The traffic was nose to tail into Patten’s Island. We were coming up to the level crossing. The car in front of the bus crossed the railway but wasn’t going quick enough to get up the hill. He rolled backwards. But the bus driver was already on the crossing. He hit the brakes and all the kids standing up jerked forward.

So there we were, stopped over the railway line. Driver tried to back up but it was hopeless – wheels spinning, polishing the snow till it was a sheet of rock-hard ice.

The traffic lights right next to my window started flashing red to orange. The alarm started up. Most of the kids were still dicking around, oblivious.

The driver was revving the nuts off the engine by now. The back end of the bus was slewing left and right, but never backwards or forwards.

Up in front, the people in the car blocking the road were out pushing it. But the clear road ahead was no use to us now. This old, heavy, overloaded bus would not move.

A disaster is nothing more than several improbable events taking place at the same time – that’s all it takes.

The sudden silence was somehow the most frightening part. One or two people saw it through the misted glass. They froze or pointed. And so, one by one, everyone else followed. Out of the right-hand windows of the bus, lights on the track. An express train. Full chat across the marshes.

Surely it would see us, we thought. But as those lights bore down, it was clear it hadn’t.

The silence turned to screaming.

Time slowed almost to a stop.

Those monstrous lights gathered us in: so impossibly huge, so impossibly fast.

And it happened.

There was no sound. That’s the strangest thing. Just this incredible pressure that swallowed everything, even noise. Cubes of shattered glass hung motionless in the air, twinkling like the Milky Way.

There was a sense of moving fast, yet also being weightless, floating in this twisted, elongated capsule as it tumbled in the air.

We hit the ground. The shell of the bus burst open at one end like an over-squeezed toothpaste tube. Bodies smashed into me, head first, feet first. Others spilled out through the gaping hole where the driver once sat.

There was no pain, not that I remember anyway. There was an instant of hope that I was uninjured, as I was thrown from the bus, tumbling over torn steel.

I thumped into the freezing ground. I couldn’t move. There appeared to be no arm where an arm should have been. My head was attached to my body wrong; I could see my own back in front of me. The snow turned red.

Bodies landed around me like they were falling from the sky. Small bodies mostly, some barely bouncing as the snow cushioned their fall.

Still no pain. No sense of the cold.