'Me and my wife were hit by a juggernaut on the M1 – doing 60mph – and survived to tell the tale'

August bank holiday’s terrible motorway crash – a collision involving two juggernauts and a hapless minibus, killing eight people, nearly killing another three – awoke in Godfrey Holmes memories of the awful day another juggernaut on that same motorway came so very close to wiping out him and his wife…

Several people died after a minibus and two lorries crashed in Newport Pagnell (Alamy)

Friday evening – 5:55pm. It had to be a Friday. The last Friday of November. It had to be that day: a “straightforward” journey from a Hinckley, Leicestershire, funeral, wake, then north to Chesterfield. Home. Or at least a rare cinema booking near to home: a first showing of The Calendar Girls.

Pitch black. It had to be pitch black: one of the few stretches of the M1 still unlit. In the slow lane: an unexpected shunt. Only a push from behind our little Rover 200 hatchback. “I can survive a shunt!” I said to myself: “Simply pull on to the hard shoulder and assess the damage.” If only.

For this was no ordinary shunt. A sole independent witness – the only person prepared to stop and ask us if we were all right, despite her being on the way to a family re-union – explained that two-and-a-half minutes of sheer terror. She said that a huge juggernaut – a 40-ton juggernaut – had suddenly pulled in from the middle lane into “our” lane.

Who knows, all these years later, what was on his mind? Whatever distracted him, and it certainly wasn’t us, he wasn't counting the number of cars or motorcycles he was passing, so chose not to pass any more of them. Hence the shunt. No ordinary shunt.

To my utter disbelief, I was not permitted to keep my course. Not even for a few seconds. The first lights I saw were his headlamps as I passed in front of his fast-moving cab. He: six foot above contradiction. By now I was driving in a big circle. Clockwise, across the middle lane without trouble. But then, the second set of lights. Here I was heading back, due south, to Nottingham, from which junction I had cruised only 18 minutes beforehand. Due south on the M1’s north carriageway. In the rush hour. And in other travellers’ fast lane.

Slowly it dawned on me that I was about to die. With my wife about to die next to me, in the front passenger seat. We could not possibly survive. This refrigerated HGV had not hit us cleanly, but as a cricketer’s willow hitting the ball for six. In a spin. Exploiting the possibility of taking advantage of the bowler’s spin. A ball hit to save the cricketer being declared out. So, instead, me and my wife were to be declared out by whichever umpire is in the skies.

I prayed to that umpire. God had been mentioned a lot in that afternoon’s happy funeral service. Why happy? Because my sister’s dear mother-in-law had died peacefully in her nineties after a good life. I became strangely prepared for the pavilion.

Somehow, miraculously and illogically, I never braked. Had I braked even gently, disaster would have ensued. And my passenger would have potentially suffered more than me: she nearer imminent impact. Multiple impacts.

No, I steered and steered. In a clockwise circle, until our battered vehicle was neatly and innocuously parked on the hard shoulder. Amazingly: facing north, not south, and right behind the offending lorry – both with our engines off. Our sole witness left her address and her good wishes and sped off. I became completely illogical.

Instead of ringing police from a wayside telephone, I tried to get through to 999 on a mobile: “North of Nottingham, six or seven miles north of Tibshelf,” not making it clear we were even on a motorway. So the police and ambulance took ages to locate us. Although non-aggressive, the bemused lorry driver wasn’t much help. He didn’t even want to leave his cab. For a long while, he appeared more anxious to get back to his Boroughbridge yard, and homestead, than to unravel the enormity, the calamity, of what had overtaken us two.

At least juggernauts are identifiable. Posh writing all over their backs and sides: advertising in a manner unfamiliar to most car owners, unless those owners engage the services of a second-hand car dealer. And, at that moment, my Rover looked distinctly second-hand, even if not yet condemned to the scrap-heap.

Nor was the dilatory police constable much more helpful. RTA. “Put it down as an RTA!” he shouted to his mate above the noise of traffic. “No visible injuries. The ambulance can leave the scene.” It was then that I awoke from my stupor and repeated over and again: “ But he nearly killed us! Killed us!.... Surely he needs locking up?”

The scene on the M1 in June 2003, where five people were killed in a massive motorway pile-up in Leicestershire (PA)

No way was this battle-hardened constable having that. “Act of god: we’ll put it down as minor collision. All settled!” he announced as he prepared to pack up for the weekend. To his extreme displeasure, I insisted he take a full statement from myself, from my bewildered wife, and then from the nonchalant trucker. Unfairly, I was not allowed to hear the latter “interview” – nor know its conclusion.

Months later, I turned up at the relevant police station for the transcript, only to be handed about five lines. Five factual lines from an unapologetic driver who had mis-chanced to find us in his path. These are the questions police should have asked, but didn’t:

• temperature of the lorry cab?
• driver’s seating arrangement?
• cab radio / CD?
• was the driver smoking or preparing to smoke?
• was he under pressure from his employer, the haulage company, to get back to Boroughbridge, a full 83 miles still to go, via the motorway?
• was he missing his family or worried about his family?
• when had he rested that day?
• was he on the phone at the moment of impact? (intriguingly, this was the last weekday before drivers’ hand-held telephones were to be outlawed)?
• was he reading a Satnav?
• had he cleaned the inside of his windscreen?
• had he access to any mirror revealing what vehicle was on his left, to his nearside?
• did he know he was still in the process of overtaking?

The following Monday, I was not slow pleading with police to prosecute. It would be our first and last chance to have all our questions answered – and to witness a measure of punitive or restorative justice. After all, we had both been within a whisker of obliteration. Miraculously, when a year later I ventured to measure the layout, police resolutely refusing to do the full reconstruction I begged them to do, I discovered that the bit of the M1 hard shoulder I had needed that evening was much wider than anywhere else on the network. For, back in the 1960s, the ministry had hoped to build services, right opposite the ancient and revered Hardwick Hall: itself clearly visible to speeding excursionists each summer.

My insurer’s lawyer was from a huge Sheffield firm: efficient in their own way – if pushed. I was at first pleasantly surprised to find the haulage magnate’s cheque for £150 (my “excess”) in my hand the following Wednesday. Maybe everything would be settle quicker than expected? I hoped.

Then it dawned on me that I had been fobbed off. Well and truly fobbed off. Boroughbridge thought that was end of story. The car was taken from our drive by a low-loader to an approved repairer. We would not have to pay anything more. Indeed, we would have the use of a small Nissan Micra until our Rover was returned to us. Nobody, nobody at all, knew of our post-traumatic stress, which lasted a full nine months. To say nothing of how a cross-torso seat belt, suddenly tightened, might impact upon my wife’s later and debilitating breast cancer.

Friends and relatives, surprisingly, also dismissed it as just an accident. Only our longstanding neighbour – a kindly woman in her early 80s – fully understood how close she was to never seeing us alive again. Her wonderful letter – hastily penned on to a page from her grandchild’s lined exercise book – I retain to this day. And it still makes me cry. Even though the neighbour along with my wife are no longer here to give further account.

The eagerly-awaited letter from the Crown Prosecution Service, when it came through the post, was intended to be a moment of calm, even of reconciliation. Instead, it sent me into a frenzy. A dervish’s frenzy. Derbyshire police had a policy of offering survivors two choices, but not both. We could either have the juggernaut’s driver done for “driving without due care and attention” – not in the High Court, with judge and jury, but in Ilkeston’s bleak concrete coffin of a Magistates’ Court where neither employer nor employee would have any obligation whatsoever to turn up. Expected fine: £100 to £120… and three points.

OR we could recommend two days of driver re-training, at a Department of Transport depot, where the trucker – his firm paying the required £150 – would have to demonstrate that he still possessed some of the skills that got him his job in the first place.

It was a no-brainer: the re-training. And no day in court for either of us. That made me agitated. Unbelievably agitated. Stung. Hung out to dry. Ignored.

Three years later, my wife got £2,000 off the Boroughbridge insurer; myself, a little more. Cash for us, fortunately, was neither the main issue nor our necessity. And I have still received no apology – spoken or written – from the driver or the haulage firm. That hurts. After all, it would cost them nothing. He’s been found at fault, thus an apology would not add to their woes. Their woes were actually few. Such a gargantuan juggernaut sustains virtually no damage when hitting a weaker road-user.

And my own physical injury? A distinct red and purple bruise to my left knee, exactly the shape and the roundness of a cricket ball! To be the ball. To be knocked about by a heedless, rampaging 40-ton lorry, doing 60 miles an hour: a cumulative 2400 tons on impact... and ''escaping”?