After the pain, comes the fury

Nina Bawden looks a bit sad and small in her big and beautiful family home in Islington. She may well be surrounded by lots of friends and family and Michael, the American lodger, but, having just turned 79, she should not by rights be here at all.

"Austen and I were so looking forward to travelling and having fun," she says. "We should have been in Australia now seeing my stepdaughter but ..."
Austen Kark, former head of the World Service and Bawden's husband of 48 years, is dead. He was 75 years old when he died in May 2002 in the Potters Bar rail crash.

He and his wife, a former Booker Prize winner whose most famous book is Carrie's War, written for older children about an evacuee, were on their way to a friend's party in Cambridge.

"We never usually travel first class," says Bawden, "but we did that day as a treat. We sat down and opened the newspapers and that is the last thing I remember."

She woke up a long time later in Barnet General Hospital. So many bones in her body were broken that she thought she'd never walk again. "My left ankle was shattered in pieces," she says. "I had a haemotoma the size of a grapefruit in the other. My right arm had gone a wonderful shade of deep purple. My clavicle was broken. I could hardly breathe or talk. All my children were there standing around me. They thought I was going to die. At the time they all knew Austen was dead. When someone told me, I didn't believe them. In a way, I still don't."

But Nina Bawden is made of stern stuff. She didn't die or fade away or get lost in terrifying grief. Inch by inch she painstakingly got better. "I've never given in," she says. "I've always been strong and opinionated. I have my own views and I do not like to be defeated by anything."

She may have been physically incapacitated but she's as sharp as a pin. Which may be why she's suddenly found herself as a bit of a spokesman for rail survivors.

"It's just that I feel so angry,'' she says. ''It's not as if Austen was sick and I could say goodbye to him. He was ripped from me in a totally unexpected way. I couldn't tell him goodbye. I couldn't ask him where the key to the cabinet was. Little things like that."

Part of the reason she has become so vocal is that, as she puts it, "I am in the unique position of being both bereaved and survivor at the same time." In this capacity, a couple of weeks ago she, and other members of the Potters Bar crash in which seven died and 70 were injured, went to the National Theatre to see Sir David Hare's drama The Permanent Way, which is based on the testimony of train crash survivors.

"It's a marvellous play," says Bawden. "It's not so much about the politics of the railways as about what it actually feels like to be involved in a crash, to lose your husband, your mother, your child. It's about everything - why corporate business takes no interest in us small, private people with our loss and grief. The play is all in our own words. I think mine are the last three pages. What's remarkable is how David has knitted everything together."

What's also remarkable is that Bawden managed to sit through it. "I had been told there was a very lifelike, simulated crash sequence in the play. I had read the script and was mentally prepared for it. Still, it was very painful and moving. I sat near the exit in case I needed a quick getaway but I coped. It moved me beyond words to watch it."

It is probably hard for Bawden to cry in public; she is so elegant, refined and dignified. She insists on going up and down the stairs even though her legs and hips hurt. She offers to make tea but can't carry a tray because she has a huge pin in her left arm. Physically, mentally, life will never be the same for her again. Despite the fact she has tucked away the photographs of herself and Austen in a chest of drawers, she obviously misses him. It is hard for her to talk, though she bravely tells me how her late husband died.

"The gaps were filled in for me by a man called Martin Rose, an RAF Squadron Leader, who was also in the carriage with us. He told me that when the train derailed I was flung into one end of the train and Austen was flying through the air towards the other. Mr Rose clung on to the baggage rail and hoisted himself up to avoid Austen. As soon as he could he went to help him but my husband was dead so he came to help me and talked to me. He says I was conscious, although I cannot remember it. He saved my life."

Yet there may be people who wished he hadn't. For Nina Bawden has turned out, thank goodness, to be a pain in the neck for those she holds responsible. At the moment, she is, finally, writing down everything she can remember.

"I'm naming names. I'm saying what happened. I'm outing those responsible." But, more than that, she is relieved she can finally write again.

For the last year and a half, she says, she was too physically and mentally nervous to attempt to write.

"It was impossible for me," she says. "I couldn't concentrate. It was so painful for me. I was in the middle of a children's story when the crash happened. But after the crash I couldn't write any more. I've written over 40 books. It's my job, but I was incapable of doing anything."

It's all changed now though. She's writing again for two hours a day, which is all she can manage. "My book's called Dear Austen. It's everything I want to tell him; how horrific everything has been since he died. How terribly we all miss him. How we have all struggled so badly but, most of all, how atrociously and wickedly we've been treated. I started writing it out of the blue. I suddenly realised that I couldn't finish the children's book and that, instead, I must write everything down for Austen's sake really."

Along with the other members of the Potters Bar Claimant group and her own lawyer Louise Christian, Bowden has been pursuing everybody for the right for compensation. "We can't even get legal aid," she says, "because you can only get it if accidents of a physical nature are due to a catastrophe or a disaster. What is Potters Bar supposed to be?" She says at first she wasn't angry but then the better she got, physically and mentally, the more angry she became. "I thought about what had happened and why it happened. I heard other people's stories and it made me so cross. It made me cross the way it's changed my life. I used to be gregarious. Now I find it hard to be with large groups of people. Conversely I get very lonely by myself. But all this campaigning takes up most of my time."

Primarily, she holds Jarvis, the contractor designated for looking after the track, responsible. "They said it was sabotage but by whom? What? Did Osama bin Laden decide to come and derail a train there? Did aliens come down and loosen the points?

"We have never been given any explanation as to what this sabotage is." Next, she would like to see Railtrack also pay out compensation. "To be fair, Railtrack has paid out some money. They paid for me to get taxis to and from my physiotherapy sessions because I can't drive any more. But there are people who need more than that.

"No one seems to be able to say sorry. This was a disaster. People died. Scarred for life: novelist Nina Bawden, who partly lost the use of her left arm and suffered multiple injuries in the tragedy

Others had their lives ruined. It is shameful how we have been treated."

The Government do not come off lightly either. "Like all governments since the war, Blair's never given priority to the railways, which is why we are in such a maladroit state. Alistair Darling is useless. My MP, Chris Smith, has been wonderful but no one else wants to listen. There should be a public enquiry about this but there is nothing. I had been a Labour Party member for 60 years. I cut my card up in four neat pieces and sent it back to the party with a long letter explaining why I felt so disillusioned. I expected some sort of reply from them? Do you know what I got? Nothing."

Then, before I leave, she shows me a photograph taken the last summer she and her husband were together. They look tanned and relaxed. "This is us in Greece," she says smiling. Then her face clouds over again.

"I was supposed to have these years with my husband. Instead I am studying books about railway-points systems. I should not be doing this. It should never have happened. My husband was killed by people who were not doing their job properly and I am not going to give up and be quiet and go away."