Seeing another Human Being Die.

I come from a family of Police Officers for whom the sight of a recent sudden death is not an uncommon experience. I suspect that my huge respect for them, and my certainty that it is a job I could never ever do, stems from an incident in my childhood when I witnessed somebody actually die – for the only time in my life so far thankfully.

I was about eleven years old and I remember it was a spring day because the daffodils were out on the road opposite the shop where I had just been to buy some football cards – a weekly ritual for me in those days as I squandered my generous pocket money.

Served immediately after me in the shop, with some cakes and other treats I seem to recall, was a lady of the village known to me as “Miss Lappard”. My father had taught us all to always address adults in such a way no matter how familiar they were. She was not particularly familiar and I remember that on that day she was dressed in unseasonal dark colours and that apart from being clearly quite elderly she was otherwise fit and well as she passed me on the shop steps to return to her house just 60 yards away.

She was returning to her home which had been there for considerably longer than she had, standing by the busy main road which divided it from the village, a road even older than the house – one that had Roman origins and ran straight past Great Stukeley but which was, nevertheless, busy and fast.

In his essay “A Hanging” George Orwell describes the execution of a Burmese native by the British Imperial Judiciary during his military career. The most poignant moments for him are first when on hearing that his appeal has failed the condemned individual urinates in his cell where he stands, out of pure terror, and the second when as the same prisoner walks the short distance to the scaffold in bare feet he carefully steps to one side to avoid a puddle. To Orwell this trivial unconscious act underlined the brutal significance of taking the life of a perfectly functioning human being.

For me, at least looking back, I remember a similar significant moment as Miss Lappard stepped off the kerb carefully to avoid tripping over with her bag of shopping – carefully placing one foot after the other to avoid a slip or twist of an ankle. Once safely on the road she simply stepped out towards her home…

The image that stays with me to this day is that mass of dark clothes flying into the air on the impact of the car and the following silence. Even now I do not remember a car stopping or a driver rushing back to her – I just remember that heap of clothes and the realisation that a human being had just ended their life in front of me.

I stood there, motionless for a few seconds probably rapped by terror and childhood curiosity, and then ran back into the shop to find an adult. Time changes things of course, but the basic details have remained vivid I think.

I think that, at that moment, my own mortality suddenly became real and my adult self was born.