Crashing

We spin out of control. There is no slow down of time, just a frantic scrabble and blur outside the windscreen. The lights of the lorry I was overtaking, then the barrier on the central reservation. Things slam into the car from outside. The wheel and I wrestle. I am screaming "No No No", F is crying, C is screaming, V is cradling her in the back seat.

We aren't spinning any more.

We are in the middle of the motorway, facing back the way we came. Shocked traffic is coming to a halt behind us. There is a wrecked car not far behind us, a sprinkle of smashed parts all over the tarmac throwing long shadows in the headlights of the stopped cars.

We are okay. Are we okay? There is red stuff on V's face, F's legs. People are running up, alien silhouettes in the stark light. I can't open my door. C is still screaming.

We can all talk. My thumb hurts. F wants to know if the car crashed. V is shaking and crying. A Danish man is asking if I'm okay in heavily accented Swedish, a nurse called Elin has come to see if we're okay. Everything smells of petrol.

A fat man in his middle age, eyes wider than an owl's, rushes up. The Danish truckers flank him.

- It's all my fault! Who was in the car? Children? he asks.

- Yes, two, I tell him. He grabs my hand, clutches and shakes it, then backs away. His face is caving in, swallowing itself in misery. The Danes follow him.

We are okay. So we sit and wait for the emergency services. People sporadically come to make weird attempts at small talk. The first Dane asks about living in Sweden, he's thinking about moving there. A man in red and yellow overalls tells me twice how lucky we were. I know, I think. I was screaming no because I thought that was it for us, for my family, and I didn't want it to end like that. It wouldn't have been fair.

F rides with me in the ambulance. They are taking us to the nearest town, Varberg. The last I see of the tangled car, as I step out over a blood-like pool of oil, is C being cradled in the arms of a fireman. Her round face is lit up with the flashing blues of the ambulances. She looks interested.

F is interested too, the ambulance is exciting.

"Was the crash my fault," she asks me, still worried about the fruit salad incident earlier in the evening.

"No! Not at all, it wasn't you at all," I tell her.

"Was it your fault, daddy? Because you were driving and you aren't very good at it."

"Don't talk to the police later, okay?" I say.

It wasn't my fault. That owl-eyed idiot was drunk, the Danes saw him throwing a flask into the ditch. I was driving at the speed limit to overtake a lorry, doing 110 in the outside lane, and there was no warning, to time to evade, just a blaze of light and a crunch and shove and terror.

The policeman tells us in the emergency ward, where we're being checked for minor injuries, that they'd already had reports of him driving like a lunatic before he hit us. He's been arrested, he had insurance, we will hear more from them all shortly.

This is our society, one where it is okay to build and buy and drive cars capable of easily exceeding our legal speed limits. Where the only thing preventing you turning that car into something as lethal and indescriminate as an automatic weapon is a polite expectance that you will be responsible. Where we could collectively decide that is not okay, but we'd rather protect the rights of the rich to have expensive toys.

Life in the West regularly sickens me. Sweden, with it's more active Socialist government, is a vast improvement on my experience of the UK, a country governed by the rich for the rich, where money is the defining characteristic of self-worth, societal value and use, where our elected government (and make no mistake, we elected them, they are our fault) would rather bomb foreign countries than look after the infrastructure of their own. Pathetic.

Excuse me venting, I am extremely angry. Also scared, relieved, amazed and surprised. F and C are perfectly alright, a little shaken up but now moving straight on to the next adventure. I have a big red plaster cast on my left hand (F chose the colour for me), with torn ligaments in the thumb. All that red stuff in the car turned out to be raspberries, scattered by the collision. It feels vaguely inappropriate to find this as funny as I do.

We have to get a taxi home at midnight, the hospital can't help us with transport. So at 1230, we are driving back over the scene of the crash. I watch as the skidmarks roll past and try not to wince every time cars overtake us.

I am alive. All four of us are. Phew. Roll on Christmas.

-

V wanted to write something too - here's her take on the accident:


I usually don't write very personal things on my FB page but this will be the exception.

Last night my family and I endes up in a car accident on the big E6 high way between Varberg and Gothenburg. We are all very lucky to be able to talk about it.

About 19:00 last night my husband, my two small children and I were on our way home after a day of major christmas shopping for all the kids in the family... The car came out of nowhere...

My husband had just over taken a big lorry when we saw a bright light coming through the back window and then *bang* we got hit from behind and started spinning, hiting the rail, I leant over my youngest daughter's car seat who was next to me in the back, and I could see everything in slow motion. - My husband desperatly trying to get the car under control and my oldest daughter flung around in her car seat in the front passenger seat. I was convinced that we would not make it.

The car stopped and there was a moment of utter silence, then I heard my youngest starting to scream, I could then also hear my oldest starting to cry followed by my Husband checking how everyone was doing - door flung open and I could hear lots of voices asking us if we were hurt, how the babies were doing and lot of bright lights, the driver of the lorry, a Danish lorry driver started covering us with sleeping bags to keep out the cold when... a man turned up by my husband repatedly saying "Det var mitt fel! Jag körde för fort!" (It was all my fault! I was going to fast!) All very surreal - the man tried to shake my husbands hand. 

When the man walked back to his car the Danish lorry driver said we were very lucky and that the man had been drinking and speeding (drinking while driving too)

This is the point I want to make - Drunk driving. Such a respectless thing to do. Your not only putting your own life in jeopardy but also everyone on the same road. It doesn't matter if you're a very safe driver if others aren't.