Donald Jackson (SH 75-80) writes:

Origin of the DDD tag – How St Bees School helped to save my life!

“In the mid 80s, I was an undergraduate at Oxford and spent holidays at the parental home in Worcester.

One summer, my younger sister Caroline was planning to go and stay in Keswick, in the Lake District, with seven friends. The venue was the house of a family friend.

As their group did not collectively possess enough cars and driving licences, I offered to drive up with them and carry on to Scotland for a few days.

On the day of the drive we arrived in the late afternoon. Having dropped off my passengers, I carried on to St Bees, where I spent the evening with old school friends, notably James Craig. Thus, I returned to Keswick after pub-closing time, but sober, as I had been driving.

Caroline and her friends were having a toga party, and it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to catch them up in terms of party mood, as there was little drink left.  Also, they all knew each other, and I didn’t know most of them; and the ‘music’ was too loud for going to bed to be an option.

Thus, I decided to go for a little stroll behind the house, and enjoy the beauty of a summer’s night in the Lake District. One of Caroline’s friends, Steve Carroll, said that he would join me, as he wanted some fresh air.

We walked along a path a few hundred yards to the base of Castle Crag, and then climbed up to the top of this small rise by moonlight. From the top, it is possible to see two lakes: Bassenthwaite and Derwentwater; we enjoyed the view for a few moments.

We then set off to retrace our steps. After a couple of minutes we realised that we had strayed off the path. This made it darker, as we were now amongst trees.  Since we knew that the path could only be a matter of yards to our left, we started to walk on an angle to converge with it.

At one point we came face to face with the top of what was clearly a very tall tree, so we realised that there was a big drop in front of us. From this point we followed the contour back towards the path, walking along a lesser path.

Suddenly I dropped through the air and fell about 20 feet. Almost before I knew it was happening I had come to rest. The first thing I did was to say to Steve ‘Don’t move an inch’. He was probably startled to hear my voice from directly below him. This was the only time in my life that I have been grateful to be with a smoker.  He struck a couple of matches, which enabled us to take stock of the situation. I could go neither up nor down, nor to either side. The cliff-face of a small worked-out quarry was too close to sheer. There was at least 20 feet more below me, to a steep slope strewn with large, loose boulders.

Steve headed back to the house to phone for the rescue services, while I took further stock. I had a big bump on my head, and bangs on both elbows and knees.  I was on a ledge which was marginally smaller than one of my feet. Initially I had hand-holds for each hand, but these rapidly crumbled away, leaving me supporting myself on one foot. I was able, gingerly, to shift position every few minutes, and even to change feet occasionally, so as to avoid pins and needles becoming too serious.
I put my hand round my back, and found a long gash by my spine. The hand slipped into a nice, warm, velvety groove which was oozing blood, and some safety mechanism probably cut in because I didn’t really think about this wound.

While waiting for Steve and help, I decided to keep my mind occupied in order to avoid dropping off, in both senses, as it was now the wee small hours.

Initially I tried to work out if, having just avoided death, and still facing it, I should be eligible for profound thoughts, images of past life flashing past or anything of the sort. But nothing happened.

Plan B was to recite stuff.  Having recently read some of the Fitzgerald translations of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, I started with those. But the first one which came to mind started:
Ah come with old Khayyam, and leave the wise,
To wrangle ….
but I got no further. Subsequent pondering led to the conclusion that a sub-conscious mechanism intervened, as the quatrain continues:
.. one thing is certain, that life flies
Not the best message to dwell on! I turned next to Henry V, my ‘O’ level play at St Bees.

During my O Level year, I often received punishment lines to write. The words had to be copied from a book. So, I had decided to kill two birds with one stone by memorising enough to allow me to write 100 lines.

Between school and university, while living in a kibbutz in Nazareth, I often worked night shifts in a bakery. It was such mechanical work that I learned a few additional lines of Henry V before each night shift, and then recited the play up to and including the new lines.

In the end I knew the whole of Act I and part of Act II by heart. This includes what is regarded by some as the most boring speech in the whole of Shakespeare, the Salic Law speech.

So the text which I could recite amounted to an hour’s worth; which was useful, hanging off a cliff!

While reciting, I generally felt that I wouldn’t be able to hold on for very long, and it seemed implausible to survive the remaining fall without sustaining horrific injuries, I decided that my best chance was to fall head-first and hope for a clean kill. For two hours, after the handholds had crumbled, I kept my hands inside my waistband to prevent myself using them during the impending fall.

Meanwhile Steve had alerted the household, and the rescue services. The initial 999 reaction was that it might be a wind-up, so PC Plod was sent to check that it wasn’t a hoax. He was directed towards my eyrie. He shone a torch up and saw me and asked if I was hurt.

Then the mountain rescue people were called out. They were unsure whether I was more accessible from above or below. In the end they decided to belay a rope round a tree above me, send one fellow down to strap me into a stretcher, and then lower me to the forest floor.

The chap came down by rope and put another rope under my shoulders. Having been hanging on for about two hours, for most of which time I was contemplating how best to ensure a clean dashing out of brains, this was welcome.

He asked about my injuries and inspected the spinal cut and shouted up ‘Send down the biggest dressing we’ve got.  Severe flesh wound.’  He did some dressing of the wound, and strapped me into a stretcher.

In the end I was lowered to where a few of them could carry me. They refused my request to walk.  I suppose they knew that the wound was very close to my spine. But I was upset, because I felt fine and was concerned that Caroline (and others) would be unduly alarmed to see me thus trussed up like an oven-ready turkey.

As I recall, I stuck my tongue out as I was carried past Caroline to show that all was well.

At the hospital in Keswick, a nurse spent a half hour or so pulling grit out of my back while we waited for the doctor. He tested my vertebrae to see my reaction, to check whether there was a real risk of spinal injury. A painful experience.

I suspected the thought was that I had been a reveller at a party!  But of a household of drunken teenagers – how likely is it that the one who went walkabout and fell off a cliff was the only sober one?

At Carlisle hospital a lady doctor spent almost an hour putting in stitches. In addition to putting in 10 internal, soluble stitches and 26 external ones, she was applying the local anaesthetic by injection. The system seemed to be that the anaesthetic lasted for 2 ½ stitches; so, we got into a cosy little routine whereby halfway through each third stitch I would tell her that she had gone past the anaesthetised area, and she would agree to give me another jab after the current stitch was finished.

She also gave me a monster tetanus jab, and a general painkiller. Both went into my left thigh, and for the second she said, ‘This won’t hurt as much, as I can use the same hole’. Curiously, this didn’t encourage me much, and I am convinced that for one or other of them someone stood pouring two pints of liquid through a kitchen funnel via a huge syringe into my leg.

My parents had rallied round by abandoning a good night’s sleep in Worcester and driving up the motorway to sort things out. The hospital was happy to discharge me once I was safely stitched up, so my mother drove me home the same day.

I was given a course of antibiotics to take over the next two weeks, and some painkillers. The latter were also supposed to last a while, but the hospital staff said that because a 200 mile car journey might tickle an injured back somewhat, I could take extra painkillers on the journey if need be.

It was a very painful journey, despite the extreme solicitude of my mother, who is an excellent driver. I particularly noticed a curb we had to drive over to enter a petrol station forecourt. By the time we got home, I had finished the entire course of painkillers. Except that I had actually finished the two-week antibiotic course, and not had a single painkiller, which would explain the discomfort on the drive.

By now the Worcester Evening News had hit the streets. Presumably the Keswick local rag had got the story from the rescue services, and established a few salient facts, and passed them on to their counterparts where I lived. And so it was that the evening edition bore the front page headline:
‘Death Drop Don Saved.’

A few people read this story and immediately concluded that I might in some way be in trouble, and a couple telephoned in evident distress, which we had to defuse as convincingly as possible.

I was upset by the somewhat sensational reporting, and contacted the newspaper, asking them to publish a follow-up, pointing out that rumours of my near-death were greatly exaggerated. They professionally retorted that ‘Local Man Nearly Dies’ makes better newspaper copy than ‘Local man not badly hurt after all’.

So, I had to think up a scheme to interest them.

First, I offered them a photograph of the spinal wound, in case perchance they might find a large acreage of bandage in any way usable.

Secondly, I pointed out that I had been reciting Shakespeare for two hours.

I understand that this latter detail probably led to the story being syndicated somewhat more widely; for when I returned to Oxford next term several people, including members of college staff, had read of the incident in the national press.  I never saw any of those articles. However, I received a signed copy of a new edition of Henry V, autographed by the editor, Gary Taylor, with the inscription ‘Seldom can anyone have made better use of this play!’

The accident caused me to delay an inter-rail trip round Europe by a couple of weeks; but I did do the trip late. Thus, the only lasting effects on me (as of 20 years later) were a scar along my spine and a name, DDD (or Death Drop, for those who prefer to be more formal).”

 

Home

The St Beghian Society    
St Bees School,    St Bees,    Cumbria,    CA27 0DS.

         Tel: (01946) 828093      Email: osb@stbeesschool.co.uk      Web: www.st-beghian-society.co.uk