Nina Bawden has written a 130-page love letter to her husband, killed at Potters Bar. She tells Peter Gruner why her grief is tinged with fury

Dear Austen by Nina Bawden
Virago, £10

FUTURE generations will look back on Islington author Nina Bawden’s book about the Potters Bar rail crash with the same mixture of shock and incredulity that we look at the iniquities of the past.
Seven people died in the crash on May 10, 2002, and 76 were injured. Despite that, it took Railtrack and maintenance contractors Jarvis three years before they were prepared to admit some liability and even now they still refuse to accept the blame.
Among the dead was Austen Kark, 75, Ms Bawden’s husband of 48 years and the former head of the BBC’s World Service.
Ms Bawden, 80, was herself seriously injured, with broken ribs, legs, arms and collarbone. She is still in pain and has not fully recovered.
It was the third major rail crash in four years and happened on the same line and only five miles from the scene of the Hatfield disaster 18 months previously.
Yet no one in the cocooned, privatised world of British railways wanted to even say a begrudging “sorry” in case they were seen to be financially liable.
Dear Austen is, as its title suggests, essentially a long letter to Mr Kark.
This angry and passionate book is a study of grief and also a testimony to the lack of honour and integrity in today’s corporate world.
The crash was caused by a faulty set of points, operated by Railtrack (now Network Rail), and maintained by engineering firm Jarvis.
But in the early stages that did not stop officials claiming that “compelling” evidence pointed to saboteurs being responsible.
Ms Bawden writes to her husband: “A year after they killed you, the contractor who was supposed to maintain that stretch of railway track declared a profit of £67m.”
One of the biggest problems for the victims was the cost of taking the railway companies to court since the right to legal aid for physical injury no longer exists.
“It was removed by the Labour government that I and Austen worked and voted for all our adult lives,” she said.
We’re sitting in the pretty house overlooking the Regent’s Canal in Islington’s Noel Road which she shared with Austen for nearly 30 years
The award-winning author of Carrie’s War and The Peppermint Pig, she writes for children and adults.
“There’s still no sign of a public inquiry or a prosecution,” she added.
“It is my belief that there will be none. But this will not be announced until after the general election.”
She points out that when there was a similar railway crash in Melbourne, Australia, the prime minister was there within four hours and an inquiry was announced within four weeks.
“I find it quiet incredible that this government doesn’t give a bugger,” she added. “They don’t use the trains or public transport after all. They go in their chauffeur-driven cars everywhere.
“I still use trains. I have no choice because I can no longer drive since the crash. But I can’t help feeling nervous when I do go by rail”.
The book is a poignant love letter and a diatribe against the people Ms Bawden blames for her husband’s death. It attacks the faceless executives and bureaucrats of the rail companies, who she calls “snakeheads”.
“It was a word which just came to me,” she said. “It seemed so appropriate somehow. These are the people who run private companies, make millions and don’t do things properly.”
Life for the couple, one of semi-retirement, had seemed mapped out – writing, visits to grandchildren, travelling and trips to the theatre and walks to pubs and restaurants in their beloved Islington.
On the day of the accident they were going to Cambridge by train for a party. The irony was that they bought first-class tickets. It was the first- class coach which was worst affected when the train was thrown off the line.
“I used to disapprove of the ‘compensation culture’ but experience has tempered my disapproval considerably,” she writes.
“Making people responsible, for the cracked paving stone they should have replaced or for the bolts that should have secured points 2182A might make them more careful.”
Partly because Ms Bawden was the best-known survivor of the crash and partly because Mr Kark had a notable career at the BBC and as a writer, she has become the “voice of Potters Bar”.
Campaigning is not something that comes naturally to her but she feels passionately about what she regards as the financial and moral irresponsibility of Jarvis, Network Rail and the government.
She is not just fighting for herself and her late husband, but also for the families of the six others who died and for the 20 or so who still suffer from their injuries.
To that end, Dear Austen is full of vitriol as well as grief.
She writes: “I dislike the words ‘victim’ and ‘losing a husband’. You were killed. I didn’t lose you.”
The Guardian wrote not long after the crash that the privatisation of British Rail was one of the “most reckless acts of ideological vandalism ever perpetrated by a British government”.
It was a “shameful monument” to John Major and his cabinet.
Yet Labour must shoulder a share of the blame too, the newspaper added.
“It spent almost five years complaining without taking substantive action.
“Meanwhile, it swallowed the half-baked free-market ‘wisdom’ that private ownership would guarantee not only efficiency, but safety too.”