A former mayor says he prayed to God that someone would find him after he became wedged between the back of a building and a fence while trying to take a daring shortcut.
Chris Cummins’s prayers were answered when a member of a football club’s management team heard his cries for help in time to save him.
“I’m told had I been there for another two days I may well have died,” said Mr Cummins.
His near-fatal predicament came about in February after he tried to cut behind Redbridge Football Club to get to Barkingside underground station in east London.
It’s a shortcut that should have seemed a daunting task to anyone, not least a 75-year-old.
The gap between the back of the clubhouse and a fence leading onto an area of overgrowth is so slim that Mr Cummins ended up trying to crawl through the space.
“There’s a pipe along the wall and then suddenly it dips so I couldn’t get under it and there was another obstacle, and things sticking out, which prevented me from getting further down. So basically I was jammed.”
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Mr Cummins, who is the ex-mayor of Redbridge, near Essex, had lost his phone, so could only cry out for help.
But there were very few people coming and going at the football club, as it was often too cold to play at that time of year.
“It’s almost as though saliva in my mouth was acting in place of water. It sort of helped me through in a way,” said Mr Cummins.
He insists that throughout his ordeal he was optimistic he would eventually be rescued.
He was also thankful it was dry, as he had just a thin cagoule on to keep him warm in the winter temperatures.
The train timetable was all he had beyond the changing light to know how long he’d been trapped.
“I could hear the times of the day when the trains stopped going into Barkingside [underground] station and then I’d hear them start up in the morning and I’d hear the announcements at the station.”
But finally, on the fifth day of his nightmare, Mr Cummins’s weak cries were heard by the football club’s chairman Ricky Eaton.
‘He thought I was an angel’
At first Mr Eaton, who was checking a potential leak on the clubhouse’s roof, thought the noises were coming from colleagues playing a prank on him.
He said: “We found him face down… obviously we didn’t know how long he had been there for, so we asked him a few questions and we gathered he’d been there for a long time. So we called the emergency services, who came straight away.
“They cut the fence and lifted him out of there to safety. But it was very, very stressful for him.”
Mr Eaton immediately fetched Mr Cummins a glass of water with a straw.
Weak and trapped, the straw was the only way he could take in the much-needed water.
“I told him ‘don’t drink too much at one time’, he started bringing it back up,” said Mr Eaton.
“But he was so relieved to be found, he thought I was an angel.”
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‘I owe my life to him’
Mr Cummins is an extremely devout Catholic. He feels that Mr Eaton was his saviour.
“I owe everything to him, I owe my life to him,” he said.
“He was inspired by God. He has a basic humanity. And I’ve found in my life there are more good people, human people, than bad ones.”
Mr Cummins was taken to hospital and later had some toes amputated due to a prior, untreated condition.
He’s lost a great deal of weight, partly due to the time he spent trapped and partly because he struggled to eat afterwards.
His mobility has also depleted severely, but he says he’s building up his strength again.
The two men have stayed in touch since the ordeal, with Mr Eaton setting up a GoFundMe webpage to raise money for Mr Cummins’s recovery.
The 75-year-old has managed to find some humour in what happened.
Asked whether he’ll be taking any more shortcuts to get to the Tube, he chuckled “No, well not that way anyway.”
