The Anonymous Widower

Children In Trouble

I’m just watching a recording of the BBC documentary; The Railway.

In one section, they have to go and tell a mother, that her son has been hit by a train and killed.

I might not have been a saint, but one incident in my life made my mother think the worst.

I’d been driving back to Liverpool University in my faithful Morris Minor; VKX 156, when just before Peterborough, a guy in the slow lane of the northbound A1, decided he needed to turn right.  But he missed the turn and was hit fair and square by the car in front of me.  I would have gone right into him, but for the quick thinking of another driver in an Austin 1800 in the slow lane, who slowed and waved me through in front of him.  I then pulled directly on to the verge as I thought things would now go seriously wrong.  They did, but not around me, as the car that caused the accident bounced across the central reservation of the dual carriageway and then hit someone going south.

The Police turned up some minutes later and I gave a detailed statement about what had happened.

Nothing further happened until that summer, when I was on a boating holiday on the Thames, when a Police Sergeant turned up at our house around midnight and said I was wanted in Court in the  morning to give evidence about the accident.

Seeing him there, had given her an awful fright, as she thought I’d fallen in the Thames or a lot worse.

Obviously, that hadn’t happened, but it does show the sort of reaction expected, when something serious happens.

I know the heartbreak of losing a child, so we should all take care.

I certainly do, as best as I can, after all I’ve been through in the last few years.

February 22, 2013 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Death, Driving, Police, River Thames, Trains