It was a warm summer afternoon in 2019 when Charlotte Lay, a nurse from West Yorkshire in England, was preparing for her usual night shift. But something didn’t feel right. Deeply troubled and overwhelmed by long-standing mental health struggles, Charlotte made a heart-wrenching decision; she left home and headed towards a railway station with the intention of ending her life.
But fate, and a compassionate train driver, had other plans.
Charlotte, now 33, describes her memories of that day as ‘quite blurry’. But one moment is etched into her mind: a train pulling up on the tracks and a man stepping off.
“I remember seeing a man getting off the train and starting to panic and thinking he was going to tell me off,” she recalls.
Instead, what happened next changed her life.
“He approached me and said ‘hi, my name is Dave, are you having a bad day?’ I said ‘yeah, just a bit’. He went ‘OK’, we can sit and talk until it feels better.’”
That simple, human exchange saved Charlotte’s life, and was the beginning of an extraordinary love story.
Dave, a train driver for Northern, spotted Charlotte by the tracks and instinctively knew something was terribly wrong. Without hesitation, he got out of his cabin and approached her gently.
“I knelt down in front of her and introduced myself,” he says. “I told her we could talk things through until she felt comfortable enough to get onto the train, where she could be taken to safety.”
For 30 minutes, the pair talked on the railway line. Charlotte, though still visibly distressed, eventually agreed to board the train. Dave transported her to Skipton Station, where she was handed over to the care of police officers.
The following day, determined to thank the man who had treated her with such compassion, Charlotte posted an appeal on a local Facebook group asking if anyone at Northern could help her get in touch.
“I’d have understood if he didn’t want to hear from me,” she says. “But I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for giving me the time and for treating me like I was a human being.”
Her heartfelt message reached the right people. A colleague of Dave’s saw the post and passed on his number. Charlotte sent him a message. Dave, now 47, was equally relieved to hear from her.
“I needed to know she was all right,” he explains. “I’d contacted the police to try to find out what happened to her and just wanted to make sure she was safe.
“I felt like I’d a duty to make sure she was all right. We’d had that rapport built by the side of the track. It was just nice to be able to make that difference to somebody.”
From that moment on, the two began exchanging daily messages. Two months later, they met up for a coffee, and something clicked.
In 2022, Dave and Charlotte tied the knot, with Charlotte 22 weeks pregnant on their wedding day. The couple now live in Wilsden, West Yorkshire, and are proud parents of three children.
But life wasn’t done testing them just yet.
Dave was diagnosed with testicular cancer after visiting the doctors for what he thought was just a bad back.
“It’s because I’m a bloke,” he says. “I’d done 12 or 13 years in the motor trade working on cold floors and out in the elements, lifting and carrying silly things. I just put it down to a bad back.
“Charlotte kept saying ‘go to the doctor’. I said it was just me getting old.”
Reluctantly, Dave followed her advice and it turned out to be lifesaving. He was swiftly diagnosed and treated. Just weeks later, he was given the all-clear. A consultant at St James’ Hospital in Leeds later told him he wouldn’t have survived had the cancer gone undiagnosed for much longer.
“Charlotte may say I saved her life, which I don’t know about really,” he says modestly, “but she saved my life as well.”
Now, the couple are sharing their remarkable story in the hope it will inspire others who may be struggling in silence.
“Life does get better,” says Charlotte. “You just have to be here to see it.”
A vocal advocate for mental health awareness, Charlotte urges people not to wait for loved ones to reach out, but instead to ‘reach in’.
“It’s often too difficult for people to ask for help,” she says. “We owe it to each other to be checking in with people around us.
“You don’t have to offer life-changing advice or say anything profound. Just sitting down with a ‘cuppa’ [tea] can make all the difference.
“Because of what I’ve been through, I had a duty to talk about it and I’m hoping it’s going to be a conversation starter.”
A global campaign surrounding mental health started on May 1 and marks the month that we see people fundraising and opening up conversations to raise awareness about mental health issues.
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