UK - A lasting sense of guilt

[John Ashworth]

A lasting sense of guilt


On a dark, stormy night almost 60 years ago, two boys crossed the railway tracks as the Edinburgh express, its lamps blown out by the wind, appeared from nowhere. Howard Temperley recalls the fateful night that ended in his friend's death

Monday October 15, 2007
The Guardian

As in some old black-and-white film, I can remember every freeze-framed detail - wet Tarmac, telegraph poles, our leaning against the gale, the surrounding darkness, Eric holding the crossing gate as I went through, and the train that came from nowhere, a sudden roaring, glittering apparition that in a second was gone - and then the silence, the empty road stretching ahead, the empty track down which the train had disappeared, and Eric vanished.

It was December 1949 and I was 17. I had known Eric for nine years. As wartime evacuees we had lived in the same hostel when our school, the Newcastle Royal Grammar, moved to Penrith in the Lake District. Readjusting to life in the urban north-east on our return proved difficult. "Shades of the prison house," Wordsworth wrote, "begin to close upon the growing boy."

They certainly seemed to be closing in on me. I yearned for the Lakes as much as I had yearned for home when I was first evacuated.

Still, I kept up with Eric and when I visited we would go shooting over the fields. Eric's family, the Irwins, farmed in Ponteland in the countryside outside Newcastle. His father, a notable sportsman, owned a good selection of shotguns and a punt house on the foreshore north of Banburgh, opposite Holy Island. So when, at the age of 15, I had saved up enough for a shotgun of my own, I took to joining Eric and his brothers up there at weekends.

Food was short in those days and game a useful addition to the national diet, so neither guns nor shooting had the connotations they have now. My travelling on trains and buses with a shotgun aroused no alarm. It became our regular practice on Fridays to drop off our clobber at Newcastle's bus station, catch a bus after school and be out on the mud flats by 9pm.

On this particular weekend I had caught the bus as usual, got off at the Fenwick junction, crossed the railway line and cut across the fields to the punt house. After two years it had all become so familiar that I did not need a torch. Eric had got there a couple of hours earlier and had the stove already lit. He had left school a year before and begun farming; I was just beginning sixth form.

An easterly gale blew up, making the birds fly low. We were awakened at around 2am by the sound of graylag geese in the nearby creek, but they must have heard us moving about because they took off before we got the door open. Hoping that they would return the next night, we decided to stay on an extra day.

Again the same thing happened, only this time we took more care. By the sound of it there were even more geese than the night before. As we crawled out of the door and along the foreshore, more and more kept coming in.

Between us we got six and the next day another came in on the tide. It was the largest bag we had ever made. So it was that, heavily laden, tired and hungry we set off for the bus stop shortly after dark on the Monday evening.

After the train had passed I expected to hear Eric yelling that I'd better watch out or I'd get myself killed, but there was no voice, just an eerie silence. I walked a hundred yards down the track and there was nothing. A man came by to whom I told my story, who pushed his bicycle through the gates and rode away. At the cottage, the keeper, Ma Schooler, came shuffling to the door. She said the storm had brought down the telephone lines and I'd need to go to the signal box.

Down the track, further than I could have imagined, there lay a goose and then other scattered objects that I couldn't properly see. Finally, a good quarter of a mile from the crossing, there was a pale shapeless object that I took to be Eric, or what remained of him, tied up in his fisherman's knit pullover. It had a dream-like quality, as if I were a spectator as well as a participant in the events that were occurring. Averting my eyes, I walked on.

In all that dreary wilderness there was not a light to be seen until, beyond a wood, there appeared a tiny golden cube that seemed magically suspended in air. Having climbed the wooden stairs and pushed open the door, I was met by a thick fug of pipe smoke, rows of levers, a glowing stove and a signalman with his feet up reading the paper.

Then things began to happen. The Edinburgh express was stopped. A bunch of jolly railwaymen appeared. And off we set, they in oilskins, flashing torches, me leading the way, not looking where they played their beams.

Leaving them to their gruesome task, I made my way back to the cottage to find the police already there. What was my occupation? Why wasn't I at school? Did our parents know where we were? Then in barged the jolly railwaymen wanting cups of tea. There was a hand they had not been able to find but it would turn up in the morning. Their jolliness did not strike me as strange; at least, no stranger than all the other things that were happening around me. Having satisfied themselves that it was all straightforward, the police let me go. So I found myself standing alone at the side of what was then the Great North Road, now the A1, waiting for the bus Eric and I had been hurrying to catch three hours earlier.

At Newcastle station a man bought one of the geese I was carrying, saying it would do for his Christmas dinner. It was midnight by the time I got in. All the way home my one thought had been that I would have to inform Eric's family. So I headed for the telephone box at the end of the street. It turned out the police had told them Eric was dead, but not how it had happened. I reassured them that his death had been instantaneous, then sat for a while with Mother, ate some cereal, had a bath and went to bed.

My own apparent calm still strikes me as a little eerie. Maybe I was in a state of shock; perhaps, too, my years as an evacuee had taught me to conceal my feelings. Left to their own devices, boys will pick on weaklings in much the same way flocks of birds do. So, at the age of eight, finding myself the youngest in a hostel where supervision was lax and bullying rife, I had set about proving I was not a weakling by performing acts of daring - jumping out of windows, climbing trees and, on one memorable occasion, sticking a spoon into a broken light switch. I became tough as whipcord and with an iron determination never to weep, admit to homesickness or otherwise suggest that I was anything but the brave little boy I appeared.

The circumstances leading up to Eric's death were all gone over at the inquest - the stormy night, the trouble with the signal lamps (oil lamps on the front of a London express). Before the proceedings started a man came up to me in great agitation - the train driver, it transpired. Why he was so profusely apologetic I couldn't understand given that what happened was no more his responsibility than that of the passengers in the carriages behind. I was continually surprised at the way others regarded what had happened as more extraordinary than I did. But what continued to haunt me was my failure to stand up and denounce British Rail: the oil lamps having blown out, there were no lights at all on the front of that train, nor, in that gale, was there any sound as it bore down on us at some 100mph.

And so I was left with a sense of guilt at not having done what the occasion required of me. By the time of the inquest, the wildfowl season was at an end. I never saw or heard from the Irwins again. I doubted they would want to be reminded of me. Looking back on those postwar years I see myself as forever trying to recapture the freedom I had enjoyed as a boy in the Lakes. In mourning for the world I had lost, I took to drawing pictures. The one reproduced here is of Ma Schooler's cottage and the level crossing, and catches something of my feelings about the grim event that occurred there.

That Eric died and I survived, that he held the gate for me rather than I for him, was pure chance. I have often reflected on what the consequences would have been for all the people my life has touched, and doubtless his life would have touched, had it been the other way around. Thinking back to that winter's night of 60 years ago, it is not just that hurtling mass of steam and metal that comes to mind but what went before and came after: the fumbled lock, the pause at the stile to catch breath, the broken bootlace, all the circumstances leading up to that fatal conjunction of metal and flesh; and then the ripples spreading outward, the woman Eric didn't marry, the children he didn't have, the house where someone else is living.

· Howard Temperley is an emeritus professor of history at the University of East Anglia.