During my time at the Cambridge News I wrote hundreds of 'Real Life' stories about people who have gone through extraordinary experiences. Unfortunately when Trinity Mirror (now Reach) bought the paper, they took away public access to the online stories, otherwise I’d link to them all… Anyway, can’t be helped. Here's one of my favourites - about the day a former soldier saved a man's life on his way home from work.
After two decades in the army, Mark Budden was ready for a quieter life.
The dad-of-two from Saffron Walden had seen plenty of high-octane action, not least as the commanding officer of a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan. So last year he decided to swap his uniform for a suit, and joined the army of commuters instead.
What he couldn’t have imagined was that his army skills would soon save somebody’s life – not on the battlefield, but at Bishop’s Stortford railway station.
It was an ordinary Wednesday evening in early January. Mark, 37, who works for Network Rail in London, had just stepped off the Stansted Express and was waiting to catch a connecting train to Audley End. Then the screaming began.
“I’d been off the train about a minute, I’d just got out my book to read, and I saw a woman running towards me, screaming hysterically,” recalls Mark. “I stopped her and said ‘What’s going on?’ And she said 'Someone’s on the tracks, someone’s been hit by a train'.
“Stupidly I thought oh, someone’s jumped. And then I thought hmm, this is not the place you jump from. Then instinct took over.”
Without hesitating, Mark ran into the ticket office and instructed staff to call the emergency services and stop the trains. “Then I ran along the platform, looking down, and after about 20 meters I saw the body. I didn’t know if they were alive or dead.”
The man on the track was Matt Robinson, a 29-year-old from Bishop's Stortford. He’d also been on the Stansted Express, travelling home from his job at the Bank of England. Realising he’d left his wallet on the train, he’d got back on to look for it but couldn’t find it, and stepped off again just before the doors closed. “Then as the train pulled away, Matt had turned to have one last look through the window, edged forward, didn't notice the gap, and fell,” says Mark. “Just awful. A truly awful accident.”
Mark saw that Matt was still conscious but horrifically injured. “He was clearly in a lot of pain, and then I saw the extent of his injuries: one was an above-the-knee amputation, one was a below-the-knee amputation.
“The above-the-knee amputation was obviously the worse injury because his blood was pumping out at a significant rate. I knew that he probably had a couple of minutes to live, and I knew that if I didn’t do anything he was going to die.”
After checking that no trains were about to thunder through, and after reassuring himself that the power came from overhead wires rather than an electrified rail, Mark jumped down on to the track and began removing his belt to make a tourniquet.
He then shouted at one man to act as a look-out for oncoming trains and, knowing he’d need a second tourniquet, shouted to another man, John Thorp, to get him a belt: “John said ‘I’ve got a belt myself’, and I could see he wasn’t panicking, so I said ‘Right, stop – jump down and help me down here’.”
Meanwhile, Mark had spotted another likely assistant: Pamela Abbott from Stapleford. “I said ‘Can you help?’ And she jumped down as well.” Matt couldn't have been in better hands: John is a former customs officer with first aid training, while Pamela had done a Red Cross first aid course.
“There was a mix of people on the platform: there were people panicking; there were people who left quickly; there were what I would call the ‘grief chasers’ – the nosy ones; and there were people who wanted to help,” says Mark. “Luckily I spotted two of those.”
Mark fastened his belt around Matt’s above-the-knee injury, and asked John to hold it in place, “but the blood was still coming, so I got him to make a fist and push it into the top of Matt’s thigh, where the femoral artery is. I’m not a medic, but every soldier deploying to Afghanistan does battlefield first aid training, so I knew the basic rudiments of trauma care.”
Using John’s belt, he then made a tourniquet for Pamela to hold in place on the other leg and, after putting his scarf between Matt’s face and the stony ground, concentrated on keeping him calm. “Reassuring the casualty is incredibly important, it keeps them alive,” explains Mark.
“He said 'am I going to die?' And I said 'Look mate, you’re not going to die. I’ve seen worse – unbelievably I have seen worse – and you’re going to be fine'.”
Face down on the ground, Matt didn’t realise the extent of his injuries and asked Mark what had happened. “I said 'What do you want to know?' and he said 'Tell me the truth'. I said ‘OK, both legs are off’.
“But he was so pragmatic and brave. Incredibly, he was more concerned about his mum than he was about himself: she was in the car park waiting to pick him up, and he was very worried about her sitting in her car, seeing stuff going on and not knowing what it was. Which tells you an awful lot about Matt, I think.”
By this time, a policeman had arrived and was putting a cordon in place: Mark shouted out Matt’s mum’s name, car registration and mobile number and sent the policeman to find her “and under no circumstances to allow her onto the platform.”
With relief, Mark realised that Matt was now stable. “I knew he’d sustained horrific injuries, and he clearly needed medical attention, but we’d stopped the bleeding. I only found out after from a medic at the hospital that he’d lost a significant amount of blood. They said he had probably five minutes before he would have died from bleeding out.”
Yet Mark brushes aside talk of bravery and heroism. “Brave, stupid, there’s a fine line,” he laughs. “I suppose the brave thing was jumping down, knowing that in commuter rush-hour, another train could be coming any minute. But I don’t consider it brave, I just think it was the right thing to do.
“The brave ones were John and Pamela for jumping down and listening to some random stranger telling them what to do. An awful lot of people walked away that day. If everyone had done that, Matt wouldn’t be alive today, so it was completely selfless of those two to take a stand and offer their help.
“But also Matt was incredibly brave. For me it was humbling to see a young man with such horrific injuries dealing with them so stoically.”
Mark spent 20 minutes on the track with Matt before he was blue-lighted to Addenbrooke's, then went to the toilets to try to wash off the blood. Realising he wouldn't be able to catch another train, he took a taxi to Audley End to pick up his car and drive home.
“I remember getting in the car thinking ‘Crikey, that wasn't what I was expecting on my commute home!’ But I felt absolutely fine. Unfortunately I've seen injuries of a similar nature from the army, so I wasn’t really shocked. And it sounds cold, but I did sleep that night.”
The following morning, Mark rang Addenbrooke’s. “I knew that they wouldn't be able to give me any details, because I wasn’t a family member, but I just wanted to know that he'd lived. They said he’d had an operation last night and was in a stable condition, and just I felt an immense sense of relief.”
Mark left his phone number, and a few days later Matt called to thank him – and asked him to visit. As they hadn’t seen each other’s faces before, it was, says Mark, an emotional moment.
“We never actually saw each other because Matt had been face down, so this was first time, although he’d seen my face in the paper so he had a head start! It was great. He was in good spirits and cracking jokes – he’s just a hugely positive person.”
Mark visited him several times in hospital; at the end of last month, Matt went home, “and I’ve said I’ll come and pester him at his house,” says Mark with a smile. “We've struck up a rather surreal friendship. I don't know how best to describe it, but it's great.
“So after an awful accident, it’s a good news story: Matt’s an immensely strong character who will get through this. He's into scuba diving and snowboarding and, OK, it'll change how he does those activities, but it won't stop him. He’ll hopefully lead a very healthy and successful life for another 60, 70 years.”
Is he haunted by memories of that day? “If things had turned out differently I might have been, but as awful and graphic as it was, I don't think of Matt on the track, I think of him wheeling himself round – and very soon he'll be on artificial limbs, getting on with his life.
“For me it's a happy ending to an unbelievably tragic accident. It’s just an incredible piece of good fortune that I seemed to be the right person in the right place at the right time.”
Today, Mark continues to enjoy his quiet life with his wife, Colette, and children Freya, 10, and Finley, 9. But the irony of that fateful event will never escape him.
“It's funny isn’t it? I spent 20 years in the army and yes, I've seen terrible accidents and injuries, but it's the first time I've got hands-on and saved somebody's life. It's just weird that it happened after I'd left the army, coming home from work in a suit!”
From April 2013. (c) Cambridge News