The emergency reception area began to fill. Maybe the dredger had already arrived at lifracombe. The scenes around me were heartbreaking. Even professionally I had never been at the site of a major disaster before. There had not been one in Devon, Cornwall or Somerset in my lifetime. The nearest we had ever got to it had been a crippled airliner heading for the North Devon coast which had dropped into the sea off Ireland – five minutes away from Bideford, they said.
I had been trained in emergency procedure, of course, but nothing prepares you for the reality of it. As well as the walking wounded there were the stretcher cases, and more than once a doctor shook his head and pulled a sheet over the head of a victim. I felt as if I was in a daze as I wandered among all these poor injured people, hoping to find Robin, dreading the condition I may find him in. As a policewoman I had only been used to anonymous victims before. It was hard to think that these were my wedding guests.
I lifted the sheet from a comatose figure and revealed the face of a dead woman so disfigured that even if I had known her I would not have been able to recognise her. One side of her face had been more or less sliced off and congealed blood surrounded a gaping head wound. As I stood and looked at her my whole body started to shake.
‘I don’t know who you are but you will please get out of my casualty unit,’ ordered an authoritative female voice. I turned around and faced a tall commanding-looking woman in a uniform I just about had the nuance left to realise was that of a senior nursing officer.
By this time I was only too glad to obey. I couldn’t take any more. I found myself a chair in a quiet corner of the main reception area and sat down to wait. I couldn’t face Maude and Roger again, nor Clem. Not yet. Not after what I had seen. I shut my eyes and quickly opened them again. All I could see inside my head were the terrible faces of the dead and injured, jumbled up with images of people being literally swallowed up by the earth. Many of them must have been buried alive, I knew. My shakes were almost uncontrollable now. The scale of the disaster was almost beyond my comprehension. And this had been my wedding day. It was supposed to have been the best day of my life.
Somehow or other I fell asleep, just sitting there in reception. My head was still full of terrible images, but I suppose I must have been exhausted.
I was woken sometime after dark by a voice so welcome.
‘Rose, Rose, wake up, darling . . .’
It seemed to take me a long time to open my eyes. For a brief wonderful moment I couldn’t quite remember where I was. Then the horror overwhelmed me again. Automatically I glanced at my watch. It was just after ten. I had been at the hospital for almost nine hours. I couldn’t quite work out where the time had gone. I couldn’t work out anything much. I felt dazed.
Julia crouched by my chair and stroked my cheek with one hand. Her eyes were very bright and there was a gauntness about her. She looked as shocked as everyone else but appeared to have escaped unscathed.
‘People have been looking for you,’ she went on, managing a half smile. ‘They wanted to take me to some bloody survivors’ centre or something, but I found out that you were here and just bloody well insisted that I was brought here too.’
I threw my arms around her neck. Julia was so wonderful. With all that she had gone through she had come to find me, she had time to think of me.
‘Thank God you’re all right,’ I said.
‘I always was a lucky reporter,’ she responded, and the tentative smile stretched into a crooked grin. Her navy blue and white wedding suit was torn and muddy. I thanked God again that that seemed to have been the only damage she had suffered. Physically at least.
‘I came into lifracombe on a trawler,’ she told me. Her voice had a tremble to it and sounded almost as if it belonged to someone else. ‘A dozen or so of us aboard, none of us with more than a scratch, it’s all inside your head though, isn’t it, Rose? You wonder if you’ll ever be able to think of anything else . . .’
I buried my face in her neck and felt the tears welling up again.
‘My poor Rose,’ she whispered. And yet I had not even been on the island. I had not had to run for my life as the earth opened up beneath my feet. I had not faced death nor seen it approach close enough to touch as Julia had.
I looked up at her, wondering exactly what she had seen. My relief at discovering that she was alive and well, had, for the first time even put the thought of Robin out of my head – but not for long.
My eyes formed the question. As usual Julia half-read my mind. I didn’t need to say the words.
‘He’s all right,’ she told me. ‘I’ve seen him.’
The relief washed over me, then I was overcome with shame again at my selfishness.
‘All those poor people,’ I said haltingly. ‘My nephew, my mother . . . are they still missing? And how many others?’
She shrugged. ‘Nobody knows how many yet,’ she said. ‘It’s still too soon.’
I could hold the tears back no longer. I wept in her arms, great heaving sobs wracked my body but brought me no relief.
‘There’s time, Rose,’ Julia soothed. ‘They are still digging. People have been . . .’ She paused as if searching for the right words. It became obvious with what she said next that there were no right words. I knew what she was about to say, I had been thinking about it myself, but hearing the words was still shocking. ‘People have been buried alive. But they come out alive too – sometimes . . .’ Her voice trailed off. We held each other very tightly.
The Puffin, carrying the last of the survivors and many of the emergency workers was on her way into Ilfracombe, we learned. Mary Riley was still on duty and able to tell me that Robin was definitely aboard. Apparently he had refused to leave the island until everybody who could be helped had first been transported to safety, or at least installed aboard the Puffin.
I could not wait at the hospital. I did not even know if he would be taken to the North Devon District. I wanted to get to the quayside at Ilfracombe, fast. Mary Riley fixed me a ride with a couple of young constables in a squad car. Strictly against procedure, but I can be very persuasive. And I was a Detective Chief Inspector.
It was almost midnight when we arrived at Ilfracombe. Several ambulances were waiting there for the Puffin to berth, and a Mobile Incident Room – a West Country Ambulances’ control van – was parked by the waterside. In spite of the hour there was quite a large crowd gathered including more press and TV.
The night was as cold as the day had been glorious. I had no coat and I was shivering as I stood on the quayside, but after waiting only for twenty minutes or so I could see the Puffin’s navigation lights approaching.
It seemed like a lifetime before they brought her alongside, and then another lifetime before I spotted Robin clearly illuminated in the bright lights which had been erected around the harbour by the emergency services. I could tell that he was holding back, waiting on the deck until all the rest of the survivors had been helped ashore. Eventually he stepped onto the quayside briskly enough. His clothes were muddy and torn and he had a nasty gash on his cheek and was supporting his right hand with his left as if it was giving him pain. Other than that he seemed unharmed – except for his mental condition.
I rushed forward, pushing to one side a police constable who misguidedly tried to stop me, and half threw myself at Robin. He did not even greet me, just stared into the middle distance, his eyes vacant. I wrapped my arms around him to try to comfort him, but it was as if he was incapable of focusing on me. He looked grey and gaunt. He did not speak.
A paramedic checked him out, carefully studied his injured hand, consulted a clipboard and decreed that Robin should be taken to the Musgrove Park Hospital at Taunton – apparently the North Devon District was already dealing with well over its quota of injured. I begged to be allowed to travel with him.
In the ambulance he remained silent. I suppose it was crazy, but I found myself wondering if he would ever speak again. I asked him about his brother, and Luke, and my m
other – of whom I still had no news – and he just looked at me blankly. I told him I had left his mother safely at Barnstaple, and that she was coping well. He did not react at all to anything I said or did. I accompanied him into the emergency room and nobody tried to stop me sitting with him while they stitched up his face-wound and then set splints on two fingers which had turned out to be broken. I was not even sure if he was aware of my presence.
They said he would be kept in for twenty-four hours and gave him two pills which he meekly swallowed. Ten minutes later he was soundly into what seemed to me to be an unnaturally deep sleep.
I was alarmed and called a nurse. ‘Classic reaction to shock,’ she said. ‘Best thing for him.’
I sat by his bed all night. The hospital told me they could get me transport home, if I wished. There was no question of my going home. I wasn’t even quite sure where home was any more. Contracts were about to be exchanged on my apartment and Robin and I had been due to move directly into the new Clifton house on our return from honeymoon.
The next morning it became apparent that Robin was being hailed as a hero. I learned that it was those inside Abri Parish Church, which could seat only 100, places allocated mostly to relatives and island residents, who had been worst hit, trapped within a tomb of collapsing stone. The others, to whom the ceremony was to have been broadcast on a closed-circuit TV screen, could at least run. Robin had been standing just outside the church, apparently waiting until the last moment before going in so that he could see me arrive. Instead of running from the crumbling building he had managed to help some people out before the entire church collapsed.
I would have expected no less of him. Mrs Cotley, who had also been taken to the Musgrove Hospital at Taunton, told the story of how he had defied flying timbers and masonry to throw himself into a huge crack in the earth to grab hold of her three-year-old grandson who had been fast disappearing into it. Somehow he managed to get the boy and himself to safety.
‘I don’t know ‘ow he did it,’ she told me wonderingly. ‘All I could do was watch.’
She had sustained a broken leg and a couple of cracked ribs, but she was sitting up in her hospital bed when I took a break from my vigil at Robin’s bedside and visited her on the morning after the disaster. I knew how fond Robin was of Mrs Cotley, and reported back to him that she appeared to be recovering surprisingly well. Robin showed little interest. He seemed to be in a kind of trance. The papers may have dubbed him Abri’s Hero. But it meant nothing to him. He was discharged from hospital later that day, although I did not really think he was fit to leave. It seemed to me that he was still in deep shock.
Somehow, I don’t really know why or even recall exactly how, we all ended up going to Northgate Farm. I knew by then that my mother and my brother-in-law Brian were both safe, but my nephew Luke was still missing, and so was Robin’s brother, James.
Robin and I travelled in complete silence in a hospital car. He would by then answer questions in a monosyllabic way, but there was still no possibility of conversation. I wanted desperately to talk about all that had happened. Robin would have none of it.
Maude and Roger were already at Northgate when we arrived. She was deathly white behind her perpetual tan, but maintained her dignity as ever.
The news we had all been dreading came within minutes of Robin and I arriving at the farm. Roger answered the phone. Maude and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. Robin had gone upstairs alone. He returned as soon as he heard the phone ring. All three of us stared silently at Roger as he held the receiver in his hand and listened. He said little, just an occasional desultory yes or no, but his manner told the story.
‘They’ve found James,’ he said simply, when he turned to face us.
We did not need to ask if he was dead. We knew, and indeed had known all along, I suppose. Nonetheless this was the final blow.
Robin seemed to sway on his feet. I thought for a moment that he was going to pass out, but before I could get to him Maude was by his side, her hand under his elbow steadying him. She had been a tower of strength all her life, I had no doubt, and it seemed to come automatically to her to support others. Even at this terrible time, learning that she had lost her much-loved younger son, her first thought was to prop up Robin – in every sense.
Again he did not speak, just looked at her with panic in his eyes.
She led him to a chair which he half-fell into. Maude stepped back from him and stood, ramrod straight, looking down at him.
‘Just remember you are a Davey,’ she told him. A truly weird thing to say at such a time, anyone who did not know the family might think, but from her it seemed perfectly natural, and her voice was gentler than her words.
Robin reached up and grasped her hand tightly. In common with Julia in the hospital the day it happened, he didn’t sound a bit like himself when he eventually began to talk.
‘If only James had lived instead of me,’ he whispered, forcing the words out.
His mother stroked his hair as if he were a child. ‘You mustn’t say that, darling boy,’ she said. ‘You really mustn’t.’
‘It’s true, it’s my fault, all those deaths, mother, they’re all my fault,’ he said. ‘I’m to blame.’
‘No, no, Robin,’ she admonished him, everything about her still wonderfully calm and controlled, her voice almost hypnotic. ‘No-one’s to blame. There hadn’t been that number of people on the island since your first wedding, and that was over twenty years ago. Perhaps it was just too many. We just don’t know, do we? But nobody could ever have predicted such a thing, Robin, luv. It’s nobody’s fault.’
I didn’t know how she could be so logical and so articulate right then. Robin remained crumpled. Certainly he didn’t look convinced. I could understand that well enough. If you throw a wedding party for 300-odd people and around half of them end up dead or injured you are bound to feel responsible, aren’t you? I jolly well knew that, I did.
My nephew Luke, my godson, was also not found alive. It took almost a week to recover all the bodies, and poor little Luke was one of the last to be discovered. I had loved him dearly and I was devastated. Although once again we had all known, I suppose, that he really must be dead, that there could be no hope, the dreadful limbo period had added to the nightmare. And when we finally got the bad news, I found myself wishing that my mother – who had been one of the few to survive from inside the church, escaping only with a broken wrist – had died instead of Luke. Then, of course, I was overwhelmed with guilt for allowing myself to think such a thing.
In all forty-four people died that terrible day and ninety-four were injured. Also among the dead were two of the band, The Dave Morgan Five, and thirteen residents of Abri. None of my police colleagues were killed although two were among the injured.
Luke’s death was the worst of all for me – the horror of it heightened by the long wait before his body was recovered. Naturally Clem took it very badly. Nothing else could have been expected. I wanted to visit her, in fact I had wanted to be with her all week, but my brother-in-law had counselled against it. Clem would not even come to the phone to speak to me.
‘Look Rose, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but she seems to blame you for what has happened to Luke,’ Brian told me haltingly over the telephone.
‘It makes sense to me . . .’ I said. ‘You see, I blame myself too.’
My mother had gone to stay with Clem and Brian, which I thought was all they probably needed, but even she wouldn’t speak to me. Normally I couldn’t have cared less about my mother’s whims and moods, but I needed all the comfort I could get right then. And there wasn’t a lot of it about.
I called Peter Mellor to ask him if he thought it had been Luke whom he had tried to save. He had never even met my nephew, and didn’t have a clue one way or the other. I don’t know why I even bothered to ask, but I think maybe it was a question of trying to keep Luke alive inside my head. And somehow I would always believe that it was Luke whom Peter
Mellor reached out for.
I only went to two of the funerals. Luke’s and James’ – that was all I could cope with – and even that in spite of receiving a curt note from my sister telling me she did not want me there when she buried Luke. But I could not stay away. I arrived as late as I could and sat at the back of the church. Julia – who had gone straight back to work after the disaster, maybe trying to deny that it had all really happened – drove down from London to be with me, but Robin was not there. He only went to one funeral, his brother’s.
Little Luke was laid to rest on a wet and windy April day amid scenes which will haunt me for the rest of my life. It seemed like thousands of people lined the streets of Weston-super-Mare as the funeral cortege drove by. My brother-in-law carried Luke’s tiny white coffin in his arms and that image will remain with me always.
Julia kept her left hand permanently under my right elbow and somehow we got through it. When we came out of the church I wanted to go to the graveside, but saw Clem looking at me with undisguised hatred through tears which seemed to be born as much of rage as of grief.
I didn’t know what to do but Julia steered me firmly away. We walked slowly through the churchyard, I think I was still reluctant to leave, and suddenly I was surprised to find my brother-in-law Brian by our side, having broken away briefly from the main funeral party.
‘If it’s any consolation, Rose, she blames me too,’ he said.
I could only stare at him. I didn’t understand.
‘I was there, you see. I was with our son. I survived, and he didn’t. I doubt she will ever forgive me.’
His pain was written in the lines of anguish on his face that had not been there three weeks earlier. I touched his hand. He half-smiled. My legs felt shaky. I do not think I would have been able to carry on walking without Julia’s firm grip under my elbow. So often I was staggered by her strength, and couldn’t quite comprehend where she got it from. She too had been through a terrible ordeal, and the way she coped not only with her own nightmares but also with mine, was little short of magnificent.
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