Dear Austen
Reading my instructions for the Cheltenham Literature Festival this October, I remembered my last visit in 2001. On the train back to London, in a first class carriage (the publisher was paying), I sat alongside Nina Bawden and Austen Kark. It was their familiar way of travelling: they had senior railcards and were comfortably off. They spread their books and newspapers on the table between them. Their devotion to each other was easy to read. It was of the sort that decades of loving kindness brings.
He faced the engine. She was wearing red shoes with a pointed heel and black fishnet tights. Though in her seventies she was still beautiful. For some reason I mentioned the World Service as a boon for insomniacs. I hadn’t known that for years he’d been director of it. They spoke of their apartment in Nauplion and how she liked writing there. He showed me his book Attic in Greece. He’d endured bouts of hospital treatment – as had I. I foraged for teas from the buffet car. A running gag punctuated the journey - the inspector couldn’t work his ticket machine. He kept coming back and saying Maybe this time.
When I got home I ordered Nina Bawden’s novel Ruffian on the Stair. I thought of them both on and off. It had been one of those pleasant, life-enhancing encounters that make travel worthwhile.
The following year, on 10 May 2002 they got the 12.45 train to Cambridge from King’s Cross. They were going to a friend’s birthday party.
Next day, returning from Devon, I stopped for coffee on the A303 at a Little Chef. Part of the obligatory ghastliness was a free copy of the Daily Mail. I cried out when I read of his death and her serious injury in the train crash at Potters Bar. In my mind’s eye I saw them again - the comfortable carriage, newspapers and books spread between them, their loving familiarity.
Months later I heard Nina Bawden twice on radio news. She corrected the interviewer who spoke of her losing her husband. I didn’t lose my husband, she said. He was killed. In another interview I heard her say My husband was a conscientious man, he was killed by someone who was not conscientious.
I didn’t see David Hare’s play The Permanent Way about the privatisation of the railways. It was 75 per cent verbatim and Nina Bawden’s was the main voice in it. Nor have I read her book Dear Austen ‘a letter to my husband who was killed in the train crash at Potter’s Bar on 10 May 2002, to tell him what happened both then and afterwards…’ I’ll read them both when the sick feeling’s gone. I do wonder about it though – the elision between carelessness, incompetence, greed, immorality and crime. The unacceptable face of capitalism? Loose nuts on the points 2182A – and not only there it would seem. Insufficient maintenance, no proper inspection, no one at Jarvis taking responsibility. Not my job, cut the costs, up the profit, take the money and get home quick.