Perhaps it was sometime between 1985 and 1988. I can’t be sure. It may even have been later. I was probably living in that dreadful flat on Pool Road in Newtown. I can’t think where else I could have been living because I was driving to Llanidloes for an evening pottery class. I think it was only the second session.
I remember looking forward to the class. It started at seven, so I must have left Newtown around half past six. As it turned out, half an hour was nowhere near enough time.
I crossed the railway line at Caersws and headed towards Llandinam, a road I had travelled countless times. First as a child in the back of my father’s Saab, later in a succession of cheap, unreliable cars of my own. The road was familiar enough to be almost invisible.
Then I saw the white van. It was stopped ahead of me. As I drew closer, I saw a smaller car. Even before I understood what had happened, I felt a clammy sensation, a tingling through my body, every sense suddenly sharpened, a feeling of dread coming over me.
In those days the A470 was quieter than it is now, and I was the only person there for a few minutes. I had been taught never to rush straight from the car at the scene of an accident. Count to ten first, they said. It helps you stay calm and think clearly.
I did not manage to count to ten. When I reached the car, the driver, a young man, was screaming in pain (with a broken pelvis I learned later). Beside him in the passenger seat sat his friend. Silent. Motionless. His head slumped forward.
He was surely dead. I leaned across to reach him. Two fingers to his neck. No pulse that I could find. Not wanting to move him and risk making things worse, I opened his shirt and placed my hand on his chest.
It was rising and falling. Breathing.
I remembered my first aid training: breathing, bleeding, breakages. In that order. He was breathing. There was no obvious bleeding. There was nothing more I could do except leave him where he was and wait for help.
Later I heard that he had been in a coma. When he eventually regained consciousness, he was paralysed. He spent the rest of his life in a motorised wheelchair.
I saw him several years afterwards in a shop. He was talking, laughing, enjoying a conversation with the shopkeeper at the till. I recognised him immediately. He did not recognise me. Why would he? I said nothing and walked on.
Every time I pass that stretch of road, as I did again today, I still feel the same faint tingle. I find myself wondering where he is now, whether he is still alive, what sort of life he made for himself.
For a few minutes on a winter’s evening, our lives collided. I was there at the worst moment of his life. I held a hand against his chest and felt him breathing.
And then we became strangers again.