The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

40 : The Key to Anchor Lake

Chapter 16 of The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt – "1971: the Ben Iuchair Bus Crash"

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Monday 15th February 1971

In 1971, the first half term of the year fell in the second week of February. It was a cold, bitter week up in Anchor Lake, plagued by snow and ice and freezing rains, the weather so poor that the town's children were looking forward to returning to school. They had spent nine days stuck at home, unable to do anything but amuse themselves indoors or wrap up in so many layers to go outside that they looked more like snowmen than their slushy creations.

Monday the 15th marked the first day back. The weather was still atrocious, the roads iced and gritted over and over, but a little snow doesn't grind life in the Highlands to a halt. We can handle freezing temperatures, and schools showed no hint of remaining shut until the icy storms lifted.

That morning, the seventeen children who take the bus from Anchor Lake to Kinmuir – one of several school options in the area, a forty-minute journey northwest around Ben Iuchair – were excited to get out of their houses and see their friends again. At seven forty in the morning, the bus pulled up outside the Anchor Lake library, parents and guardians waving off their children before bundling up and heading off for work.

The ride took longer that morning. The roads were extremely treacherous, especially higher up in the winding tracks that circle the mountain and look down on the valleys below. It took almost an hour that morning, and by the time the children arrived, the first bell of the school day was ringing, signalling for them to hurry to their classrooms for registration. But everybody made it there in one piece, if a little cold and tired.

A little over seven hours later at four o'clock, the minibus was ready, engine idling outside the gates to Kinmuir School, a combined secondary, primary, and pre-school serving the remote villages of the valleys surrounding Ben Iuchair. The older children raced there from their final lessons, ten minutes between the final bell of the day and the bus's departure. The younger children, from Primary 1 through to Primary 7, were escorted by a teacher.

By six minutes past four, the bus was full. Seventeen children on board, the youngest only just six years old and the oldest almost fifteen. All from Anchor Lake, from twelve separate families. Three children from one family took that bus, the fourth a year too young for school. Less than an hour later, that family was cleaved in half. Three siblings dead, leaving their parents and their baby brother to cope with the aftermath.

The snow had continued to fall throughout the day. Around Kinmuir, it wasn't enough to stick, but it was colder up in the mountains, the roads less travelled. What didn't stick became black ice, melting and refreezing beneath the snow that settled.

The driver was experienced. A former trucker with twenty years of experience on Scotland's narrow, winding, snow-covered roads, he was likely the best person for the job of transporting precious children from one remote town to another. He knew his minibus well, the same one he had been driving for five years, fitted with snow tyres and an emergency kit fit to help him and a bus full of children survive in the event of a winter breakdown.

Who can say what really happened? Only the driver knows. Perhaps his foot slipped on the pedal. Maybe he lost focus for a fraction of a second, or he oversteered, or understeered. Maybe he was distracted by the giddy, giggling children behind him, catching up on their first day back at school; maybe he glanced in the mirror or turned around to shush them at the worst possible moment.

It's impossible to know. But at half past four that Monday afternoon, the sky already dark, the sun already set, the bus careened off the mountain road. It smashed through the weak afterthought of a safety barrier and tumbled down the side of Ben Iuchair, into the dense forestry. The driver couldn't have done anything to stop the rolling. He couldn't have known that most of the children had undone their seatbelts to talk to their friends, reaching over each other and twisting in their seats.

There was no hope for them when the bus fell. Their bodies were tossed around inside the metal box, half of them already dead before the van came to a stop in a craggy crevice at the bottom of the mountainside. It hardly resembled a van by the time it came to rest on its side, tipping into a freezing stream.

The cold set in quickly, without the van's heating to keep warm. Surrounded by her schoolmates' bodies and covered in blood that she didn't know the origin of, Betsy Martins was still alive. Despite the horror of the accident, she was still in one piece – sixteen of her friends had just lost their lives; the driver had wheezed his final breaths, and she was still awake.

Her right arm was shattered, her skin torn, the bone poking through. Her left arm was a bloodied mess, glittering with shards of glass that had impaled her when the window had smashed. Her kneecaps had been crushed by the impact, several ribs fractured, her vision blurred. But she was still alive, still fighting. And freezing fast.

The bus wasn't due in Anchor Lake for at least another twenty minutes, and it was often another twenty minutes behind schedule in winter. It was long after five o'clock, forty-five minutes after the accident, before anyone realised that something was wrong. Fifty minutes passed before a concerned parent called the school, who confirmed that the bus had left Kinmuir over an hour ago.

After another ten minutes of concern, two fathers volunteered to drive the route – a route that hardly sees any traffic – to see if the bus had got into trouble. They called the police before they left, and each got in a truck and set off.

It took them thirty minutes to reach the spot where the bus had crashed. They could see the remains of the minibus from the road, but it was unreachable. When they yelled down to the children, begging for a response, Betsy couldn't find her voice. Her lung was punctured, her breaths laboured, skin turning blue.

One of the fathers raced back to Anchor Lake. The other stayed. It was an hour before emergency services arrived on the scene, all three arriving in a blur of sirens and lights. A helicopter managed to land in a clearing further into the valley; firefighters were able to clamber down the mountainside and race to the van.

Betsy had lost consciousness, her body shutting down, but she was still breathing. She still had a pulse. She was the first to be pulled from the wreckage, her limp and broken body airlifted seventy miles to a hospital in Inverness, the only one to survive the awful crash.

It took hours for firefighters to free every child from the van, the metal distorted and bodies crushed. They were still working in the sub-zero temperatures as Betsy was rushed into emergency surgery, surgeons racing to fix a bleed in her brain amidst her myriad of other injuries.

The crash decimated the youth population in Anchor Lake. Families were torn to piece, several parents losing their only children in the devastating accident. Lives were ruined, a mere two years after the town had lost ten children to the hands of a murderer. There were two sets of parents who lost one child to a killer kidnapper in 1969, only to lose their second in a freak accident in 1971.

It was deemed a miracle that Betsy Martins survived. By all accounts, she shouldn't have. Her injuries were more severe than she had realised at the time, and the combination of shock and hypothermia should have marked her last breaths. But she made it. She beat the odds, every one of them. Every doctor was proved wrong: the ones who said she wouldn't walk again; wouldn't talk again; wouldn't be able to hold a pen; wouldn't remember.

She walked. She talked. She learnt how to write again. And she remembered every second.

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