And he started to back towards me, his eyes more upon me than on any signals about the traffic that I might be giving him. I looked out at the road to wave him on, and then stepped smartly in again when I saw a car that I took to be Neville’s approaching from the distant corner. I turned to make some communication of this, and to try to get out of the way and up the stairs again, and as I turned Wyndham’s car hit me: he was backing towards the left-hand side of the garage doors, and he got me just against the doorjamb with the rear left-hand wheel. For the first second I thought the car had just touched me, and then I thought that I was dead. I was pinned against the wall, unable to move, and the car did not seem to stop. For a very long time it moved in on me, the whole weighty metal mass of it, crushing my legs together and me to the wall, and then I started to scream and the car stopped, leaving me caught from the thighs downwards, and not merely caught, but squashed and crushed and flattened by wheel and mudguard. I went on screaming as I realized what had happened. Thoughts of amputation, of myself without legs, began to flash across my mind, and I continued to yell as loudly as I could, from pain and indignation. It seemed a very long time before Wyndham got out and came to see what had happened; he put his shoulder against the car and tried to heave it off, but without success, and we had time to look at each other and to wonder what to do. Speed seemed to be necessary, but I could not think in what direction.

“Just get in again,” I think I said, “and drive it off, drive back into the garage,” but it was apparently not as simple as that because of the way the wheels were locked and twisted; in order to move off me they would first have had to move farther in. I cannot remember what happened next. I can remember the feel of that car, and the feel of my kneecaps crunched together neatly on top of each other, but I do not know whether I spoke or whether I continued to make a noise or whether I was silenced. My recollection is restricted to my knees. I do not know what we would have done. Wyndham was trying once more to relieve the pressure by pulling the car off me with his bare hands, and I was watching his efforts and trying to feel whether my feet were still attached, when Neville’s car pulled up and David got out.