Bridge Danger

As a child I lived in Mid-Sussex. At the age of about 10 in 1955, I become trapped with two friends on a very high railway bridge about a quarter of a mile from where I lived, as we attempted to edge our way across a single brick ledge on the outside of the bridge about 80 foot above the tracks. We couldn’t move either way, paralysed with fear, and if we had slipped we would have been killed in the fall. We shouted at every car that passed, and eventually two men on bicycles pulled us over the parapet. I moved from London to Bournemouth in 1982. My Mother died in 1986 from a longstanding illness, and it was thought that she might pass away within a week or two. I was out sailing my boat in Poole Bay the day she died, having seen her the day before and expecting her to live a little longer. Obviously she was in my thoughts. I was sailing back in to Poole Harbour and had to slow and tack to avoid the Sandbanks chain ferry, and as I neared the shore I glanced across and saw an elderly lady who looked exactly like my Mother waving at me, I waved back. I returned home at 8pm to a telephone ansaphone message from my sister who also lives in Bournemouth, to say that my Mother had passed away that afternoon. I returned the call, and she told me a very strange thing. She had been on the Sandbanks ferry with her husband that afternoon, thought they saw me sailing in to the harbour, and then looked to shore and saw the lady waving looking just like our Mother. I returned the following day after work to mid-Sussex to see my Father. As I drove up to the same railway bridge in the dark, I saw a car which had just stopped in the middle of the bridge, the lights illuminating a young woman, on all fours on the parapet, trembling and shaking. I jumped out of my car as did the other driver, and between us we grabbed the girl. I held on to her on the back seat of his car, and we drove to the local Mental Hospital where we delivered the girl safely to the attendants. I then got into the front seat of the car, and realised that I knew the driver, who I had not seen for over 30 years. He was one of the other two boys trapped with me on the bridge when we were children. We maybe had saved the life of a girl at the very spot we could so easily have died ourselves all those years ago