GOVERNMENTS - and the corporate world - must curse when someone like Nina Bawden gets caught up in their negligence, blunders and lethargy. A distinguished novelist, she was a passenger, with her husband, on the train from King's Cross which crashed at 100mph at Potters Bar, when it went over a set of points missing two vital bolts. Her husband, Austen, was among the seven who died, and she suffered multiple fractures and internal injuries.

Her grief is expressed in this letter to her husband, in which she relates what happened, in the crash and afterwards. It's a story of evasions and apparent indifference, which led to Nina Bawden resigning her lifelong membership of the Labour Party. She still feels the heartache of the loss of her husband, and half expects to hear his voice or footstep. "I wanted people who had never experienced a catastrophe of this sort to know what it was like," she says.

She has become convinced that companies will be more careful only if their top figures know there is a strong chance they could be held personally responsible for major failings of care.

Published: 28/03/2006