The Herione of Crundle Hill Bridge

Trying to remain defiant in the face of outright and blatant hatred is a terrifying prospect, especially when you’re eight years old. Mary dug her finger nails deep into the flesh of her pale forearms as she stood in the playground, opposite Alice Tuebrook.

The other girl had a preened flash of red hair, tied back into a neat bun and despite her almost angelic appearance, that hair underlined the angry fire burning bright inside her.

Mary was at the receiving end of one of Alice’ s hateful, withering looks, reducing her to a quivering wreck which she was, for once, determined to not betray. Mary did not wish to give Alice the usual satisfaction that she clearly garnered from these all too familiar encounters.

“Well” chimed Alice, regarding Mary with the same sneer that would have been better bestowed upon a mass murderer “we better see what the other girls think”.

This was a new tact for Alice to take, Mary thought, eying the other girls who played nearby.

“Come along!” commanded Alice in a loud, clear voice “we need to make a decision!”

Mary’s arms ached, screaming out almost as she contracted her muscles tighter, turning her stubbornly folded arms into a self-hug. Alice was getting back-up.

With a wave of her arm, Alice was surrounded by the other girls that she and Mary usually played with at break and lunch times.

There was a specific pecking order and Mary knew she was at the very bottom of it. Just being allowed to play with the posh girls, the clever girls – that had meant the world to her and had been more than enough. Going home at night with a proud smile on her face had defied her mother’s best efforts at torment too. Mary had felt wanted within a group that she had had to wait patiently, ever since she had started Primary School, to be accepted into.

Alice twisted her pretty mouth into an ugly grimace, which faded for a moment to coil into something of a smug smile. She was hatching a terrible, painful plan to punish Mary for not doing what she was asked and for speaking up during an earlier game.

She’d gone off and thought about this, thought Mary. She had wanted to inflict pain without lowering herself to the sub-standards associated with those who inflicted heavy handed violence. No, considered Mary, Alice was a conniving monster who calculated with the cold, unfeeling accuracy of a computer programme.

“All those who want to be Mary’s friend, go over to her side. All those who want to be my friend, come and stand over by me” Alice announced. Mary knew exactly what the other girls were about to do. The almost regal confidence in which Alice had made her decree known, told Mary that her fate was already sealed.

Janet and Alison Weaver looked at each other in wide eyed disbelief for a moment, whilst Sharon Somers looked to Paula Cobb to see which way she was going. The other four girls hesitated for only a moment, before they were followed quickly by Paula, Sharon, Janet and Alison.

They all stood behind Alice.

Their faces were not those of sweet, innocent children anymore – they had been morphed into the hellish depictions of demons and gargoyles on churches, belying their strict Catholic upbringing. They had turned into agents of Satan, right before Mary’s defiantly dry eyes.

How she begged in her heart for the sweet intervention of an agent of God. Just someone, anyone who would take her side and stand by her. Just someone who would believe in her and not take a side against her. Someone who would never let her feel alone, mocked or exiled.

She stood for what felt like a lifetime, looking into the tableau of utter primal hatred directly in front of her. Silent venom radiated from the girls stood a few inches away. She could almost hear their angry, hateful words, churning about inside their pig-tailed and rosy cheeked heads.

Mary waited – hoping that everyone would burst out laughing. She hoped this was a joke, some terrible sick joke, but unsubstantiated nonetheless.

What had she done to make them hate her so much? She knew all their parents were still married. Was that why? She’d had so many sniping, cutting comments about being from a ‘broken home’ since her parents had divorced a couple of years earlier. She wasn’t as clever or as talented as any of them and she never got picked for anything by their teacher, whilst they always did. She wasn’t a bad girl though, she was certain. She had pulled Jodie’s pony-tail a few times last year, but had been told off by her Mum for doing it as it gave Jodie head-aches. Mary had gone home that night and cried; she hated the thought of hurting anyone – she had only been playing!

The stares were turning into vile, hideous scowls. Each one crushed Mary’s broken soul a little further.

Her resolve was starting to unravel, like a reel of cotton in the breeze. Tears stung her eyes, making her own stare now powerless and weak. Sensing victory, Alice turned to her gaggle of followers and instructed them further.

They were to carry on playing in their pretend Bakers shop, where Alice worked the imaginary till as the boss and everyone else played the bakers or the customers. They were to disregard, ignore and not talk to Mary at all costs and were to ignore her if she tried to join in.

Mary watched them disappear to the other side of the playground and begin their pretty little game without her. She had been a Baker in that game. She loved it. She had gone home from school eager to escape to her bedroom and draw pictures of what she thought the Bakery and all the characters looked like. She had wanted to show her designs to her friends, but had been told by Paula and Alice on several occasions that she couldn’t draw for toffee. Instead, she squirreled them away into the bottom draw of the little white desk in her bedroom. Her mother wouldn’t maliciously destroy those pictures if she thought that they were just doodles and dumped in a bottom drawer.

She absentmindedly rubbed the red, indented flesh on her arms as she sat down on a curb at the very edge of the play ground, admitting defeat to herself. She shouldn’t have tried to change the game and suggest new ideas to the story they were playing. She shouldn’t have tried to stick up for herself.

Why did she have to have this terrible stubborn streak at times? Why couldn’t she just erase it from her being with as much ease as rubbing out a pencil line? Why had nature given her terrible situations to deal with and then God cursing her with a fighting spirit? She would have been better being quiet and mouse-like in that instance. For Mary, being quiet and retiring was her default setting.

She dropped her head and examined her hands which rested in her blue and white gingham covered lap. She hated the summer dress she had to wear for school but it was what all the other girls wore at this time of year.

She wanted to feel anger and rage towards those awful, vile girls, but she couldn’t. Instead, she felt nothing but shame and embarrassment. It was her fault. It had to be. It always was.

The electric bell from inside the school sounded its shrill cry to herald the end of morning break and the teacher rang the hand-bell in response. Everyone lined up in their respective classes and were led inside by their teachers. Mary hung back until everyone in her class was in their line.

After lunch, they were off on their weekly jaunt to the swimming baths, but until lunch, it was Maths and Geography. Mary, who sat on a table on her own in the classroom, watched Mrs Glynn draw questionable likenesses to France and Spain on the black board. She hadn’t paid much attention; she instead opted to stare hopelessly out of the window, imagining what it would be like to be in one of those countries. Just to be far away from everyone and everything that made her life so unquestionably awful would be a dream come true.

At lunchtime, she had queued up to get her hot meal from the kitchen with all the other children who were on free school meals like her. Her former friends were already sat in their usual haunt, a long grey table connected to its wide red stools. She cast a wary, but envious eye over at them. They laughed and whispered together as they ate their packed lunches, no-one casting even a cursory look in her direction.

She was forgotten. Like a crisp packet being put in a bin – worthless, insubstantial and insignificant. She sat at the furthest corner of the assembly hall that also doubled, or rather trebled as a gym and a canteen. She chased the minced beef round her compartmented pink plastic tray, replaying that morning’s events in her head.

Her mind was a heap of emotions and thoughts that she could not comprehend. She wanted to talk to someone about it, so badly, but daren’t. Besides, there wasn’t anyone.

After being chased out of the canteen by a severe looking dinner lady, Mary reluctantly ventured outside, sticking near the door like a cat waiting for its owner to let it back in. Over the far end of the playground, she could see the other girls playing joyfully amongst themselves.

She looked on at the throngs of children as they ran, skipped and laughed their way through their lunch time. Mary silently cursed whoever it was who thought lunch breaks should be an hour long.

She thought about home and her heart sunk when she thought about her mother. She could never tell her about the incident with Alice and the other girls from earlier. She’d listen and dismiss her with cool indifference, telling her she had deserved whatever it was that had happened and then sending her off to her room without a second thought.

When her mother did have a second thought though, her anger was awesome.

She would barge into her room, screaming wildly at her like an insane ape, banging the walls and throwing whatever came to hand at her. If she knew of something Mary cherished, she would lunge for it, destroying it as best she could in front of her, as if a wanton act of destruction would teach her anything.

Mary had learnt never to outwardly show attachment to anything in her mother’s presence, even mention which food she preferred. She knew it would give her something else to withhold from her as a punishment.

Of course her mother beat her, but the destruction was, to Mary, far worse.

Her mother had torn the arm off a cuddly rabbit she’d had since she was a baby during one of her rages. She had lovingly re-stuffed it and sewn the arm back on as best she could, vowing secretly to protect her rabbit against her mother forever.

She hid him well at all times, including taking him to school with her, hidden at the bottom of her gym bag. Today was no exception. He was buried at the bottom of her bag underneath the rolled up towel that contained her swimming costume and goggles.

She smiled when she thought of ‘Noobles’, her beautiful pale pink, long legged rabbit. What did Alice and the rest matter when she had him? He was never going to leave her, ignore her, hurt her or reject her. His smile was always there and always meant for her.

Her older sister Karen told her that she was too big for cuddly toys – but she disagreed. So what if it made her a baby? She suddenly felt that feeling of stubbornness flow back into her. She felt her limbs grow warm with the knowledge that she wasn’t as lost and as adrift as she had thought. She had Noobles, her pink rabbit and that was all that mattered.

The bus waiting to take her class and the class a year above hers to the swimming pool, stood at the end of the school’s driveway.

Mary , the last to leave, having lingered in the cloakroom for as long as she could so she could avoid the noxious daggers being hurled at her by the other girls in her class, finally trotted down the path to greet it.

It was a double decker bus, a treat for the kids as they loved racing up the narrow winding staircase behind where the driver sat to reach the top deck. Alice, Rebecca, Janet, Paula and the other girls had gone straight upstairs with almost all of the other children, in a cacophony of chatter and giggles. Mary saw the teachers exchange wary glances with each other before one of them quickly jogged up the steps to supervise upstairs.

“Honestly Mary Molenyeux” sighed Mrs Seddon, sharply.

“You’re always the last at everything, aren’t you? Now go get yourself sat down”.

Mary bobbed her head dutifully at the teacher from the other class and shuffled into a window seat.

The bus was taking the children, their teachers and a couple of parent supervisors to Winston Baths about three miles away. They went every Friday afternoon to have swimming lessons from their irritated looking teachers.

Mary hugged her bag to her chest as the bus chugged into life and set off.

The morning’s events were still horrifically burnt into her mind and each thump of her little heart ached with the knowledge that she had no friends now at school. There were a few other girls that she supposed she could play with from now on, but they were not who she desired to be with. They were clumsy and stupid, playing games that the kids in the infant’s playground would instead. She wanted to be amongst the pretty, clever girls. Their mothers sent them to school with pale blue gingham ribbons in their hair and frilly white socks.

She dreamed of being that lovingly turned out.

As the buses breaks let out a shrill squeak, indicating that it was slowing down at a junction, Mary opened her bag to check on Noobles. First, before she removed the towel to reveal his hiding place, she took a cautionary glance around the lower deck on which she sat. No-one was looking in her direction, not that people did in general.

For once, her forgettable physical presence was a blessing and she pushed the towel aside until it showed Noobles’ pink, textured face smiling back at her. Content that he was safe, she carefully re-covered him and zipped the bag back up.

What other friends did she need? Noobles had heard her cry herself to sleep for years. He had stayed by her side throughout all of her mother’s various punishments and her older sister’s hard, cruel insults.

The contrast between the physical contact she had with Noobles and that of her family was awesome. Her mother’s open palm would cleanly connect with her cheek at the merest hint of Mary’s disagreement or protest. Noobles instead, would press his cool, soft fabric nose against her burning cheek and soak up her tears with his yielding pink paws.

Yes, determined Mary inwardly, she had no need for anyone but him and she would protect him with her life if needs be.

She looked forlornly out of the window as the grey concrete buildings of the town rushed past her window. In a few minutes or so, she would be immersed in the white tiled pool of the ageing Winston Baths. Afterwards, her mother’s boyfriend was picking her up and taking her home.

She frowned as they paused at traffic lights. She loathed Eddie so much that it was difficult to put her finger on what she disliked more: his oily skin, his thinning grey hair or his mouth full of irregular yellow teeth. He referred to her as a ‘little vole’ a tiny, squeaking little thing that hid in her little bedroom like she was retreating to a nest.

She hated the adult jokes he’d tell her and the way he’d rub her thigh when she sat in the front passenger seat. He swore all the time, whilst picking his ears with long, dirty fingernails. He was gut churningly awful; even the thought of him made her involuntarily grimace.

They were almost there, Mary noticed as they passed Kinnock’s Bus Depot on Crundle Lane. This was an industrial part of town with a wide road and dotted with factories and storage units.

The road was punctuated by a narrow bridge at the end that lead to a roundabout and then two minutes later, they would arrive. Mary knew this journey all too well by now. She had been going swimming with her school for a year and the journey was very much imprinted into her head.

The bus rumbled onwards towards the little bridge that went over a disused railway line. Mary had often wondered how so many lorries, trucks and buses managed to get over it safely without it cracking. It was only wide enough for one vehicle at a time and managed by traffic lights, maybe that was why it was still so strong, she surmised.

It was customary for the children on the top deck to stand up when the Bus went over the hump of the bridge, if the Bus they had been sent for the journey was a double decker. Mary could hear excited cries above her and the sound of a few dozen feet scuffling into place as the bridge got closer.

Mary bowed her head, disappointed that she was missing out on something else.

She could hear one of the adults shouting something she couldn’t place to the kids upstairs, which was no doubt a warning to sit down.

The traffic lights were green so the bus picked up some speed, heading for the little mound of the bridge. Mary waited to hear the excited calls from the children above her as they enjoyed the sensation of going quickly over it.

She waited.

But it never came.

Mary looked up to see the surreal sight of the windscreen of the bus fly past a thick black line of tarmac and rubble whilst she experienced the millisecond long feeling of falling before an almighty thwack that rattled her bones.

The falling sensation, although brief, had felt like it had lasted a lifetime.

The ensuing thuds, vibrations and pounding crashes seemed to last only a brief moment.

All around her thin body, Mary felt enormous pressure, as though the thumping chaos around her was trying to crush her with its force. She tried to move, she was desperate to resist this force that pelted her with sharp, wild pain, but she was bound by its colossal force and left helpless to resist it.

Silence.

The beating, booming silence around her came as quickly as a flash of lightening across a blackened sky. It was only its sudden arrival that reminded her that there must have been noise before it. Was there noise? Did she hear anything after the feeling of falling?

She opened her eyes, slowly and cautiously, the tiny vole taking a peep outside its little house after it had been trampled over by a heard of wild horses.

There were angry little knives sticking into her back and when she went to move her arms, she looked to see them glinting and shimmering in the hazy half-light that hung above her head like the light of a distant, remote sun.

She gingerly put her little, sore fingers to her face, but found they hurt so much that she pulled them away.

Her brain struggled to grasp the images that beat around her in the deadly silence. What was she looking at? Where was she?

She was lying on her back, staring up at an oblong of light. Directly below it was a line of shining metal which made up the rail on the back of one of the buses seats.

The bus, the swimming baths… of course! Her jumbled, confused mind told her where she was and made some sense out of the mire.

She knew she had to get up – she had to get up! There must have been a crash, a terrible, terrible crash. Everyone could be dead – she could be next! She had to get up and get out. Now.

The primordial instinct for survival gripped her insides savagely, pumping adrenalin through her veins.

She was going to get up and get out. She was going to be okay.

She made half a dozen limp attempts at sitting up in the now exceedingly cramped space in which she lay.

She looked about, making herself wary of her surroundings. She was lying to one side, in a glass free window. She was lying parallel to the ceiling of the lower deck, sandwiched between that and two seats that remained in place.

After another attempt, she rose on pained, unhelpful limbs, getting as far as her knees. The bus was lying on its side in an eerie silence.

What about the people? She thought. What about Mrs Seddon? She was here a moment ago, I must ask her what to do. She narrowed her eyes to try and focus her sight as the dust settled and looked around her. Mrs Seddon was two rows ahead of Mary and on her side, blood covering her face. She wasn’t moving. Mary crawled on her bloodied hands and knees to reach the teacher, and shook her still shoulder.

“Mrs Seddon? Mrs Seddon, it’s Mary Molenyeux. Mary. It’s Mary”

Still no response.

She remained stooped over Mrs Seddon as she began crying and shaking, only disturbed in her keening by the sound of another person crying. The sound was muffled at first, like the sound of distant thunder, until it turned into a screeching wail that shook Mary free of her sobs.

If there was someone else there, she would have to find them, she had to help them.

Mrs Seddon wasn’t moving, she had to leave her now.

It must have been coming from the upper deck. Most of the children were up there, with only her and one or two others on the bottom. She hadn’t heard from anyone else from the bottom deck and she instinctively followed the sound from the top.

How was she going to get out and up there?

The stairs were on the ceiling now, rendering them useless.

She looked ahead in the hazy gloom and made for the windscreen, which was shattered and against a fuzzy bank of dark grass that looked like a wall.

Mary climbed over Mrs Seddon and struggled under a pole and the luggage dais above one of the wheels. She climbed down onto the mangled remains of the door and pushed at the shattered glass of the windscreen that now resembled a mad spider’s web.

Dangling above her was the driver, one of his arms hanging down and his head at an uncomfortable angle. He wasn’t crying though, she reasoned, before wondering in all her absent wisdom, how best to get out.

She pushed gently on the windscreen, her brain telling her that it would probably hold in place, only to feel surprise when it yielded to her small weight and moved forward like the canopy door to a tent, revealing a big enough gap for her to scuttle out through.

The fresh air hit her hard and mixed with the fresh blood all over her body, making her shake with not just shock, but cold too. She had come out past the headlights and twisted pieces of metal and masonry, to face the bottom of the bus.

Pipes and bolts, all black and brown formed the underneath of the bus; ugly and meant to be unseen like the underside of a wood louse.

There was no way around to the top deck back past the front of the bus, so she ran round the underneath of the bus, quickly putting one horribly painful foot in front of another.

There were shouts above her head – passersby? She didn’t look, she simply ran to the back of the bus, locating the emergency exit handles to the back window and pulling them hard until they yielded. How her tiny, weak arms managed to pull those levers, she didn’t have time to question. Instead, she pulled open the hatch and crawled inside.

Her young eyes met a scene of carnage not dissimilar to a battlefield. Children were bent double over the side of chairs, all covered in blood. Some were lying on top of each other in between the same gaps that she had been lying in herself on the lower deck.

What did they say on telly about moving the injured? Don’t? Wait until medical help arrives?

Where was it? Surely people would have seen the crash. Was that what all the shouting was about above her? Had people noticed and were letting her know help was on its way?

Her brain was foggy with confusion and nothing seemed to make sense.

Someone seemed to be crying before – that was why she had decided to get out and check. She listened hard, but her ears were ringing now. Perhaps they had been since she had opened her eyes. Had she been unconscious? Was that what it felt like? Nothingness?

“Hello!” she called, wiping at the blood she had only just become sensible of coming from her forehead and her nose.

“Please let me know if you want me to get you out, it’s Mary Molenyeux” she wanted to say more, but her voice cracked and she began to cry again. She was only a child, a little girl. She wanted her mother, as icy as she was. She wanted to go home, she wanted to go to bed and she wanted to sleep.

“Help me!” came an insistent cry from just by her feet.

Someone below her was making small movements.

“Is that Chris Armley?” she said through her tears.

“Yes” sobbed the little boy “please just get me out”.

Mary ignored the agony ripping through her body and the sickening sensation of warm blood pouring down from her head and gathering over her skin and dirty summer dress and pulled Chris out onto the opposite bank of the abandoned railway line.

His plea was followed by another and then another.

By the time she had pulled five children, some bigger than her free, adults had begun to appear around her in number.

A policeman with mismatched eyes told her to go and sit down on the side with the children she had helped, telling her that there was nothing she could do now and that she was to leave it to the grown-ups.

She protested, but the policeman took her gently by the shoulders and lead her to the bottom of the embankment and told her to hold his hat whilst he tried to help, before smiling slightly and rushing back to the bus.

More and more adults appeared, most of them in uniforms and all shouting urgently into walkie-talkies and administering treatment to those who were pulled out.

Mary looked on, shaking as her body gave way. A paramedic quickly checked her over before calling over her shoulder to someone that Mary could go as she was classed as the walking wounded.

“Don’t worry love, we’ll get your friends out, just nip over there to see Brian and he’ll take you off to hospital to make sure you’re okay”. By the time the paramedic had finished talking, she had moved off to triage another child.

No one was looking at Mary now, which she was grateful for. It had occurred to her that her bag that contained Noobles was missing and she had absolutely no intention of leaving him. She had wanted to explain to an adult that she had to find him before she left, but she knew that none of them would understand. Instead, she cautiously made her way to the back of the bus. Her ineffectual presence was going to serve her well for once in her life.

The bottom deck was evidently cleared of people and now the adults were concentrating of dealing with those on the upper level. She quietly crept through the gaping hole at the back of the lower deck where the window had been and snuck in, searching desperately in the strange light for her blue and pink bag.

She tripped over something, sending her onto her already cut and bloodied knees with a crash that she hoped no-one heard.

She looked down with utter joy to see the offending object had been her bag. It was as though Noobles had wanted to get her attention. Out of those she had pulled free, he was the most important of the lot.

She pulled open her bag with the same glee and urgency as a child on Christmas morning attacking their first wrapped gift. Soon Noobles was in her arms, his faded pink fur was getting tacky with her drying blood, but she didn’t care. She had him back and that was all that mattered.

She turned to look back out of the window. The bank on which she had been sat was now empty of people as the children she had sat with had evidently been carted off to hospital.

She knew she should make for the bank, but it felt like miles away now and she was so very weary.

Instead, she reasoned that a little rest would be okay and sat down in the tiny gap between the back seats and the rear and side windows.

She curled up into a foetal position, her beautiful, wonderful best friend snuggled in against her small, calming chest.

She closed her eyes and within moments, her pain was gone.


The Gazette – June 18th 1986

The funeral for schoolgirl Mary Molenyeux took place this morning at St. Hilda’s church on Renwick Street, Oak Hill.

Mary, aged 8, was the only fatality in the recent Crundle Lane Bridge accident which saw the double decker bus she was travelling on with children from St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Primary School, fall onto the former Ridgeway Pit railway line after the bridge they were crossing collapsed.

Her head teacher, Mr Peter Bush, described her in his eulogy as “a bright, beautiful and irreplaceable child who is a terrible and tragic loss to us all”.

Mary was also posthumously honoured by the Humane Society of Great Britain for her bravery at the accident scene. She received a commendation for saving the lives of five other children which she, despite suffering a fatal head injury, pulled free from the wreckage.

One of the children who Mary saved was 8 year old classmate Alice Tuebrook, daughter of Mayor and Mayoress Anthony and Sarah Tuebrook.

Mr Tuebrook said in a statement that he and his wife were “deeply grateful for Mary’s selfless heroism that surely saved our daughters life. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family at this time”.

Her mother Edith and sister Karen, 15, were amongst the hundreds of mourners who turned out for her funeral, which was presided over by Canon Robert Newell.

The Police are currently investigating the cause of the bridge collapse and have yet to make a statement concerning their findings to date.

© Cat Mercer 2012

First published on 'Continuous Strings' - wordpress