by Tim Pears
Table of Contents
Also by Tim Pears
Title Page
Dedication
Part One - Hold
Collision Investigator’s Report
1. THE CASE
2. THE LOCATION
3. THE INCIDENT
4. PHOTOS
5. THE CLAIM
6. ANALYSIS & OPINION
The Hill
Consciousness of a Lost Limb
The Burrows
Fingers
Snow
www.fatherforum.co.uk/casestudies
Part Two - Abandon
he cometh up, and is cut down
i am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were
i will take heed to my ways; that i offend not in my tongue
take thy plague away from me
though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i will fear no evil
hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling; hold not thy ...
o spare me a little, that i may recover my strength; before i go hence, and be ...
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
Also by Tim Pears
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
In a Land of Plenty
A Revolution of the Sun
Wake Up
Blenheim Orchard
For Gabriel and Zosia
Part One
Hold
Collision Investigator’s Report
On Friday 18 June 1996 I attended the scene of this incident on Fielding Avenue, Selly Oak, Birmingham, as part of my overall analysis. During my attendance I took various measurements and a series of digital photographs using a Kodak DC40 camera.
1. THE CASE
1.1 The collision occurred at 8.03 p.m. on Saturday 4 April 1996, between a 1989 green Peugeot 205 Look, 4 cylinder, 1124 cc, petrol driven, manual 3-door hatchback car, driven by the Defendant, and a 1995 white Volvo FL7 Hook loader, multi-axle, rigid body, 32-ton skip lorry, driven by the Claimant.
1.2 The Claimant in this civil action is the Defendant in the criminal case concerning the same incident brought by the Crown Prosecution Service.
2. THE LOCATION
2.1 The location of the incident is a dual carriageway urban road. When travelling west on the immediate approach to the collision scene the westbound carriageway is straight and flat, and consists of two lanes initially separated from the opposing carriageway by broken white lines leading to a central reservation which forms part of a pelican crossing.
2.2 The road is subject to a 40 mph speed limit on the approaches and throughout the scene, as clearly indicated by speed restriction signs.
2.3 Street lighting is present at the collision scene and consists of intermittent pole-mounted overhead sodium lamps on both sides of the road.
2.4 The pelican crossing consists of three pole-mounted traffic signals for each direction of travel: one directly facing traffic on the near side of the road and two facing traffic from the central reservation.
2.5 Pole-mounted green and red man signals are also provided on each side of the crossing, indicating for pedestrian use. All the traffic lights work in a standard sequence.
2.6 At the crossing the road bears an overall width of 10.2 m. Each crossing point on both sides of the road consists of a dropped kerb and tactile pavers. Pedestrian-operated demand buttons are present on the four signal poles at each corner of the crossing.
2.7 The crossing is preceded by a 17.3m zigzag zone leading up to a solid white ‘Stop’ line, a gap of 2.7 m, and then a line of studs delineating the crossing zone.
3. THE INCIDENT
3.1 It is agreed by those involved and by witnesses that the two vehicles involved in the collision were the only vehicles on the westbound carriageway in the immediate vicinity. Both were in the nearside lane, the car in front of the lorry.
3.2 At the time of the incident it was dark. The weather is described as fine and clear, although there is conflicting witness evidence regarding whether the road surface was wet or dry. According to the witness evidence, both front headlights of both the Peugeot 205 car and the Volvo lorry were displayed at the time of the incident.
3.3 The Claimant asserts that as the car, driven by the Defendant, approached the crossing, the traffic signals changed from red to green in its favour. He asserts that the car then began to accelerate towards the crossing, acting upon the reasonable assumption that the traffic signal would remain green until well after it had crossed. The Claimant also began to accelerate the lorry.
3.4 The Claimant asserts that as the car approached the pelican crossing it suddenly and without warning braked violently, and its wheels spun. The car slewed 90 degrees and came to an abrupt halt facing south across both lanes of the westbound carriageway in the middle of the pelican crossing.
3.5 The Claimant applied the brakes to his lorry but there was insufficient time or distance for the lorry to stop before colliding with the car. The front of the lorry collided with the passenger side of the car. The car was shunted for a distance of some twenty metres along the carriageway before both vehicles came to a stop.
3.6 This version of events is corroborated by the witness evidence of Mrs H, a cyclist who was positioned on the central reservation. She had crossed the eastbound dual carriageway of the crossing and was waiting to cross the westbound dual carriageway at the time of the incident.
3.7 This version of events is corroborated also by the witness evidence of Mr R, a pedestrian who had just crossed the westbound road at the pelican crossing from north to south. He had begun walking east along the pavement away from the crossing. His attention was drawn by the sound of the Peugeot’s tyres squealing upon braking and he turned in time to see the collision. It was Mr R who telephoned for the Accident & Emergency services on his mobile telephone.
4. PHOTOS
Views westbound along Fielding Avenue towards the scene of the accident.
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
5. THE CLAIM
5.1 It is the Claimant’s contention that in braking so hard without reason or warning the Defendant invited the collision and was wholly responsible for it. The Claimant has never denied accelerating as he approached the pelican crossing, a course of action wholly reasonable given the traffic signal had just changed from red to green.
5.2 The Defendant has said that he braked to avoid hitting a brown mongrel dog that was crossing the road at the pelican crossing from north to south. He says that he was unable to avoid impact, catching the dog with the nearside of his front bumper, which impact he believes was responsible for his vehicle spinning round. Witness Mr R has said that he thinks he might have heard the sound of an impact before the car came to a halt, and before the lorry hit it, which could have been the sound of a dog being struck. Neither witness saw a dog. Nor did the Claimant.
5.3 Traces of brown canine hair and blood were found on the Peugeot front bumper. They have not been definitively dated to the time of the accident.
5.4 The fatality occurred to the passenger of the Peugeot. The driver of the Peugeot – the Defendant in this case – was taken by ambulance to hospital having suffered serious though not life-threatening injury.
5.5 The Claimant was hospitalised for one month after the accident. He has been unable to work since and although his appeal is pending he has no prospect of resuming driving work in the foreseeable future. He is seeking compensation for damage to health and loss of earnings.
6. ANALYSIS & OPINION
6.1 Accepting the location has remained unaltered, there is no other physical evidence at the location from which to determine the exact series of events as they unfolded.
6.2 Having analysed polic
e records and attended the scene of the accident it is this investigator’s assessment that at the moment of impact the Peugeot was indeed stationary and skewed across the carriageway, and the lorry was travelling at approximately thirty-eight miles per hour.
6.3 Regardless of the question of its admissibility as justification for the accident, the Defendant’s claim that he braked to avoid a dog crossing the road is not, in this investigator’s assessment, proven. No blood was found on the road or pavement. More pertinently, in particular regard to Mrs H, who was perfectly positioned to have seen such, no witness saw this dog.
6.4 In my opinion a collision between a car and a dog would not account for the car slewing upon such forceful braking. More likely reasons would be an involuntary touch on the steering wheel by the driver or an error in the steering mechanism or wheel balance of the vehicle.
6.5 It is my belief that in all probability there was no dog, and that the canine hair and blood found on the Peugeot bumper resulted from an earlier incident.
The Hill
They walked across the fields up high above the farm, Owen half-trotting to keep up with his grandfather. The old man would periodically stop in his tracks. Owen learned not to walk behind him, for he’d ram straight into his hard back, but to keep off his left shoulder and then his grandfather would put out his left arm to stay the boy, and they’d stand on the hill. Owen would glance up to gauge the direction in which his grandfather was looking, or perhaps listening, ear or eye cocked that way. He might nod for the boy, and Owen peer with his eleven-year-old eyes.
‘Fox,’ Grandpa would say. ‘Buzzard.’ Never more. Owen then had to find it for himself. ‘Woodcock.’ A shadow flitting amongst the trees; a russet blur in the grass, melting into cover.
They walked up towards Lan Fawr then cut right and down the bank behind the ruin. In the pocket of his jacket Owen could feel the animal, entrusted to him for the first time, bumping softly against his hip. Three days earlier he had borrowed needle and thread off his grandmother and sewn two buttons on the pocket, cut eyes in the flap and stitched their edges to stop the fabric tearing further open. The animal, he believed, was excited as he himself was. This morning he thought when he was fussing her that she knew what day of the week it was: Saturday. When Grandpa came in from work Grandma stood out of his way, watched him gobble his lunch. In the shed he found Owen had laid out equipment: lines, wires, nets, pegs. Grandpa discarded snares and mesh, took up a shovel.
Now he stopped and thrust the shovel into the earth, as if to send tremors underground, fair warning, we’re here to have you. Said nothing to the boy, it was clear enough. Grandpa clambered across the bank, taking a small purse net from his pocket, spreading it loose across a hole of the burrow. Satisfied he’d found them all when he’d covered five, he came to Owen, who lifted the ferret from his pocket and held it fast around the neck and chest while his grandfather attached its string muzzle. Then, this time, instead of taking the animal himself, Grandpa stood back.
One hole he’d left uncovered. Owen set the ferret there. She sniffed, then turned away lifting her nose, testing the air as if some distant scent, the rumour of some unheard of exotic prey might see her dash away. Her white albino fur trembled with bloodlust and nerves, she turned back to the hole, then after a moment’s further ponder and a shiver of momentary distaste, she slithered into the black earth. Grandpa set a new net across the hole, stood back, then changed his mind, stepped forward, took a handful of loose soil from below the entry and rubbed it into the net, darkening the new string. As he did so the ferret reappeared at the mouth of the hole. While she hesitated, peering around with her bright blind red eyes, confused by the brevity of the game or by her own stupidity, Owen came up and took her and set her back to the hole, into which she once more disappeared.
The old man stood back from the bank; Owen beside him felt his grandfather’s big rough hand on his chest, over his heart, as if not just to keep him from moving forward but to calm him too. Owen cast down his eyes. A labourer’s hand, fingers flattened, skin thickened and knotted, hands half as large again as unworked ones. Yellowed nails. Calluses. The knuckles were bony misshapen arthritic protrusions. His grandfather’s hands were no longer delicate flesh and blood like Owen’s own, they were heavy tools on the end of his arms, they’d accrued inorganic matter like barnacles, or like the horns of a ram. The dark soil with which he’d just dirtied the string on the new net marked his fingers, but even when he’d wash his hands before a meal the lines still showed up, ingrained with oil and mud and creosote, with tar and paint and the shit of the five hundred ewes scattered across these hills.
When he judged the boy was still enough, steady, Grandpa let his hand fall to his own side. They waited. Owen stared at the bank, the focus of his attention shifting from one to another of the half-dozen purse nets, his ears pricked. He became aware of the tiniest movement of grains of soil subsiding, of a blade of grass, flattened by his grandfather’s footstep, springing back to an upright position. He became aware of how blue the sky above them was. A crow flew overhead and he could have sworn it was not black but purple. Closer by, a bevy of starlings veered across the sky, metallic plumage flashing in the sun. He heard a liquid sibilant seep, seep, and though he looked and saw nothing he recognised a yellowhammer by its flight-note song. He turned to tell his grandfather, but was baulked from doing so: the old man – some way yet from sixty, in truth, but ancient to the boy – stood just as he had many minutes before, focused as a dog on point.
Owen was certain his grandfather had neither seen nor heard any of the things to which his own attention had strayed. Ashamed, he once again stared at the nets strewn across the bank. Presently his grandfather stirred, stepping quietly, daintily almost, despite his bulk, and reaching the bank he lay with his ear to one of the holes. Owen copied him, tiptoeing forward, bending down and listening at another. He could hear nothing. Perhaps this rabbit warren connected to fissures in the rock, to hidden potholes, deep subterranean tunnels along which the ferret was slithering like an eel in pitch darkness, down, down, after the scent of whatever creatures inhabited the centre of the earth. No. It was his mind, not the animal, that was wandering beneath the ground.
The old man stood up, stepped back. Owen assumed his position beside him. Grandpa had not said a word since before they left the house. Owen wondered what he was thinking as he stood there, patient, alert. The boy understood that his grandfather thought about nothing, that his mind was placid like water, still as the pool in the plantation up by The Bog, dark and oddly ominous, but Owen wondered how he could sustain or even stand it. Had he trained himself, or was this trance a natural state? Did his grandfather not experience tedium? Did his mind not wish to stray, to fill itself with thoughts of other things? Speculation such as this?
Owen was jolted by sounds. Bumps. Coming from the bank, dull thuds, as if furniture were being clumsily shifted inside the burrows, and then a rush and flurry and one of the nets came alive, bursting away from the bank. It rolled over and over, showing brown and white fur inside as it slowed. But even before the rabbit broke Owen had seen his grandfather move towards that particular hole. Owen remembered that between his own splayed hands he held a fresh net at the ready, and he advanced to cover the hole while his grandfather fell upon the full net: he broke the doe’s neck with a chop of the side of his hand.
Now the rabbits came tumbling out of their burrows and the man and boy had to move fast, killing or replacing a net as it fell to either of them to do so. Owen at eleven was not yet sufficiently strong or more likely decisive enough to use his grandfather’s method: he had to hold a rabbit’s hindquarters and neck and break its spine like a stick over his bent knee. The noise was all human: their footsteps, and rustling clothes, and gasping breath. When he found a big old buck in a net close by he called, ‘Grandpa!’ and the old man was over in three strides and took care of it himself.
And then they found themselves standing by, breathing hard in a silen
ce and stillness that had returned more acute than before. Eleven carcasses lay strewn around their feet: the dogs’ meat for a week. Owen gathered them up, tied them by their hind legs in two clutches. His grandfather checked the nets for the ferret’s emergence then sat on a tussock away from the bank and rolled a thick cigarette.
‘Rarely hear a rabbit squeal,’ he said. He lit the cigarette. ‘Hare will always squeal when it’s caught, see. Horrible sound.’ Owen caught whiffs of the smoke, which wafted in lazy drifts in the still afternoon. ‘Anyhow, be needing a lurcher you want to catch hares, and I’ve enough to think of with the collies.’ He frowned. ‘Not that I’ve seen a hare hereabouts in a year or two.’
The old man was never as loquacious as after a kill, something about it freed his penned-in personality.
‘Need a gun, too, like,’ he said, spitting a strand of loose tobacco onto the grass. A freedom about him, a disdain. There was a gun in a cupboard in the cottage, a twelve-bore shotgun that was never used but which Owen gazed at and sometimes touched when his grandparents were busy, drawn to an occult power he sensed it had. He didn’t know why his grandfather despised guns. It might have been their intrusion upon the silence he preferred.
‘Once had a ferret running the burrows,’ he said. ‘Out flies this creature. Rabbit? No. Brown owl. Must have laid its eggs in there. Nicely tangled up in the net. Let it go and up it went.’ Tilting his flat palm, he raised his arm. ‘Whoosh.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Come on, boy. Better us do something.’
‘Is it blocked?’ Owen asked.
