For Death Comes Softly

Fifteen

The scenes below us on the island were horrendous, yet at first none of us really reacted. There was total silence in the chopper apart from the roar of the engines. Then Clem began to scream. She uttered no words. Just an almost inhuman cry of terrible anguish. Her husband Brian and her five-year-old son Luke were both somewhere in the mayhem below. So was our mother. So was Robin and his brother James. So were so many friends and relatives. All I felt was a kind of numbness. I did not try to comfort her. How could I? I was myself far too shocked.

Suddenly the carnage seemed to grow more distant and I became aware that we were rising upwards, Eddie Brown was steering the helicopter up and away from the island.

I rounded on him. My sister was not the only one close to hysteria.

‘No, no, go down, we’ve got to go down,’ I shouted.

Eddie was almost unnaturally calm, his training had taken over, I suppose. He had only one consideration, which he quickly made clear, the safety of his craft and his passengers.

‘I can’t, Rose, it wouldn’t be safe,’ he said in a completely expressionless voice.

The helicopter continued to rise and suddenly Clem too became aware that we were going up. She lunged at Eddie, pulling and pushing his arms, even trying to grab the controls.

‘What do you think you’re doing, you bastard,’ she screamed at him. ‘My child is down there, my child.’

Eddie was a strong fit man, a professional quite intent on his task. Clem, about my size, was no match for him. He fended her off with one arm, continuing to pilot the aircraft with the other.

Abruptly Clem changed tack. She threw herself sideways and started trying to wrench the door open, using her feet against the wall of the cockpit as she pulled fruitlessly at the handle.

‘My son, my son,’ she wailed.

We were 100 feet or so above the ground, yet I had no doubt that, had she been able to open the door, she would have jumped, so desperate was she with panic and grief. Even at that moment, though, I knew that she could not do so. While we were in the air the door was sealed and electronically controlled. Only Eddie could open or close it.

We rose further and further into the air and began to swing around, away from the island. I had been leaning forward, peering out through the windows at the awful scenes below. Eventually I slumped back into my seat, quite defeated. Young Ruth had not moved. She remained perfectly still and her face was deathly white. It was almost as if she had gone into a trance. Somewhere in the distance I could hear Eddie on the radio. He was the only one of us who was functioning.

‘Mayday, Mayday,’ he repeated in his solid calm voice, and proceeded to give a brief, lucid and factual account of what was happening on Abri. ‘It looks like an earthquake,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. The ground is just breaking up, people are being swallowed into the earth...’

Strange really, but it was his controlled voice — and I learned later that it was in fact Eddie’s radio call which gave the first news of the accident to the mainland and sent the emergency services scurrying into action — which added the final grim reality.

My sister was still clawing at the door, whimpering now rather than screaming. Maude leaned forward from her seat at the back of the cockpit and put one hand on Clem’s shoulder, muttering words of comfort. It was the first time I had heard Maude speak since the disaster had happened below us. I had almost forgotten she was there. Robin’s mother. A woman whose two sons were both somewhere on the devastated island. I glanced back at her. She was still wearing the big brown hat with the veil. The little I could see of her face was dead white.

Eventually Clem, even in her distraught craziness, began to realise the hopelessness of what she was doing. She fell back from the door as abruptly as she had thrown herself at it, and collapsed in a heap on the cockpit floor.

I was unable to comfort her. As a senior police officer, I had already seen more than my share of death in my time, but never never anything like this. Almost everyone I cared for in the world was down there on Abri. I felt sobs begin to rack my body. I thought my heart was going to break. My dream had become a nightmare.

Clem seemed to be half out of her mind. Overcome with nausea she began to be sick, making no attempt to control her urging. Vomit poured out of her over the floor of the chopper. Roger had reached out now for Maude and was cradling her in his arms. Maude took off the big hat, put it in her lap and sat looking at it. There was no hysteria from either of these two — I would have expected none — but the pain in her eyes was terrible to see.

Ruth was still staring trance-like into the middle distance. I continued to sob pathetically. Eddie continued to do what he did best. Fly his helicopter. He also talked ceaselessly into the radio. I became vaguely aware that he had announced his intention of taking us straight to the North Devon District Hospital at Barnstaple.

‘I have passengers on board in deep shock,’ I heard him say.

The return journey from Abri to virtually the closest part of the mainland from the island took only a few minutes. It felt like a lifetime. The helicopter landing pad at the North Devon hospital is just to the rear of the main building. I remember thinking obliquely that it was going to get a lot of use that day.

When we touched down Eddie switched off the engines, unlocked the doors, and turned his attention to his stricken passengers. Clem, still slumped on the floor, seemed superficially at least to be in the worst state. Eddie tried to help her to her feet, but she appeared to have no desire to stand up, nor indeed to move at all. Eventually he gave it up as a lost cause, and instead bent over, picked her up off the floor and carried her down the steps onto the hard Tarmac. Her vomit stained his pristine white jacket. The gold epaulettes gleamed in the sunshine. It was all so unreal. I grasped Ruth’s hand tightly and together we followed Eddie and Clem, with Roger and Maude just behind us.

There was quite a reception waiting for us. At least two photographers and a TV news team, from Westcountry TV, I later learned, did their best to overwhelm us. The press had apparently picked up the Mayday signal, and rushed to the hospital where Eddie had said over the air that he was heading. Looking back we must have been quite a sight, and manna from heaven for press photographers, not to mention TV — Eddie in his gold-braided Ruritania suit carrying the near comatose Clem in her blue satin dress, me in all my designer wedding dress glory holding the dazed Ruth by the hand, and Roger and Maude, in her six-inch heels, with her head held up high and her chin set, quite determined not to break down in public.

A reporter started firing questions at us and a uniformed police sergeant stepped forward to guide us into the ambulance which was waiting to take us to the hospital emergency reception area. I was still weeping and I could hardly see through my tears. All of us allowed ourselves, almost gratefully, to be clasped in the grasp of officialdom.

To my eternal shame all I could think about was Robin. My lover. My idol. The man I was to marry. Was he alive?