Dear Austen
Nina Bawden Virago, 130pp, £10
ISBN 1844081842
On 10 May 2002, Nina Bawden and her husband, Austen Kark - writer, journalist and retired managing director of the BBC World Service - arrived at King's Cross Station in London to board the 12.45 train to Cambridge. Fifteen minutes later, having reached a speed of a hundred miles an hour, the train was due to pass, without stopping, through Potters Bar. As a treat, Kark had bought tickets for the only first-class coach; the couple were going to a birthday party. They were alone in the compartment apart from one other passenger, a squadron leader.
As the train approached Potters Bar, a defect in the points caused it to derail. The first-class coach twisted round, rolled on to its side and stopped, wedged under the canopy of the station platform. In all, seven people were killed and 76 others badly injured, including Bawden. Kark died instantly.
The squadron leader saw Kark flying towards him, and avoided contact by clinging in midair to the luggage rack. When the coach had stopped shuddering, he knew Kark was dead and concentrated on Bawden, who was trapped under a seat. Appalled at the extent of her injuries but unable to free her, he crouched at her side and urged her to stay alive.
Horrific as the facts may be, Bawden's book is not a sentimental and gory account of a bloodstained disaster, oozing with bodily pain and lost love. Rather, it takes the form of a letter, a searching attempt to make sense of what took place at the time Kark was killed, the events that followed, and the illusory nature of the death itself. She writes:
Do I half expect you to read this letter? I have never believed in life after death. I can see why it appeals . . . the boat across the Styx, the reception committee on the far bank, the dear friends, the lost family, the tearful greetings, the laughter . . . Before the coffin lid was closed and your broken body shuffled to the flames, your superstitious family, typically hedging their bets, put pennies for the ferryman in your jacket pocket.
Dear Austen is also an angry and in-formed attack on the cowardly avoidance of blame (profits must always be protected) by the managers of Railtrack. One spokesman, after mouthing the usual empty platitudes - "deep sense of loss . . . abiding sympathy" - announced that sabotage by persons unknown had caused the derailment. In fact, as was later proved, the points snapped because the stretcher bars lacked the nuts necessary to hold them together. Some were found at the side of the railway track, without evidence of ever having been screwed into place.
Some years ago, I watched a television programme in which an investigator, pretending to be a railway worker (he had no previous experience), was hired to work on the maintenance of the tracks. His companions spent most of their time drinking tea and playing cards; when they did venture out on to the rails, none of them seemed to know what faults they were looking for. Bawden writes of the numerous letters she has received from Railtrack employees who have suffered penalties for reporting broken plates, damaged points and cracked rails. The Health and Safety Executive maintained that there were 83 things wrong with the points at Potters Bar - too many, perversely, to illuminate one particular fault that might have led to a prosecution.
Bawden was hardly conscious when she was taken from the wreckage and put into an ambulance. She waited for her husband to come, though part of her knew that he was gone. For days, she drifted in and out of dreams - of being in a gentlemen's club whose members were all sitting with their eyes closed, as if dead or asleep, within a fencing of steel bars. She, too, was behind a rail and was determined to climb over it, to find Kark. She couldn't.
A young man who was at Potters Bar Station at the time of the crash told her that the one thing he was unlikely to forget was not the metallic screams of the carriage as it ripped into the platform and roof, but the silence that followed. Three years on, Bawden still half expects to hear the sound of Kark's key in the lock, to hear his voice when the telephone rings. But there's only silence; and that is the worst sound of all.
Beryl Bainbridge's most recent novel is According to Queeney (Abacus)
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