AFTER Clapham Junction, Purley, Cannon Street, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Selby, Potters Bar, and after Berkshire last weekend, I got the obligatory post-train crash phone call from my mother.
Her meaningful “How are you” on these calls is rendered redundant as soon as I pick up the phone, because it is her code for saying: “You weren’t killed on that train, were you?” Just as my overly breezy “Hello, Mum” is my code for “Of course I wasn’t on the train! Let’s examine the statistical evidence. I am eight times more likely to be killed in a car, except I am not, because I haven’t got one. On a personal level, what is the mathematical probability of two members of the same nuclear family both getting killed in train crashes, with 37 years and an ocean between them. It must be one in a zillion.”
I make up a different unfeasibly large statistic every time — again, my way of conveying thinly veiled irritation that, after nearly four decades, my mother is still not quite over the trauma of losing my father, the love of her life, in a train crash between New York and Montreal, in a town called Saratoga Springs, on August 12, 1967.
After each phone call I consider asking her if she thinks railways are somehow against us, as a family. One down, three to go. But she says the reports upset her and that she feels a bit nervous, a bit uneasy, and so she calls, just to check in. She is a train crash spotter, sans anorak, sans notepad, sans anything but a sigh of relief that neither my sister nor I have been in the latest crash.
I used to indulge in a more detached form of disaster spotting in the early 1980s, when planes seemed to drop out of the sky on a regular basis. It was a bad time for aviation, but I was fascinated by the search for the black box recorders that charted the last moments of the flight and gave clues to what went wrong. Why didn’t they make them for trains? I imagined the boxes sitting there at the bottom of the sea, with sounds of swearing and screaming alarming the fishes. I thought I could turn it into a piece of art, a series of black boxes speaking scared, muffled last words to each other in a giant fish tank. I had an artist friend who was going to help me make it, and then I realised how tasteless and upsetting it would be for anyone who lost a loved one in an air crash. I wasn’t as detached as I’d thought, but I still condemned my mother, to an extent, for not being detached enough. Of course it was unfair, but that’s daughters and mothers for you.
Now, each time there is a train crash, each time I get the call, I think about the difference between the fleeting sadness I feel and those for whom the sadness is not fleeting — when a picture or a report of a tragedy triggers a morose feeling that is hard to shift. Me, I like to think that I am well over it, the death of my father, and wouldn’t I be one of those sad, psychobabbling, victim culture, “my traumatic childhood: discuss”, stuck-in-the-past types if I were not over it by now? At least, that is the jazzy, tough line I throw to anyone who makes too big a deal if it comes out in conversation. The reality is a little different.
My interest in the minutiae of rail-crash reports is almost forensic. Certain phrases, descriptions and quotes from witnesses and survivors come up time and again. There is always someone noting how eerily quiet it is after the thud of the crash. Somebody always expresses disbelief that anyone survived. Then there is the horribly euphemistic “human error”, a phrase more suitable for a mistake on a tax return, or an insult to be levelled at a particularly unsavoury character. It seems far too mild to describe the faceless, nameless creep who didn’t stop the passenger train when he was supposed to, and ploughed it into a freight train, which was switching to a siding, causing the passenger carriages to topple over and get crushed by the freight, which snuffed out my dear old dad.
But I’m over it. At least I think I am, until I come across one of these reports and I see a photo of a train toppled into a ditch, and bits of track ripped up, and luggage strewn over the area, and people laid out on stretchers. Or I come across a variation of the quote such as the one from the ambulance worker in Saratoga Springs, as reported in the August 13, 1967, edition of The New York Times, right next to the ad for a drip- dry lace table cloth from Lord and Taylor. The paramedic said: “There was no panic. If anything, it was the terrible silence that got to you. It was not the usual crash where you hear the screams and cries of the injured.”
I first read these words when I was about 13 and looked up the article on a microfilm machine in the big public library in Manhattan. “Two Killed and 13 Hurt in a 2-Train Collision Near Saratoga Springs”. I had not been to my father’s funeral, never visited his grave, and I thought, just as a possibility, that it was all a big lie, and that perhaps he had just gone away to do something else, was a bit fed up or something, and the crash was an invention to spare our feelings. But there it was, three quarters of a page in America’s most reliable paper. The eighth paragraph said: “Those killed were Kristian S. Jebsen, 65 years old, of Bergen, Norway, and Sidney Kirsch, 49, of . . .” and there it gave our exact address, which excited me. My address in The New York Times! But then, in the bluish light of the humming microfilm room, I started to cry, great big gulping sobs. It had to be true, then.
Two details really upset me. They were not gruesome but they highlighted the misfortune of being in the wrong railway carriage at the wrong time. The passengers in the rear carriages were not even aware there had been an accident until the conductor told them. “Most of the passengers,” reported the Times, “were continuing their trip by bus.”
Well, how nice for them, I thought at the time. But of course, why shouldn’t they carry on with their journey, their lives? Then there was the guy who had been trapped in his bunk for three hours, but came out “smiling and neatly dressed in a summer suit, but without socks. He apparently spent his time dressing and packing his luggage while waiting to be freed.”
How dare this sockless luggage-packer smile while my father was lying dead a few hundred feet away! Was it a triumph of human spirit in adversity, a little comic relief amid the carnage? I couldn’t see the funny side, and blew my nose into a sheet of crumpled photocopy paper. I got a print-out of the page, stuffed it into my pocket and took the train home to Queens, wondering if, well, if it hurt, and if Dad’s lovely face — he looked a bit like Perry Como, a bit like Gene Kelly — was all smashed up. I wondered if people read the report while eating their cornflakes and thought, “Ah well, only two dead, that’s not so bad,” before thinking about nipping out to the shops.
But what is the alternative? Would I rather that strangers weep at the death of a person who had nothing to do with them? When you cry at the death of people you don’t know, it somehow cheapens the grief of those who are really grieving.
So yeah, I welled up a bit for the casualties in Berkshire, (which I read about on a train) and I feel my personal history allows me to get slightly more sad than the woman next to me who tut-tuts about the crash but then turns the page to read about a transvestite beauty contest in her newspaper.
And then, in a move I hope my father would have approved of, I rejoin the land of the living, like the guy without socks, and look at photographs of men putting on eyeliner. Life goes on.
