Sometimes a change in life comes at the speed and force of a motorbike crashing out of control, bouncing off one car and crashing into another, while its rider slides along the road.
The Broomway links Foulness Island to the mainland and is sometimes called the UK’s most dangerous right of way. Most of the time it sits under estuarine water. From the island, looking out at the grey horizon beyond, the crumbling on-ramp down into the water looks like a path to the Land of the Dead. It is so-known because its route was marked by tufts of broom to guide your steps. Along with the fast and deceptive tides there is quicksand, sand craters and unexploded ordnance. You need a guide, and should start your journey as the tide starts its ebb, to give you as much time as possible to pick your way along it.
Last Sunday (1st June 2025), I visited Foulness Island with my friends Dave and Hannah and looked across the Broomway, and even walked a little down it.
On getting home, tired after a long day, I got a call from my brother’s wife to say that he’d had a serious motorcycle accident and was being airlifted to hospital – St George’s in Tooting, where he was born. I said I’d be there straight away and got a cab. On the way, I get the details from his wife. Severe head injuries, severe chest injuries, multiple fractures to the spine. I phone our mum, on holiday in Crete. Police meet me at A&E, with practiced professionalism despite pitying, almost fearful eyes, and say they will go and get my mum, with emergency lights on in both directions. I explain. His wife is in a private, locked room to the side, and I go in and we hug.
It’s clear from people’s expressions, from the willingness of the police to fetch our mum, even from the spartan, lockable room with its offensively neutral wall art and board of information, that it is very possible that he might die.
A consultant comes in, explains the situation and confirms what has been evident in all this hurly-burly of things hadn’t even existed an hour ago: “right now, the priority is to save his life.” And so you sit, and wait, in the unforgiving halogen light, with similarly shellshocked, tired people outside. You don’t panic, you can’t do anything except feel tired, and coaliesce into a sort of frozen, passive acknowledgement that you are in the middle of something bad happening. And you must sit in a room and wait for information.
At some point the consultant from resus comes in and tells us he’s stabilised but in a medically induced coma. He has a clot on his brain and severe chest injuries, mostly on his right side. Good news: his abdomen is intact; liver, spleen, kidneys etc. They let me in to see him. Pale, deep in coma, but recognisably my brother. His body underneath the cover is smashed up, but his face is intact somehow, despite the cranial fractures and head trauma. He doesn’t look dead. But he does look suspended, very far away.
Police go and get my other brother, J’s twin. They are going to move him up to Neuro ICU. This must be about 2:30am. The three of us agree that we will wait until he’s settled in and then go home. There’s nothing we can do of course, but you need to be there, a logic that has governed this last week.
It takes two and a bit hours to set him up in ICU. My brother and I are asked to look at his biking leathers. The air ambulance crew cut him out of them, and there are bloodstains on the inside. There’s nothing to find other than a tenner and his house keys. The police have taken his phone and helmet for analysis. We ask them to dispose of the leathers.
Eventually, we are let in to see him, his smashed body held together by countless cannulas, drains, blocks, wires and tubes. Six or so monitors are dense with information, ready to bleep at the slightest irregularity.
When we leave it is getting light, and I go home and sleep for a couple of hours, while my brother crashes on the sofa. He’s gone when I get up, and I must start thinking about how to inform his work.
Sometimes a change in life comes at the speed and force of a motorbike crashing out of control, bouncing off one car and crashing into another, while its rider slides along the road along his right side. That impact, mangling a human body and a life, sends out ripples, or as my other brother later says, a blast radius. That blast radius communicates not just the fact of the crash, but the violence of it as well, to the people in immediate relation to the rider, in the front line. The mess of a life is also suddenly frozen at a moment like this, as if someone in authority has suddenly shouted ‘STOP’ in a game, and we must pick up and manage the pieces of an imperfect set of relationships and histories, like my brother, now held uncertainly in suspension.
Later in the week someone says ‘it must be exhausting just coming to terms with it all’ And I realise that it isn’t possible to come to terms with anything. There isn’t anything to come to terms with. It’s all uncertainty, and reined in speculation, and not thinking, just waiting, and holding feelings, again all in suspension.
I now write this three surgeries later – spine, arm and scapula, chest and ribs – all successful in their own terms. J himself, has been unresponding, eyes partially open from time to time, looking at you without comprehension, unable to follow nurse instructions, leaving us all completely uncertain still about where he will be, what he will be. That is apart from one miraculous day last Saturday where his eyes were open and he was – impossible to believe – smiling at jokes and trying to speak, despite the tubes going down through his mouth into his stomach and airways. There he is, I thought, there’s J.
He was given an alphabet board to see if it would help him communicate, but he couldn’t spell words and became distressed.
Since then he has submerged back beneath sedation, fever and delirium – a common feature of ICU apparently. There was a day when his breathing equipment came out, but his breathing was too ragged and weak, and they had to put it back in.
Although at one stage he was writhing in bed with pain, temperature, and the itchy skin that can apparently come with morphine, it is unclear whether his right side will regain any mobility.
It goes without saying that the medical staff at St George’s have already delivered a miracle. And it is absolutely clear that the air ambulance team saved his life.
Beyond that?
Foulness Island is MoD land, and like MoD land generally, there is a tension. Underpopulated, as if in the moments or years after some cataclysm, plague, or rules and regs, firing ranges, red flags, barriers, readied against some crisis or disaster.
The Broomway’s path onto and off the island is confusing and uncertain. It is easy, apparently, to overshoot and end up in the sea, and of course then there is the quicksand, sand craters and unexploded ordnance. The incoming tide and its deceptive eddies and runs. Despite how it appeared that day, last Sunday, it is not a path to the Land of the Dead, but danger and uncertainty surrounds it, overwhelms it. When you are on its path it does not look like you are anywhere at all. As my brother makes his slow, painful way back from the moment his motorcycle smashed into a car, from the threshold he was at on that Sunday night in resus, what is the mainland on which he will set foot? What island?
Why am I figuring such a direct emotional experience in this way? Because the overriding sensation in the week after was of being a sort of block of dense nothing. A sort of emotional constipation and fatigue – a draining continuation of that coalescing feeling in the emergency room on the first night. It is inarticulate, and the most natural answer to anyone who asks me how I am feeling is ‘I don’t know. Tired.’ When I sit with him and hold his hand, I just gaze at his face and watch him breathing, and speak to him if he opens his eyes slightly, though if they’re shut I prefer to let him rest. I call this ‘collecting my thoughts’ and although that’s not quite right, it is almost tranquil, just being able to hold that moment, because the radius of moments out from just sitting there with him and waiting for him to get better is meaningless and anchoring emotions in that sand exhausting.
