Have you met my father?
He’s the final bridge before junction 12 on the M25. You cannot miss him. Dad spans all six lanes, so it doesn’t matter which direction you drive.
At first, you’ll see two twenty-metre concrete towers, bulbous at the top. Like sewing needles. Except much bigger than sewing needles – I mean, really massive. Then, as you get closer, you’ll notice suspension wires connected to a horizontal deck.
Normally, bridges go straight over a road in the shortest way possible. But my father skews diagonally 104across the motorway, the way you slice a baguette to make garlic bread.
That’s Dad for you. A true one-off.
Now, you might well snigger at that. One-off? Really?
Hey-ho. Whatever. No skin off my nose. You wouldn’t be the first to react in that way. Like most people, you assume that all motorway bridges are pretty much the same and not worth special consideration.
Wrong!
Go back and read my description again. Think about it for a few minutes. Picture it in your head. Now tell me that you’ve seen a bridge exactly like that.
Bet you can’t.
Anyway, I expect you’re thinking of motorway bridges that carry roads. Single lanes. Dual carriageways. Access roads. That kind of thing. Occasionally, you see cows walking over them. Or a lonely man staring down. Or a rozzer with a speed camera. Dad’s not one of those. He’s a railway bridge, which is far less common. And not any railway bridge either, but the first all-concrete cable stayed railway bridge in the world.
Beat that!
My father is a proper first, like Neil Armstrong or Sir Edmund Hillary. But growing up in his shadow isn’t as hard as you’d think. After all, there’s not much pressure to better your dad’s achievements when you’re a human being and he’s a fifty-five-metre bridge.
Sometimes I wish a kid had come up to me at school and said, ‘Thea Stanton, is your dad really the first concrete cable stayed railway bridge in the world?’
But that never happened. 105
See, the problem with Dad being a railway bridge is that most people don’t think of him as a railway bridge at all. That sounds strange but think about it. When you’re driving on a motorway and you see a bridge, you tend to think, ‘Motorway bridge!’ You don’t adapt your terminology to suit what’s going over that bridge. If it’s a railway bridge, you still think ‘motorway bridge’, because it’s going over a motorway. But when you see a railway bridge in a town, you don’t think ‘road bridge’ because it’s going over a road.
Weird that, isn’t it?
So while my father is, technically, the Lyne Railway Bridge, you’d probably know him as a motorway bridge.
Fine by me. I just think, that’s my father. Good old Dad. Solid and reliable. Always there for me, wind, rain or shine. Those qualities are at the core of his being and will never change, no matter what happens to me. No matter how many more tragedies strike our family. No matter how much time I spend in hospital.
They’re what make him him.
And, by default, they’re what makes me me.
I’ve always looked up to Dad. Ever since I was little. Though truth be told, most people look up to him. You’d need to be a giant or a helicopter pilot to look down on him. And how many people are those things? Hardly any.
If you’ve been on the M25 orbital, you’ve looked up to him too, even if you weren’t conscious of it. Maybe you were singing along to your stereo or having an argument with the person in the passenger seat. Even so, your eyes will have seen him. Your brain will have processed the signals your eyes sent up your optical nerve. Like it or not, Dad will be in your head, deep in one of the cortexes (I’d have to google 106which one, sorry). As you pass under him, the light changes for a moment as he casts a line of shadow over you, like an airport scanner going over a bag. So you sense my father’s presence, even if your busy mind ignores that feeling.
That’s why you could ask a bunch of people, ‘Do you know Thea Stanton’s dad, the world’s first all-concrete cable stayed railway bridge?’ And they’d all say, ‘No!’ (well, maybe apart from one weird guy with a beard and glasses).
But, actually, they do know my father. They just don’t realise it.
And that guy with the beard and glasses? He’ll be one of those curious types who do notice motorway bridges. If anything, they over-notice them, to the point that they get quite het up about the ones they don’t like. Take, for instance, the man on an online forum who wrote:
It’s the design of those towers that ruins it for me.
Specifically, the way they get wider and more blocky towards the top. It makes them look top-heavy and unwieldy.
There’s no grace about them whatsoever.
Pah! Well of course Dad isn’t graceful. He’s tall and strong. He needs to be so that he can hold himself together with those high-tension wires. You try being graceful with a bloody great train on your back!
Thankfully, not everyone thinks like that.
There is a woman up in Manchester who painted a portrait of my father and put it in an exhibition. She paints lots of motorway bridges and says that Dad’s the one who means the most to her. I don’t feel jealous. Only proud. 107Her painting is a bit fuzzy, more like a memory of the bridge than the bridge itself. There are no cars in the painting. But that’s the thing. Who remembers cars? When you think about the bridge, it’s all about the towers and wires, and the way the bridge makes you feel. That’s what people remember.
Looking at that empty motorway, it’s just me and Dad. The two of us together. Which is how I like it to be.
That said, he looks a bit different to how he appears in that painting. My father changes over the years, when the council paint him or graffiti artists daub stuff on him. For instance, at the moment, he bears the word HELCH. I don’t know what it means. He doesn’t know what it means. But he wears it with dignity. Even when exhaust fumes turn him black and birds shit on him, Dad stays strong and does his job.
He’s a motorway bridge and he knows it.
It sometimes makes me sad, when I see other people out and about with their dads, while mine must always remain where he is, straddling the M25. I cannot invite him to the hospital for my eighteenth birthday. I cannot watch a terrible, cringey TV show like Hollyoaks with him. I cannot hug him and tell him about my cancer.
I cannot and will not. Because he’s a motorway bridge, you see? D’uh!
It’s not the done thing to move a bridge to a hospital. Totally impractical. You’d have to lift Dad up with a crane and put him onto a truck, then drive him around like King Kong, humiliated.
If that happened, would he still even be a bridge?
That’s the thing about bridges. They are bridges when 108they bridge, but when they don’t bridge they become something else. And I don’t want to lose my father. Not again.
Instead of him coming to my ward to see me, I wish I could get up on one of his towers. He could hold me aloft like a child at a rock concert and we could look out over the motorway we know so well. It’s our bit of road and it means everything to us.
Ever since I was born, I travelled along this stretch of the M25 over and over. That’s because Grandma and Granddad lived in Bracknell, while we lived in Crawley. So we’d be up and down to their house all the time, taking the turn-off at junction 12. Quite often the M25 was slow or congested. Long, boring tailbacks that seemed to never end.
‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I’d moan from the back seat.
‘Wait for it, Thea,’ Dad would say, trying to stop me bursting into tears. ‘Wait until you see the big fat pillars of that bridge. It means we’re nearly there, nearly there.’
When the bridge eventually appeared in the distance, Dad would yell: ‘There she blows! Time to turn off! Time to turn to turn off!’
He did it every single time without fail. Like clockwork. Until it would have been really weird for him not to say, ‘There she blows! Time to turn off!’
I guess it’s a dad thing.
That’s all I remember of him, at four years old. It’s the only piece of him that lodged in my silly young brain. By the time I turned five, he was gone.
Dead. Just like that.
When I was growing up, all that remained of Dad in my brain was that memory of the bridge. Its towers. The 109suspension wires. The shadow slicing across us as we passed beneath, and his voice saying, ‘Time to turn off.’
Time to turn off.
To turn off time.
To make time hard like concrete.
To hold that time tight with suspension wires.
To never let it go, the memory of the bridge and Dad. The bridge and Dad. The bridge and Dad. The bridge and Dad.
The bridge Dad.
The Dad bridge.
I would plead with Mum to drive under him, weekend after weekend, month after month, year after year, until I become too ill to leave hospital. But even here, among these machines, white walls and worried faces, I can check on Google Maps and see that he’s there, solid and dependable, as always.
My rock.
My everything.
My father, the motorway bridge.110