Futures lost to the quake JAYDEN HARRIS BAXTOR GOWLAND

Date21 February 2021
Published date21 February 2021
Her 5-month-old baby, Baxtor, sleeping safely and soundly in his cot, the city shaking and tearing beneath her, a cot crushed by falling masonry.

It’s been a decade now, and Gowland has done a lot of work to heal.

But the pain of that day, and every day she has had to live without Bax, is still raw and deep.

“It’s still so hard, I won’t lie — but I have to talk about it sometimes,” she says.

“Otherwise you get stuck, you don’t quite accept it and you get quite angry... I have to learn to deal with it but it’s still really hard.”

Gowland has flashes of the day but her memories are broken.

“I talk about it in bits, that’s how my brain accesses it,” she says.

“I avoid it as much as possible because I find it so hard to talk about, even with lots of therapy.

“I was at home when it happened, I barely even remember it from start to finish because it was so incredibly quick... all I really get is a flashback of the sound that I heard come out of my own mouth, then the realisation that my child had been injured by masonry and knowing I had to do something.

“That something at the time was to run for help, call 111, but nothing was getting through — that part in itself causes quite a lot of trauma... that I was in that position and there was no help, I still can’t understand that and I can’t explain how it felt ... just that helplessness ... ”

Gowland ran outside and screamed for help.

Her partner at the time got a group of builders who had been working in the street to come and help, and a police officer who chanced upon the desperate situation also ran in.

“I felt like I was in the middle of an apocalypse — it was so bizarre,” says Gowland.

“They were just doing what they could to get to Bax ... a paramedic also appeared from I don’t know where and put oxygen on him.

“We made a makeshift stretcher out of a cupboard door that had fallen off and covered it in towels. I was just thinking ‘where’s the ambulance’.

“I could hear sirens everywhere but we just could not find one.”

Gowland remembers being in the back of a police car trying to get from her St Albans home to the hospital — a short drive that was made excruciatingly long due to gridlocked traffic in a city of terrified and shocked people.

“The roads were completely swarmed with people ... I don’t remember much about the ride there apart from that it felt like it took 20 years... I was just there with my wee boy, singing to him and trying to love him, trying to be there for him.

“Someone kept saying to me ‘it’s going to be okay, he’s going to be okay’ and I believed that — the strength...

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