had to stop over - so we didn't see them all that often. My mother and her sister were 18 years apart in age and so they were not that close either. Still, we loved to go there as it was by the sea. To children living many miles inland, the place was paradise. Who we stayed with didn't really matter but our aunt and uncle were always welcoming.

To all intents and purposes, my uncle and my aunt were a couple living out their later lives near the sea. Everything was good, except that one of them had a disability. Well, that was how it seemed.

Our family often went on summer holiday to the West Country in late summer. This particular year, we were down in Devon, when my mum received a letter sent to our accommodation. It was odd; who would send us a letter on holiday? Immediately, both my mother and I recognised the writing as being from Ilene as she had the most appalling handwriting. (It must be a family thing as Mum's is bad too).

Mum opened the letter. I remember the words on that page as clearly now as when I first saw that letter. "Regret to tell you, but Pat was killed in a car accident on Monday." are the words my aunt used. It was actually written so badly, I remember disagreeing with Mum as she said the word "killed" said "injured". To me, the word was plainly "killed" although you could see that my aunt had hesitated during writing the word. My mother had to ring Ilene to get confirmation of the news - quite why she had not attempted to contact us via the telephone, I will never know. But yes, Pat had died in a car accident. My aunt had not been in the car so she was not hurt, but she was obviously grief-stricken.

What had happened was that on Monday morning, Pat had gone out in his car to fill up with petrol. The filling station was only a mile or so away from their house. It should have taken 10, maybe 15 minutes for him to do this but he never came back. I don't know if he even went there. His crashed car was found, wrapped around a tree, about 10 miles in the opposite direction.

Some time later after we had received this terrible news, I had a sudden realisation. Pat had died on 3rd September 1979, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. Much had been made of events to commemorate the anniversary in the press and on television during our holiday. The connection seemed too much of a coincidence for there not to have been a connection.

An inquest eventually delivered an open verdict. There was no evidence to suggest a definite cause - Pat had left no suicide note, and he had seemed in good spirits so suicide could not be proved. The circumstances of the accident were difficult to explain as nothing was found to be wrong with the car or the road, there were no witnesses and the weather was good. It seemed he just crashed his car into a tree. Nothing could be ruled out, but then nothing could be ruled in either. An open verdict was the only one that seemed appropriate. It is like a book that will never close on the story of his death.

We will never know what was going on in Pat's mind in the run up to that day. However little it appeared to have affected him, having a spinal injury is devastating, traumatic and permanent. I can only guess that he no longer wanted to live restricted by his injury, that the anniversary brought back terrible memories of the things he saw when fighting for his country, or that feelings of guilt for surviving where others didn't overwhelmed him. I don't believe he gave any sign of inner turmoil but then I was only 14 when he died. How could I know? How? I often wonder if he had been traumatised for all of those nearly 40 years since he went to war or was injured. Maybe someone could have helped him. Maybe.

So, today is the 31st anniversary of his death, and also the 71st anniversary of the declaration of World War II. I know we remember the fallen on Remembrance Sunday, but spare a thought today for those who come home from war, having seen terrible things or suffering severe injuries. Organisations like the Royal British Legion or SSAFA do incredible work supporting ex-servicemen but sometimes it is not enough. Whether the conflict was last month or 50 years ago, it is the same. The human cost of war is often beyond what we can see with our eyes. Pat's story taught me that.

RIP Hugh Patrick "Pat" Deadman 17th March 1915 - 3rd September 1979