Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2007 | Page 25

After
the
crash
the
abyss

PROPERTY

life

A mother whose
18-year-old son
died in a car crash
is campaigning
for greater safety
on the roads. She
talks to Rosalind
Whistance
By Roz Whistance

“Actually I’m lucky,” says Wendy
Newnham. “My son died, but he wasn’t
responsible for the death of anyone
else. I haven’t got to live thinking he
caused the death of any other person.”
Wendy had passed her old car on to her
eldest son Martin – confident that the little
Metro was hardly boy-racer material – only
a few days earlier. With
a car-full of friends from
Carisbrooke High School,
he took a bend too fast,
over-steered when he met
a car coming the other way,
and ploughed into a parked
4x4. His passengers were
injured but no-one else
lost their life. That is the
luck Wendy talks about.
And the consequence was, he cast his
family into the abyss that is bereavement.
He has gone but they are left with the
wreckage. “I am still angry with him for
being so thoughtless,” Wendy says.
“If he walked in tomorrow I’d knock
his block off. Then I’d hug him.”
She doesn’t cry when she says this,
but then she has said it many times.
The positive of the negative of her son’s

death, as she puts it, is that she has
joined the Road Safety campaign to
educate others about driving safely – to
cut deaths and injuries on the roads.
With Family Liaison Officer PC Clive
Richardson, she has become the human
reality check for all of us on the Isle of
Wight who take risks on the roads.

into her own, everyone’s, worst nightmare.
Usually the demonstration – police sirens,
fire brigade cutting open a smashed-up
car, a body dragged out and put into a
body bag – is a reconstruction of her son’s
crash. For the Garlic Festival the scenario
was deliberately changed to reflect the
demographic of that event. “Dads will have
been in the beer tent trying
out the garlic beer. Kids
are concerned about their
safety driving home,” says
Wendy. “So the scene in this
case was a drunk driver.”
Sometimes, when Wendy’s
story is broadcast at
events, she cries at the
memory of her middle
son, Ryan, who was
just a scant two years younger than the
brother he’d just seen crash his car,
walking down the path, sobbing.
Other times it is the memory of watching
her son’s heart monitor slowly weaken
that causes her to break down.
Coping, as a word to describe Wendy,
is inadequate, almost uncharitable. Six
weeks after Martin’s death she started
campaigning for safer roads, having been

She is the woman who stands there while her own
words are broadcast to the public, in which she
tells how an ordinary afternoon – she’d just got
back from shopping in Newport – built up and
up into her own, everyone’s, worst nightmare

Island Life - www.isleofwight.net

You may have seen her at the Garlic
Festival, the short, brown-haired woman
who came out at the end of a horribly
graphic reconstruction of a road crash,
in this case caused by a drunk driver.
She is the woman who stood there while
her own words were broadcast to the
public, in which she tells how an ordinary
afternoon – she’d just got back from
shopping in Newport – built up and up

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