You mentioned emotions of shock, disbelief, anger, sadness. Did you feel any other emotions?

Disgust, hatred. I thought that the person that done it was vile, absolutely vile. Loneliness, isolation, complete loss, totally overwhelmed, the overwhelming feelings of what’s happened, and what’s happened to your mum, just it’s just absolute horror. Just you can feel it running through you, and your heart, you, get your adrenaline every time you think about what’s happened you get an adrenaline pumping through your body and anxiety and, there’s, there’s feelings I felt that I can’t even put into words to be honest, I can’t name them. I don’t know, I don’t know what, what I would call them.

So it physically affected you too, because you had this

Oh it does. You don’t want to eat, you just, I wanted to die. I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up, or I wanted to swap places and I wanted it to be me that it had happened to, and that my Mum was still here.

You can’t get away from yourself, or what you feel, but you feel like running and there’s nowhere to run to. You just want to run away and, you just want to make it go away and you can’t. it’s like being trapped in this, I don’t know, this big black dark empty mess. You can’t see an easy way out. You know it’s going to take years to see even a glimmer of light.

What did you fear the most? You said you were fearful?

I feared that the person, or persons would get off. That was the biggest fear.

That ultimately there wouldn’t be someone answerable for this terrible, terrible loss.

So what other emotions did you feel over those last years?

Well there have been times of anger of course.

Rage. I understand that to be a very normal emotion, what I realised quite quickly was that something had to be done with that rage. Those times when that anger and rage came to the fore, I needed to do something with it because it’s that element of the grief which is the most damaging, I believe. I believe that to be damaging in many ways, in the physical health sense, in the mental health sense, and most important was I needed to keep a grip otherwise the devastation would be greater for Westley’s brother and sister.

There were two main emotions that were very near the surface, and one was guilt and the other was anger. And the guilt was firstly, you know the very obvious guilt that at her time of need, that the moment of the accident on 21st June 2005 that I wasn’t there to meet her needs. But also that earlier on that same day, you know, when I was getting her out for school that morning, normally I would hug her, give her a wee kiss and make sure I’d said bye-bye properly, but on that particular morning her brother woke up early and as she was leaving the house I was attending to her brother, and it was just a very quick cheerio, or See you. And so I didn’t really even get to say bye-bye properly on that morning, and I never got to speak to her again.

And so guilt for that, and guilt that I’d, for every time that I’d shouted at her, guilt for times that I’d raised my voice with her, not because of anything particular that she had done, but because I was in a bad mood.

Things like that. And the other emotion was anger. Anger that because of the actions of another individual, and in fact the actions of three other individuals, you know the bus driver, the teacher and the lorry driver, that my daughter had lost her life. And, it’s not that I was wallowing in self pity thinking, Poor me, you know, look what lies ahead for me, it was the unfairness to Lauren because she was a wonderful child. She never gave me any cause for being anything but proud of her, she had a lovely nature, she was very loving, and very well behaved and because of the actions of others she didn’t get the life that she deserved. And there’s unfairness with regard to her brother as well, because her brother lost a wonderful sister, and is now an only child, and that has taken him down a different path.

How have your feelings changed, if they’ve changed at all? Are they just the same, or have they changed in any ways, and what other feelings have you had?

I think, I mean in that time I would say there’s probably not a day gone by when I haven’t thought of Mark.

So, the anger I suppose is under control, lets put it that way, it’s there, but I control it, it’s under control. I think as time’s gone on and I’ve met more people and you know the justice system and the politicians, I think my, my disillusioned by the system has grown. I have no faith, no faith in the system here at all, and I suppose at sometimes I have no faith in my fellow man really, but occasionally you meet someone, there are, there are people out there who are giving their all, you know trying to support someone, or trying to campaign, or trying to battle or whatever.

So in some ways I don’t know, I think possibly my disillusion has deepened, my anger, I wouldn’t say it’s lessened, it’s there, it’s in there, I just keep it bottled up, I keep it under control. Some days I feel life’s not worth living, other days you know I think I’ve got to go on and do something, so its, I take each day at a time really.

Anyway, I was suicidal, really suicidal. I was in a terrible state of shock and incomprehension. And couldn’t make sense of anything, and I really was in a desperate state for a long time. And two things were kind of turning points. I just felt that I was no longer the same person. I didn’t know why I was different because my brain was like a robot, I couldn’t think of anything. But I just knew that I wasn’t the same person anymore but didn’t know what I was, and it was like being a tiny child again. I didn’t know how to make sense of the world anymore. And then a friend, a very old friend said, Well you used to like art, so I’m going to take you to an art gallery, and see if you still like art So without knowing what we were going to do, she took me down to the Royal Academy and the exhibition at the time was of Botticelli’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I didn’t know anything about that either, but I walked to the top floor where it was and at the entrance to the exhibition there was a quote from the poem, The Divine Comed which said, Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood And I thought, So I’m not the first person to feel like this. I’ll go and watch this exhibition And I went back I think five more times, I went six times altogether to the same exhibition and again I didn’t know why. I knew that I was thinking about something but at the back of my head so I didn’t know what I was thinking about, but I knew I must be thinking about something so I just went with it and carried on looking.

And then one day I went out with a colleague from work, for a walk, and bumped into the lorry driver’s barrister, who I remembered from the court, and that was like an electric shock, it really was. I went home and I started crying, and I didn’t stop crying for three days, but at the end of those three days my mind was clear. It was like, you hear these stories about people suddenly remembering something, and it was like that, and at the end of those three days of crying I knew, I knew that my suicidal feelings were actually because I was very, very angry, and initially I turned that anger in on myself, and I’d blamed myself for the rubbish trial thinking that I’d been too naive, too trusting, and I blamed myself for everything that went wrong. But then gradually I started to realise it wasn’t me that was responsible for that, but also I realised that I was so angry at what had happened I wanted to change what had happened. I was not willing to just put up with all that rubbish, and I realised that through meeting other people and so on and talking to other people that a lot of other people had gone through similar experiences and that we could only change things if we were all together, fighting the same corner.

Did you feel angry at all?

Personally, I didn’t no. I always say that you know, even when I did my training as a counsellor, I was told that you know there are so many stages in grief, and one of them is, is anger, feeling angry and it’s been ten years, you know since his death, and I’ve never got to that stage, I’ve never experienced that stage. I never ever felt angry. I told you earlier on about the faith I had in God, and even then I wasn’t angry at him, I mean I just wanted to understand what did I miss, what did I miss here, because I wasn’t expecting this to happen to me, so I never ever experienced anger, and I know anger, and I’ve experienced anger in many, many ways in many, many experiences in the past, but during my brother’s death I was never angry. I was never angry.

How about have your feelings changed over the ten, over the years?

Well yeah my feelings have, have changed a lot. I don’t feel I’m shocked anymore. I was, I was greatly shocked at the beginning, hearing of his death, I was extremely shocked but that has gone, I’m no longer shocked. So that’s changed in me. I feel that I’m much more proactive with my life. I take more risks with more life. Before I was very, very a very complacent person really, I was someone who was just happy to have, you know, with my lot, really. I think since his, my brother’s death there’s a part of me that’s living for him as well.

There’s no doubt about that. I mean I can’t, I remember feeling a lot of shame about what had happened, a lot of shame about how I was feeling, I couldn’t look people in the eye. I couldn’t make eye contact with people.

Why did you feel ashamed?

Because I think that for me the feelings associated, you know I’ve had time to think about this, because it went on for quite a while, the feelings associated with being bereaved in such a way, and the grief it leaves, you know, the word is grief, but I mean it’s all sorts of different emotions involved with it, leave you feeling ugly, like really everything is ugly. Because you’ve lost everything, you know you’ve lost absolutely everything and I think, that kind of raw emotion is not presentable is it? Its not attractive to people, it’s not something that’s easily shared or witnessed, and I remember going out to Italy when we took Jon’s ashes back, and the, and the best man who was Italian out here, I don’t speak Italian, he doesn’t speak English, I saw him walking towards me and he had to prise my chin up off my chest, just to look at him, because I just didn’t want to look, I didn’t want him to see me, I just wanted to hide away.

But why would you feel shame? You felt people couldn’t share your grief, but?

Well shame and how raw it was, just it’s like, you just completely, it’s like your wearing your, your insides on your outside constantly.

And that wasn’t acceptable by other people?

I felt that it was too much for people really, it’s, it was too much for me, you know? Because it was almost like you’d, for me, you like you might wake up okay, well not okay, you might wake up and think, you know you might wake up and get up and get dressed, and then it’s almost like you walk through some space and you completely dissolve, do you know, your whole insides, you just feel physically sick, you feel completely out of control, you feel, I mean bereft is a you know, and Paul Rock whos an academic, I read some of his work years after and it says, Bereavement after homicide is a kind of terror for people. You know everything, everything you believe in, every kind of sense of safety you have is shattered and that’s how I felt, I felt I was in terror about it, so you, you’d get up and you’d get dressed and you’d get breakfast, and then you’d walk, it was almost like you walked through this air pocket where you feel the terror and you’re crying and you’re inconsolable and, your heart’s stopping, it’s almost like panic attacks all the time, and then you walk out the other side of it, and you watch telly, and you have a cuppa, you know, and you have conversations with people, and then you walk back through it again. You know, and that, that went on for years and years for me, you know it didn’t stop after six months or twelve months, or anything, I felt an enormous amount of ugliness about it.

So how are you over all this time? You told me about your terrible state of shock and not being able to sleep to start with.

Yes, that went on for a long time. I was completely, couldn’t sleep. I was drinking probably a couple of bottles of wine every night. I just could not get to sleep. It was horrendous. The first four months I became quite agoraphobic which anyone that knows me knows that’s not me, I’m a very, very sociable person. I hated any noise. I couldn’t stand the telly or the radio on. I couldn’t bear it, it was just unbelievable. So I just didn’t have any form of communication in the house at all. I couldn’t stand it. I wouldn’t go out shopping. I got palpitations all the time, especially in the morning when I woke up. My heart was fluttering. I used to think I was going to have a heart attack. It was just all these symptoms. And I just couldn’t sleep. The only way I could get to sleep was to have wine.

Oh dear.

And then I realised I was on the slippery slope really. And I thought this has got to stop. I need to get back to work. Ben died in the June so the girls were off all over summer. So I had like the rest of July, August, the beginning of September with the children. And then when they went back to school, I was lost really.

And that’s when I started to, to really feel it.

Can you describe any other feelings you had?

Reality had changed. The world had changed for me. It was just this does not happen, you know. it’s not normal. it’s reality, what’s happened? Why, why are people behaving like everything’s normal now when it’s clearly not? I just cried. I cried and cried and cried and cried and cried and I felt like I was made of tears. I cried, and self harmed which is I never thought I would ever do that. And now looking back, I can’t, I feel so sorry for myself that I felt that felt that bad. And I would never consider it again. And I’ve got a few little scars and you know, I don’t want to particularly show them to people.

And I’m sad that I’ve got them. But I’ve moved on and I’ve, I’ve let go that now.

But then very slowly I did begin to understand what had happened, and it had been, what had happened was there was a fault in the points, someone had, Railtrack insisted were, could have been sabotaged, which was a load of old rubbish as it was quite clear to everybody that it was these particular points that had been bad, had been badly aligned, and it was a matter of, as the health and safety executive that came said, It was a matter of piss-poor maintenance it’s a good phrase, Piss-poor maintenanc

But they still wouldn’t admit liability. And so for the two or three years after the crash I wasn’t doing what they call grieving I don’t think. I was on the rampage.

Was compensation paid by the rail company?

Compensation was, was, was eventually paid, decent, decent compensation I’m glad to say, I don’t know whetherthere were two women whose mother who was an old age pensioner and was killed walking under the bridge where the train went into it, and was killed by falling bricks, and they were told originally they would get nothing, because she wasn’t, she wasn’t supporting anyone. As if she was worth nothing. They said her life was worth nothing. But they did eventually admit liability to my great relief. And I think it was then I realised that Austen wasn’t coming back.

I, this is what happened to me after I’d realised that it had actually happened. I suppose I can, I had a kind of a breakdown. I haven’t been out of the house properly for for, since then. I’m frightened of leaving the house; I’m frightened of going into crowded places.