It is how we deal with the darkest moments in our life that defines us.
Callum Alexander | Callum on Cars | CrackersCal
Ever since I can remember, I have always had a passion about cars. To me, driving a car is an experience, not a necessity, contrary to popular assumption about automotive commuting. As a car enthusiast, I am all too aware that the car you drive is intrinsically linked to the experience you have on your commute. Whether that is to a particular destination, or the more rarefied recreational commute: to have fun driving a great car, on a great road.
Few people, in reality, have the privileged lifestyle to enjoy such spell-binding moments, moments where you are completely besotted with your reality. As a car enthusiast, that tinge of missing out burrows into my awareness. It leaves you in a quandary about how to solve the reality of your circumstance and the purpose of your existence.
My heart and intuition act as my compass, my guiding star in the night sky. The spark of life is a beacon of solace here. For me, cars have always provided a safe haven to dream, to learn and to explore the sense of adventure that lurks within me.
The freedom of driving though incurs weighted responsibility; I bought my first car - I am an insignificant proletariat after all. It was an £1800 mid-range black Renault Clio from 2004, in good condition. It was light on its knobbly tyres, it weighed just 990kg, and combined with 1.5 CDI diesel engine, it could be driven briskly. It was basic but had good feeling in the steering, a planted turn for the type and age the car was. It gave good feedback through the controls; you could feel the strain of the chassis under load from turn in, and the undulations of the camber in the road.
It didn’t feel wooden or detached; the springy, spritely nature from the engine fuelled a happy, go lucky vibe. The age hadn’t dampened the Clios chirpy, plucky spirit. Although, the rear was sometimes nervous carrying speed during turn in on tighter, fast cornering, an unsettling sensation: it didn’t inspire great assurance. But with university study hampering the luxury of choice, it was all I could afford in 2014. For two years I drove this lump of scrap metal until one sudden day: October 26th 2016. It would teach me the boundaries of driving, the limits of driving on public roads.
That day was an overcast autumnal Wednesday morning; that meant university lecture day. Throughout my studying, I lived at home, it saved money on accommodation costs. The ramification of my prudence: a 71-mile distance between home and lecturing, situated at University Centre Harlow. My planned schedule for a punctual arrival was patently structured: leave home at 8.00am, drive the journey, taking 1 hour 20 minutes and arrive steadfast for a 9.30am lecture start. But things don’t always go according to plan.
I open my front door to a murky morning, a damp dew covering everything that was exposed to the elements from the night before. The blotted-out sun illuminated the light gentle grey covering of cloud. It looked like a glum, unclear picture painting. Crunching over my drive, I zapped my car with the key, the doors snapped open. Placing my bag on the passenger seat, the cold Clio, glazed in drying dew water, stood motionless, waiting to be coaxed into life. After strapping myself in, I ignited the engine. The rattle, clatter noise of the diesel engine is softened inside as the straight 4 cylinders churn into life. I was ready to depart my home.
I live in a small village in the countryside, where the backroads trailing out of it are faster to drive on than the main roads, which are thickly condensed, chock a bloc with traffic on the rush hour commute to work. Selecting this scenic route meant making good time on my journey and a more interesting drive.
I turned right out of the cul-de-sac I live in and trundle along about 200metres to my next right turn up Bardwell road. The coolness of the early morning clung to the air through the village and out into the heartland of the country road. Out of the 30mph village speed limit I increase my speed to 60mph. I see streaks of water being blown up the windscreen, not enough to warrant turning on the wipers, but enough to make you aware of the cold, chilling night before. And the tricky conditions that result.
As I drive earnestly along the road, I see damp, drying patches of water, reflecting back at you like a mirror, even though it had been a settled night, with no deluge of rain. I lift off the throttle as my car rushes over them, keen not to lose traction in unpredictable conditions that lure you into a false sense of security. Having floated over the damp patches, I glance in the rear-view mirror, the darker, blotched tarmac with a tippling of water haze, shrinks into the distance.
I look forward again and focus my attention on the next corner in the road which is approaching, it’s a tighter turn. There are hedgerows on the left, all unruly and unkept. The overgrown leafy strands stick out as the bulk of the hedge is blurred green. The hedge looks slightly more imposing with a high-rise bank of long growing glass, flung and trampled under its own weight. On the opposite side of road, a small wall outlines the perimeter to a property. Branches from trees behind that overhang the grey, gruff road, the surface chiselled away by the passing of time.
The road surface resembles the face of a kitchen grater, bubbled pea shaped stones mixed into the tar, leaving a course, rough surface. The asphalt curves around a blind corner, with no way of telling if a car is approaching until you’re through the bend. It should be approached with a degree of caution. Me and my Clio blunder into the first part of the corner at unyielding speed. Everything feels okay, until all of a sudden, it doesn’t.
In a flash, I feel the rear of my Clio loses traction on the unforgiving surface. My car starts to turn right more and more tightly all the time as the rear slings round. I turn into the slide, trying to counter the loss of traction in an attempt to rectify an increasingly concerning scenario unfolding before my eyes. In the distance, I see the trees and hedges hurtling towards me, getting closer and closer. There was no time to brake, it happened too fast, in such a short distance. I realise, my interventions were ineffective as the realisation struck. I knew I was crashing. I knew I was in trouble.
Remember I said the Clio felt nervous and unsettling during turn in through fast corners? Well, the weight distribution of the Clio is biased towards the front at 63.1%, meaning ideally, it isn’t balanced appropriately for dynamic, fast driving, with quick changes of direction. That indicates a limit to how fast you can push around a certain radius of corner, until the rear lightens with too much lateral load and spits you sideways like a pendulum, with no way to recover it back.
Yet, all my efforts to stop the accident were futile. I had in that split second accepted the consequences of my own naivety. I wasn’t scared, I was braced for the impact. In my mind, I knew it would be about the severity and seriousness of the crash that would determine my reality. I just didn’t know how bad it would be. I crash head on into the trees and hedges, my car had skipped just beyond the confines of the property on the right, missing the wall. I was conscious throughout the intense impact, but I was a passenger in the driving seat.
My vision looking through the windscreen turned dark as the daylight was blacked out by the undergrowth. I remember feeling the weight of the car hitting the trees as my Clio gyrated into the air, flipped and rolled over twice. I hear a massive crash as the car batters into the road on its roof. The windscreen is smashed and I see the grainy, rumbled detailing of the road as the car scrapes across the surface. With blurred vision, my perception turned light then dark, then light again, then finally dark.
From the outside, the perspective of the car sliding on the road must have been like an ice hockey puck gliding across the surface of a rink. My car came to a standstill on the roof. I’m upside down. I immediately notice the airbag in the steering wheel hadn’t deployed, but that the side airbags by my head had; I could see the white fabric bag hanging like a bin liner. I sit upside down, seatbelt tight across my body, holding me in my seat. I couldn’t feel any pain. In that instant, I wanted to extract myself from my Clio, I didn’t waste any time in doing so.
I reach to undo my seatbelt, it clicks but doesn’t retract, so I cast it away from my body, the material responsible just seconds earlier for saving my life. My body has nowhere to fall, I’m tightly formed in my driving position, compressed upside down. So, I tug my body down and incrementally fall onto my hands and knees on the headline of the car. The sunroof had shattered exposing the hard road; shards of glass now litter the unconventional headline flooring.
I glance for a way out. I couldn’t get out the side door, the interior was too crumpled for me to clamber through. The right-rear side window resembled a cat flap door for humans; the glass punched out by the trauma I had inflicted on my Clio. It was small, a tight squeeze but it was a way out. I manage to hunker my body down, I wanted to avoid touching any fragments of glass pinched in the window frame with my head and body. So, I slink my body through the gap and into a settled breeze of a dim, grim morning. The breeze felt like a blowing away of the violence that my body had been subjected to.
From my hands and knees, I stand up and curse at what had just happened. The extreme accident I had just experienced was intensely violent and unpredictable. Subconsciously, I knew I had to get out of the road, so I started walking towards the drive of the house that my car had just skated past. Abruptly, I see a man walking briskly towards me. By this point, I had noticed one of my fingers had maroon red blood dripping from a small laceration - I must have cut it on the newly origami styled shards of glass strewn on the headlining.
“You alright mate.” He says in a calm and assured tone. He looks at me with laser focus, nervous about my response. My head is tilted up, my eyes reciprocated his look “Yeah, I’m fine, I just crashed my car, I think I’m unhurt.” It momentarily felt like I was in a parallel dimension, it was surreal. But I also felt so exposed and alone. I remember speaking in a soft tone, beaten up by roller-coaster tumble. It manifested into dazed shock and confusion at what had just happened.
The man’s voice had an urgency about it now.“ I heard a loud noise and walked down the drive to see what happened. Come this way, what’s your name?” We walked up the drive quickly. “Callum,” I reply compliantly, trusting his caring nature. My body is functioning, but in a rare state of flux and suspense. “My name is Andy. You’re going to be okay Callum; you’re not hurt anywhere?” I was vulnerable, my weaknesses exposed from the beaten pummelling I had taken from my ordeal. We had never met before, yet he wanted to care for me. My honesty spilled from my mouth, I knew I could trust him. “Yeah, I think I’m okay, just my finger is bleeding.” I look down and observe the unfolding condition of my finger as deep, dark red blood trickles thinly onto the pea shingled gravelled driveway we are crunching over. “Okay mate I’ll get you something for that, I’ll call the emergency services.”
Looking ahead, I saw an oil tanker. I realised Andy was an oil tanker driver, making a delivery to the house. Although now, there was a slight difference. I had inconvenienced his early drop off. We approached the oil tanker, Andy clasped the cab door handle and pulled it open abruptly. “Thank you, I don’t know what happened, I’m so stupid for crashing.” I say looking up at him, my state of mind blipped with anger and confusion at what I had got myself into. “It doesn’t matter mate, you’re alright, you’re going to be okay.” He says, repeating himself, keeping me in a stable, talkative frame of mind. I believed him, in that moment he reassured me of what was important. Andy wrapped his hi visibility puffer jacket around me, to keep me warm from the fresh, cooled air.
Andy proceeds to simultaneously call the emergency services on his hands-free phone in his cab, at the same time as opening the emergency kit. I sit down on the gravel lent up against the front left tyre of the oil tanker. I heard the phone dialling through to the emergency services in his cab. “Which finger is it?” I show him my hand. He dabbed my bloodied finger clean, then strapped a plaster concealing the wound. “Thank you, Andy.” I say with a relieved trepidation in my heart.
The emergency services answered the call. I don’t remember what was said; through muffled, unclear hearing Andy asked for an ambulance, and the police. That was to cordon off the impassable road blocked by my stricken, wrecked Clio. He gave the address of the house we were at, it pinpointed the crash location. I realised, he was supposed to be delivering oil, yet he’s attending to me. In that moment, Andy restored my faith in humanity. It filled me with a happiness, that I’ve rarely felt. The emotion had a lingering poignance. A blur passes as steady but consistent talking takes place between me and Andy for about 20 minutes.
The ambulance arrived quicker than I expected. Minutes after initial checks by paramedics, due to the high-speed impact of the crash, they are concerned about reactions that might occur in the hours after. They wanted me to be taken to hospital for observation.
I sat on a stretcher and was guided down the gravel drive, back onto the road. I look at the wreckage of my car as I’m wheeled past. It looked like the car had submerged into the road, with the roof crumpled in by the impact. The car was dented, beaten and broken by its ordeal. I felt ashamed, it was my fault. As I’m loaded into the ambulance, I gradually started to realise the scale and magnitude of my crash and just how lucky I was; in spite of all that happened, I appeared to be uninjured. The journey to Bury St Edmunds hospital took around 20 minutes.
I was monitored for reactions the rest of the day as a precaution. During that time, I discovered I had bruised my right leg, arm and my forehead as my body had clattered into the side support structure of the car. Despite this, I was more affected by the reactions of members of my family as they trickled in to hospital upon hearing the news. It all brought to my attention what I had been through and survived.
With no reactions to account for, I was discharged that afternoon, the doctors and nurses assured of my stable condition. I am grateful to the NHS for their care and loving attention they gave me; the swift response goes overlooked and underappreciated by society. They are the heroes of the people, the real role models in communities, that are too often taken for granted. I also thank Andy, for without his own care and attention in the immediate aftermath, things would have been far more challenging.
In the weeks that followed, I introspected deeply about my car crash. I was not affected at all mentally or emotionally and my physical injuries healed quickly; I test drove a car the week after. What I felt instead was gratitude. In the vacuum of the aftermath, I felt a great purpose resonating from the depths of my core. My self-inflicted crash put things into perspective, thankfully no one else was involved. I try to approach risks with a calculated methodology, not a reckless, careless gung-ho attitude.
Being pushed to the edge teaches you things about yourself, you would never normally discover. I learnt that I have the fortitude to persevere and persist in the midst of unscrupulous conditions, even when the odds are stacked against my favour. I don’t take life for granted and I intend to make the most of it; even when that takes me to the edge.
Callum Alexander | Callum on Cars | CrackersCal
Photos: Callum Alexander
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