I am told that Mrs Byrne is known primarily for a book she published some years ago titled Flemish Interiors. In my modest opinion, she should have reserved her vitriolic pen for scribbling about divans and wallpaper. Human beings are clearly beyond her narrow scope.
After disembarking at Folkestone, Dickens, Ellen, and Mrs Ternan took the 2.38 tidal train to London. As they approached Staplehurst, they were the only passengers in their coach, one of seven first-class carriages in the tidal train that day.
The engineer was going full speed—about fifty miles per hour—as they passed Headcorn at eleven minutes after three in the afternoon. They were now approaching the railroad viaduct near Staplehurst, although “viaduct”—the name given the structure in the official railways guide—may be too fancy a word for the web of girders supporting the heavy wood beams spanning the shallow river Beult.
Labourers were carrying out a routine replacement of old timbers on that span. Later investigation—and I have read the reports—showed that the foreman had consulted the wrong timetable and did not expect the tidal train for another two hours. (It seems that we travellers are not the only ones to be confounded by British railway timetables with their infinite holiday and weekend and high-tide-time asterisks and confounding parentheses.)
A flagman was required by railway policy and English law to be stationed 1,000 yards up the rails from such work—two of the rails had already been lifted off at the bridge and set alongside the track—but for some reason this man with his red flag was only 550 yards from the gap. This did not give a train travelling at the speed of the Folkestone–London tidal express any chance of stopping in time.
The engineer, upon seeing the red flag so tardily waved and—a much more soul-riveting sight, I am sure—upon seeing the gap in rails and beams in the bridge ahead, did his best. Perhaps in your day, Dear Reader, all trains have brakes that can be applied by the engineer. Not so in our day of 1865. Each carriage must be braked individually and then only upon instructions from the engineer. He madly whistled for the guards along the length of the train to apply their brakes. It did little good.
According to the report, the train was still doing almost thirty miles per hour when it reached the broken line. Incredibly, the engine jumped the forty-two-foot gap and leaped off the track on the other side of the chasm. Of the seven first-class carriages, all but one flew free and plummeted to their destruction in the swampy riverbed below.
The surviving coach was the one carrying Dickens, his mistress, and her mother.
The guards’ van immediately behind the engine was flung to the other track, dragging the next coach—a second-class carriage—with it. Immediately behind this second-class carriage was Dickens’s coach and it jolted partially over the bridge as the other six first-class carriages flew by and crashed below. Dickens’s carriage finally ended up dangling over the side of the bridge, now being kept from falling only by its single coupling to another second-class carriage. Only the very rear of the train remained on the rails. The other first-class carriages had plummeted and crashed and rolled and buckled and generally been smashed to matchwood and splinters on the marshy ground below.
Dickens later wrote about these moments, in letters to friends, but always with discretion, taking care never to mention, except to a few intimates, the names or identities of his two fellow travellers. I am certain that I am the only person to whom he ever told the complete story.
“Suddenly,” he wrote in his more widely disseminated epistolary version of events, “we were off the rail, and beating the ground as the car of a half-emptied balloon might do. The old lady…” [We must read “Mrs Ternan” here] “. . . cried out, ‘My God!’ The young lady travelling with her [this is Ellen Ternan, of course] screamed.
“I caught hold of them both… and said: ‘We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out!’
“The old lady immediately answered: ‘Thank you. Rely on me. Upon my soul I will be quiet.’ We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped.”
The carriage was indeed tilted steeply down and to the left. All baggage and loose objects had fallen down and to the left. For the rest of his life, Charles Dickens would suffer repeated spells of feeling as if “everything, all of my body, is tilted and falling down and to the left.”
Dickens continues his narrative:
“I said to the two women, ‘You may be sure that nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here, without stirring, while I get out the window?’ ”
Dickens, still lithe enough then at the age of fifty-three, despite his “frost-bitten foot” (as a long-time sufferer of gout, which has required me to partake of laudanum for many years, I know gout when I hear its symptoms, and Dickens’s “frostbite” was almost certainly gout), then clambered out, made the tricky jump from the carriage step to the railbed above the bridge, and reported seeing two guards running up and down in apparent confusion.
Dickens writes that he grabbed and stopped one of them, demanding of the man, “Look at me! Do stop an instant and look at me, and tell me whether you don’t know me.”
“We know you very well, Mr Dickens,” he reports the guard replied at once.
“Then, my good fellow,” cried Dickens, almost cheerily (at being recognised at such a time, a petty soul such as Clara Pitt Byrne might have interjected), “for God’s sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I’ll empty this carriage.”
And then, in Dickens’s letters to his friends, the guards did as they were bid, labourers laying down planks to the carriage, and then the author clambered back into the tilted coach and crawled down its length to retrieve his top hat and his flask of brandy.
I should interrupt our mutual friend’s description here just long enough to say that, using the names listed in the official railway report as my guide, I later tracked down the very guard that Dickens reports stopping and galvanising into such useful action. The guard—a certain Lester Smyth—had a somewhat different recollection of those moments.
“We were trying to get down to ’elp the injured and dying when this toff who’d climbed out of the teetering first-class coach runs up to Paddy Beale and me, all wild-eyed and pale, and keeps shouting at us, ‘Do you know me, man!? Do you know me!? Do you know who I am??’
“I admit that I replied, ‘I don’t care if you’re Prince Albert, mate. Get out of my bleedin’ way.’ It was not the usual way I’d speak to a gentleman, but that wasn’t no usual day.”
At any rate, Dickens did commandeer the work of some labourers to help extricate Ellen and Mrs Ternan, he did crawl back into the carriage to retrieve his flask and top hat, he did fill his top hat with water before clambering down the steep bank, and all witnesses agree that Dickens went immediately to work down among the dying and the dead.
IN HIS FIVE REMAINING YEARS after Staplehurst, Dickens would only say about what he saw in that riverbed—“It was unimaginable”—and of what he heard there—“Unintelligible.” This from the man generally agreed to have the greatest imagination, after Sir Walter Scott, of any English writer. And from a man whose stories were, if nothing else, always eminently intelligible.
Perhaps the unimaginable began when he was clambering down the steep embankment. Suddenly appearing next to him was a tall, thin man wearing a heavy black cape far more appropriate for a night at the opera than an afternoon’s voyage to London on the tidal train. Both men were carrying their top hats in one hand while grabbing at the embankment for balance with their free hands. This figure, as Dickens later described to me in a throaty whisper during the days after the accident when his voice “was no longer my own,” was cadaverously thin, almost shockingly pale, and stared at the writer from dark-shadowed eyes set deep under a pale, high brow that melded into a pale, bald scalp. A few strands of greying hair leapt out from the sides of this skull-like visage. Dickens’s impression of a skull was reinforced, he said later, b
y the man’s foreshortened nose—“mere black slits opening into the grub-white face than a proper proboscis” was how Dickens described it—and by small, sharp, irregular teeth, spaced too far apart, set into gums so pale that they were whiter than the teeth themselves.
The author also noticed that the man had two fingers missing—or almost missing—on his right hand, the little finger and the ring finger next to it, as well as a missing middle finger on his left hand. What especially caught Dickens’s attention was the fact that the fingers had not been cut off at the joint, as is so often the case in an accident to the hand or subsequent surgery, but appeared to have been severed halfway through the bone between the joints. “Like tapers of white wax that had been partially melted,” he told me later.
Dickens was nonplussed as he and this strange black-caped figure slowly worked their way down the steep embankment, both using shrubs and rocks as handholds.
“I am Charles Dickens,” gasped my friend.
“Yesss,” said the pale face, the sibilants sliding out through the tiny teeth. “I know.”
This nonplussed Dickens all the more. “Your name, sir?” he asked as they slid down the embankment of loose stones together.
“Drood,” said the man. At least Dickens thought this is what the man said. The pale figure’s voice was slurred and tinged with what may have been a foreign accent. The word came out sounding most like “Dread.”
“You were on the train going to London?” asked Dickens as they approached the bottom of the steep hill.
“To Limehousse,” hissed the ungainly form in the dark cape. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”
Dickens glanced up sharply at this strange recital, since their train had been going to the station in central London, not to these dark alleys in East London. “Rookeries” was a slang term for the worst of the tenement slums in the city. But now they had reached the bottom of the hill, and without another word, this “Drood” turned away and seemed to glide into the shadows under the railway bridge. In a few seconds the man’s black cape blended with the darkness there.
“You must understand,” Dickens was to whisper to me later, “I never for a second thought that this strange apparition was Death come to claim his own. Nor any other personification of the tragedy that was even then unfolding. This would have been too trite even for far lesser fiction than that which I create. But I do admit, Wilkie,” he said, “that I wondered at the time if Drood might have been an undertaker come from Staplehurst or some other nearby hamlet.”
Alone now, Dickens turned his attention to the carnage.
The train carriages in the riverbed and adjoining swampy banks were no longer recognisable as railway coaches. Except for iron axles and wheels protruding here and there at impossible angles from the water, it was as if a series of wooden bungalows had been flung out of the sky, perhaps dropped from some American cyclone and smashed to bits. And then the bits looked to have been dropped and smashed yet again.
It seemed to Dickens as if no one could have survived such impact, such destruction, but screams of living sufferers—for in truth the injured far outnumbered the dead—began to fill the river valley. These were not, he thought at the time, human sounds. They were somehow infinitely worse than the moans and cries he had heard when touring overcrowded hospitals, such as the East London Children’s Hospital at Ratcliff Cross—which Drood had just mentioned—where the indigent and unclaimed went to die. No, these screams seemed more as if someone had opened a portal to the pit of Hell itself and allowed the damned there to cry out one last time to the mortal world.
Dickens watched a man stagger towards him, arms outstretched as if for a welcoming hug. The top of the man’s skull had been torn off rather the way one would crack an eggshell with a spoon in preparation for breakfast. Dickens could clearly see the grey-and-pink pulp glistening within the concave bowl of splintered skull. The fellow’s face was covered with blood, his eyes white orbs staring out through crimson rivulets.
Dickens could think of nothing to do but offer the man some brandy from his flask. The mouth of the flask came away red from the man’s lips. Dickens helped him lie on the grass and then used the water in his top hat to clean the man’s face. “What is your name, sir?” asked Dickens.
The man said only, “I am gone,” and died, the white eyes continuing to stare up at the sky from their bloody pools.
A shadow passed over them. Dickens whirled, sure—he told me later—that it would be Drood, the apparition’s black cape widening like a raven’s wings. But it was only a cloud passing between the sun and the river valley.
Dickens refilled his top hat from the river and came upon a lady, who also had blood streaming down over her lead-coloured face. She was almost naked, her clothes reduced to a few token strips of bloody cloth dangling like old bandages from her torn flesh. Her left breast was missing. She refused to pause for the writer’s ministrations and did not seem to hear his urgings that she sit down and wait for help. She walked past Dickens in a brisk manner and disappeared into the few trees that grew along the bank.
He helped two stunned guards extricate the crushed body of another woman from a flattened carriage and lay the body gently on the bank. A man was wading downstream, screaming, “My wife! My wife!” Dickens led him to the corpse. The man screamed, threw his arms above his head, and ran wildly into the swampy field near the river, crashing and thrashing about, all the while emitting sounds that Dickens later said “were like the hisses and death grunts of a boar pierced through the lungs by several large calibre bullets.” Then the man fainted, dropping into the marsh more like someone shot through the heart than through the lungs.
Dickens went back towards the carriages and found a woman propped against a tree. Except for a little blood on her face, perhaps from a slight scalp wound, she seemed uninjured.
“I shall bring you some water, madam,” he said.
“That would be very kind of you, sir,” she replied. She smiled and Dickens flinched. She had lost all of her teeth.
He went to the stream and looked back to see a figure he took to be Drood—presumably no one else was foolishly dressed in a heavy opera cape on that warm June day—solicitously bent over the woman. When Dickens returned a few seconds later with his top hat filled with river water, the man in black was gone and the woman was dead but still showing her ragged, bloodied gums in a parody of a final smile.
He went back to the smashed carriages. Amidst the rubble of one coach, a young man moaned feebly. More rescuers were sliding down the slope. Dickens ran to get several strong guards to help extricate the fellow from the broken glass, torn red velvet, heavy iron, and collapsed wooden floor of the compartment. While the guards grunted and lifted the heavy window frames and shattered flooring that had now become a fallen roof, Dickens squeezed the young man’s hand and said, “I shall see you to safety, my son.”
“Thank you,” gasped the injured young gentleman, obviously an occupant of one of the first-class carriages. “You are most kind.”
“What is your name?” asked our novelist as they carried the young man to the bank.
“Dickenson,” said the young fellow.
Charles Dickens made sure that Master Dickenson was carried up to the railway line where more rescuers had arrived, then he turned back to the carnage. He rushed from injured person to injured person, lifting, consoling, assuaging thirst, reassuring, sometimes covering their nakedness with any rag he could find, all while checking other scattered forms to confirm that they were no longer amongst the living.
A few rescuers and fellow passengers seemed as focused as our author, but many—Dickens told me later—could only stand there in shock and stare. The two figures doing the most that terrible afternoon amidst the wreckage and groans were Dickens and the bizarre form who called himself Drood, although the black-caped man seemed always to be just out of earshot, always on the verge of
vanishing from sight again, and always appearing to glide rather than walk from wrecked carriage to wrecked carriage.
Dickens came upon a large woman, the peasant cloth and design of her dress showing that she had come from one of the lower-class carriages. She was face-down in the swamp, her arms under her body. He rolled her over to be certain that she was no longer among the living, when suddenly her eyes popped open in her mud-covered face.
“I saved her!” she gasped. “I saved her from him!”
It took a moment before Dickens noticed the infant clasped fiercely between the fat woman’s heavy arms, the small white face pressed deep against the woman’s pendulous bosoms. The baby was dead—either drowned in the shallow swamp or asphyxiated by its mother’s weight.
Dickens heard a hissing call, saw Drood’s pale form waving to him from the web of shadows under the broken bridge and walked towards him, but came first to a collapsed, upside-down carriage where a young woman’s bare but shapely arm protruded from what was left of a window. Her fingers moved, seeming to beckon Dickens closer.
Dickens crouched and took the soft fingers in his own two hands. “I am here, my dear,” he said to the darkness inside the small aperture that had been a window only fifteen minutes earlier. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back, as if in gratitude for her deliverance.
Dickens crouched but could see nothing but torn upholstery, dark shapes, and deep shadows within the tiny, triangular cave of wreckage. There was not enough room for him to squeeze in even his shoulders. The top frame of the window was pressing down almost to the marshy ground. He could only just hear the rapid, terrified breathing of the injured woman above the gurgle of the river running by. Without thinking of the possible impropriety of it, he stroked her bare arm as far as he could reach it in the collapsed wreckage. There were very fine reddish hairs along her pale forearm and they glowed coppery in the afternoon light.