I was six years old when my pyjama
jacket caught fire.
My mum was, what can accurately be
described as ‘in between marriages’, and we were living in Blackpool with my
grandparents at the time. Grandma was cooking porridge for my breakfast on the
gas cooker and she had just left the kitchen to say goodbye to mum and granddad
as they left for work. The porridge was simmering and bubbling away on top of
the cooker when something shiny at the back of the stove-top caught my eye. I
pulled a stool over and climbed onto it and reached over to find out what it
was. And that’s when my pyjama jacket caught fire.
This was before the introduction of
flame-retardant material and the fire soon took hold and I started to scream.
Grandma was there in an instant, ripping my pyjama jacket from my body. She
threw it on the linoleum floor of the kitchen and began stamping out the flames
with her fluffy slippers.
When the fire was out, leaving a
scorch mark on the linoleum, she took hold of me and held me close, ruffling my
hair at the same time. “You have to be careful, Stephen,” she whispered in my
ear, “fire is very dangerous. God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t
heard you.”
Then she clipped me round the ear.
“So, don’t do anything as stupid as that again,” she snapped.
I was taught two valuable lessons
on the day my pyjama jacket caught fire. One was that fire was something that
should be treated with respect and not be trifled with and the other was that I
shouldn’t mess with my Grandma. The incident also left me with an
(understandable) fear of burning to death, and I never did find out what the
shiny thing was at the back of the stove-top.
I was, therefore, somewhat
concerned when the fireman went on strike on 14th November 1977 and it
was announced by the government that the armed forces were going to take their
place. I was stationed at RAF Stafford at the time and for a while I thought I
was going to get away with being involved. As much as I sympathised with them and
their cause, I didn’t really see the logic or the morality of sending in troops,
who were on far less pay than the firemen, to do the firemen’s jobs who were on
strike for more pay. Also I didn’t fancy the idea of tackling something that I
was morbidly afraid of. But then, just about everyone in the section where I
worked were told that we had been selected from a cast of thousands to report
to the fire section in between Christmas and New Year of 1977 where we would
receive comprehensive fire training before being sent out on a big adventure,
from which some of us might not return. It was the start of the winter of
discontent in the UK, where not just the firemen, but everyone – dustmen, dock workers, miners, car workers, grave-diggers
– all seemed to be going on strike. Well, everyone except for the armed forces,
who were not allowed to take industrial action.
Our ‘comprehensive’ training, it
turned out, consisted of a fifteen minute demonstration on how to hold onto a pressurised
fire hose without it snaking loose and smashing all our teeth out, after which
we were loaded onto buses and sent to our various locations. My comrades and I
were informed that we were being sent to Stretford, which we discovered on our
arrival there was a fiercely militant area in Manchester, whose inhabitants
lined the streets outside the TA hall where we were billeted and hurled stones
at us whenever we were called out to fires. An armed guard had to be mounted at
the entrance to prevent some of the more zealous protestors from gaining entry
and slashing the tyres of the Green Goddess fire engines.
The last time I had been in such
close proximity to a fire engine was on a freezing February night at RAF Brüggen
in West Germany a couple of years earlier where, as part of what was known as
the Emergency Field Force (EFF), I was tasked to guard two fire engines that
had somehow collided with each other on the airfield. This was an unprecedented
occurrence as the airfield was enormous, covering a vast area that stretched
further than the eye could see, and it struck me as rather odd that two large red
vehicles should have crashed into each other in such a massive expanse of empty
space – unless, of course, the concentration of the drivers of each vehicle had
been momentarily distracted by something out of the ordinary (a UFO perhaps?)
while they were playing chicken. I was ordered to patrol around the wrecked fire
engines and prevent anyone from looting them and I was to remain there until I
was either relieved or the recovery services came and towed them away. In order
to carry out this task I was given a torch – presumably to blind any would-be
looters with its beam, before throwing my cold-weather jacket over them and
then clubbing them into unconsciousness. I was out there for four hours and,
disappointingly, no looters emerged from the darkness of the airfield. Although
it was a pointless, thankless duty and I was cold and miserable, it was infinitely
better than what the other members of the EFF were experiencing at the time – choking
half to death whilst shovelling tons of urea (crystallised cow piss) into
vehicles that would be required to grit the roads of RAF Brüggen in the early
hours of the morning.
In the section where I worked at
RAF Stafford everyone had a nickname – there was Chudsy, Hagsy, Mabsy, Lockers,
Walks-Far, Evers, Ski and so on. Nicknames were either derivatives of surnames
or were awarded for something they had done that the section staff found
unusual or amusing. SAC Stanton’s nickname was shrouded in mystery. No-one knew
why he was called Foxy and he never offered to explain to us the reasoning
behind it. Foxy amused himself by terrorising the Chinese restaurants in
Stafford when he was drunk. Ordinarily he was a good customer, always polite
and cheerful – but every now and again he would go on an almighty bender that
generally lasted the entire weekend and which occasionally ended with the
police escorting him back to RAF Stafford on a Monday morning. Foxy’s benders
were legendary. They would start on a Friday night and he would spend the
evening moving from pub to pub, consuming an unspecified amount of beer and
spirits that would have killed most people, until it was time to hit the
Chinese restaurants. Considering he only drank on the occasions he went on his
mammoth benders, we were amazed by the sheer volume of alcohol he was able to
consume in a single session, whilst also being capable of holding a
conversation, albeit a nonsensical one. But that still didn’t explain why he
was called Foxy.
I was known as either Steve or
Mitch, neither of which was a nickname in the truest sense of the word and I
longed to have one. Despite the lack of a nickname, I worked well within the
section, using my sense of humour, as I had done throughout my childhood, to
become accepted as part of the team and, in fact, in one of my annual
assessment reports it stated that ‘Mitchell keeps the lads happy with his
eccentric sense of humour’. I wasn’t sure at the time whether that statement
was meant as a compliment or a criticism, but I accepted it as the former because
the person assessing me obviously couldn’t distinguish between what was
‘eccentric’ and what was ‘childish’. In
the 1970s most men liked to think they were the dominant one in any
relationship and it has always puzzled me how we arrived at that conclusion
considering that most of us never grow up and that our sense of humour ranges
between immature to downright infantile and rarely strays away from either. I
mean, how can we ever be taken seriously by the opposite sex when we still
laugh at fart jokes and snigger whenever someone slips an unintentional rude
word into an otherwise serious conversation? Servicemen tend to use black
humour in order to cope with some of the horrible situations they find
themselves in, but when that deserts them their brains automatically revert to
their default childish humour configuration. I still do it. I can’t help it. I once
went out with a rather serious but good looking woman who was into birdwatching
and towards the end of our first proper and ultimately disastrous date she
pointed out that there was a blue tit in a tree ahead of us. Throughout the day
I had successfully feigned enthusiasm about her interest in all creatures feathered,
but the overly excited manner in which she pointed out to me yet another bird perched
in a tree in the far distance proved too much. I had, by that time, reached the
extreme limit of my boredom threshold and, unable to make a witty and
intelligent response to her observation, my Y-chromosome immediately took over
any brain functions I might have possessed, making me involuntarily snigger and
say, leeringly with a small chuckle, “You just said tit.”
I never saw her again after that
day. I didn’t even have sex with her, which, due to the shallow nature I
possessed back then, was all I was after in the first place.
We arrived at the TA hall in
Stretford at around six in the evening. The hall had been home to the Irish
Rangers, who had been living there since the start of the strike, and was
kitted out with metal-framed beds, pillows and exercise sleeping bags, which we
endearingly called ‘green turds’. We each had a small locker in which to keep what
stuff we had and after we dropped our stuff onto our beds we were divided up
into groups of six-man fire teams and given a briefing by the WO1 who was in
charge. He showed us around a Green Goddess and instructed us on how to couple
and uncouple the hoses and how to recognise where the fire hydrants were on the
street, after which we were kitted out with steel helmets and donkey jackets
and each of us was issued a torch. I was on ‘RAF Fire Team 1’ with my friend
Lockers, a driver and three others and that meant we would be starting our
shift almost immediately. Fire Team 2 was on standby. At the end of his
briefing, the WO1 pointed to a three-litre bottle of Bell’s whisky that was
stood in the corner of his makeshift office and told us that it would be won by
the first team who were out at a fire for longer than twelve hours. “Don’t
worry, lads,” the WO1 reliably informed us, “we’ve been here for almost two
months and it’s pretty quiet here, apart from the militants. No team’s ever
been out for longer than two hours.”
Our shift started at 1900 hours. We
were called out at 19.20. We hadn’t even had time to unpack our stuff.
Apart from Lockers, who I’d known
since basic training, I can’t remember the names of the rest of our team, so
I’ll just make some up. There was Geoff, our driver, who had recently been on
crash course on how to drive and operate a Green Goddess, and three others, who
I’ll call Tom, Dick and Harry.
With our siren wailing, we followed
a police escort as we sped through the streets of Stretford towards our
destination. Over the radio on board the Green Goddess, tuned into the police
band, we heard what we were heading into. “It’s a big one,” crackled the voice
over the airwaves. “An end-row terrace in a street of houses owned by
Alcoholics Anonymous. We may need back-up.” My heart started to beat faster and
it felt like it was going to burst out of my chest at any moment. The fear in
the back seat of the fire engine was palpable. You could have cut the air with
a knife. We were, not to beat around the bush, shitting ourselves. When we
arrived at the scene it was worse than we could possibly have imagined. It was
like a vision from Hell. It was an inferno. The whole house was ablaze. Flames
were leaping out of the windows and the air was filled with smoke and heat.
The first thing we did after
leaping out of the Green Goddess was search for a fire hydrant. Unlike in
America where they are clearly visible above ground and painted red, hydrants
in the UK are underground and marked with a small yellow sign bearing the
letter H. For the untrained eye they are almost invisible, especially in the
dark. The nearest one we could find was around the corner from where the Green
Goddess was parked and so we began the task of unravelling and coupling the
hoses in order for them to reach. The hoses leading from the pump in the Green
Goddess were unravelled and trained onto the blazing house, and then the water
was turned on at the hydrant.
“Hold tight onto those hoses, lads!”
yelled the fire chief. “Remember you won’t be able to get a dental appointment
at this time of night!”
The fire chief and the police were
already at the house when we arrived at the scene. Although the firemen were on
strike, the fire chiefs remained at work for safety reasons – our safety. A
fire chief was present at each incident in order to protect us novices from our
own reckless behaviour and to prevent us from becoming human torches. The
police were there for the overtime.
We took turns at holding the hoses
and dousing the house with pressurised water. After about an hour, as me and
Lockers were waiting to take our turn the fire chief pointed to us and
instructed us to follow him. Along with a policeman, he led us around to the
back of the house – the flames were leaping out of the windows at the front of
the house and we felt some relief and gratitude towards him for leading us to
where it seemed safer.
The relief was short-lived.
The first thing we noticed was a
body lying in the middle of the back garden covered in a blanket.
“I . . . is that a dead body,” I
asked nervously.
“Aye, lad,” said the policeman,
casually lifting up a corner of the blanket, revealing the face of the corpse.
“Take a look. E’s got a right good tan from the ‘eat, you know. Looks like he’s
been on ‘is holidays, dun’t it.”
“Did he, you know . . .”
“What? Burn to death? No lad, e’s a
bit charred but it were asphyxiation from the smoke that got ‘im. From what we
can gather ‘e came ‘ome pissed an’ kicked over the gas fire. ‘Is wife didn’t ‘elp
‘im and her and her kid got out and left ‘im behind.”
“Jesus.”
“No, lad, ‘e didn’t ‘elp ‘im,
either.”
The fire chief handed me an axe.
“Right, lad. Ten minutes is all the time you’re allowed in there without
breathing apparatus.”
What? In where?
“Your mate will be right behind you
with a hose.”
What?! Why would Lockers be right behind me with a hose?
“There’s fire trapped in the walls
of the house. Use the axe to smash holes in the wall to let the fire escape,
otherwise this place will be burning until doomsday. Your mate will douse the
flames with his hose.”
What??!! Douse the what? With what?
“Now, it’ll be dark in there so
feel your way around with the back of your hand. Don’t use your palm because if
it touches any exposed electrics your hand will automatically close and you’ll
end up lying next to this chap here.”
WHAT???!!! No! No! No! I didn’t want to go in there.
I was twenty-four years old and I’d
always envisioned my death to be something more spiritual, like dying
peacefully in my sleep with a smile on my face at the age of 105 with a couple
of buxom young women - one blonde, one brunette – on each arm after having
all-night sex. Burning to death had never been on my list of ‘things to do
before I was thirty’ and it was definitely
not the way I wanted to shuffle off this mortal coil.
The fire chief patted us both on the
back, pointed to the open back door of the burning house, and said, “Right
then, lads, in you go!”
“Try not to breathe too much!” I heard the fire
chief calling from behind us. “And when you breathe out, cough. It’ll clear
your lungs quicker!”
Fear gripped me like a vice as I
entered the building. I was terrified. The heat was so intense it felt like I
was under a desert sun and I could smell the acrid stench of smoke in the air
all around me. I don’t know how Lockers was feeling, but I suspect he was as
terrified as me in those first few moments. But then something happened. The
fear suddenly vanished and I swung the axe at the wall. As it smashed a hole
into the plasterboard, flames shot out and were quickly drowned by the water
from Lockers’ hose.
In the ten minutes me and Lockers
spent in there, the floors were caving in under our feet, we could hear glass
shattering and the sound of creaking wood and things crashing around in the
upstairs bedrooms. Were it not for the adrenaline taking over I would have been
frozen in terror.
Instead, all I felt was
exhilaration. In those ten minutes I felt truly alive. They were the most
exciting ten minutes I had ever spent in my entire life and the first thing I
did when I left that burning, smoke filled building was light up a cigarette.
Two more RAF fire crews were called
out to assist us and it took all night to extinguish the fire and water down
the charred and smoking embers of what was once a home to three people. At 8.30
the following morning we rolled up the hoses and loaded them back onto the
Green Goddess. It was only then that we noticed that we had missed the nearest
fire hydrant and that was because we were parked on top of it.
For two months the Irish Rangers
had fought small fires and the three litre bottle of Bell’s whisky had stood invitingly
and unclaimed in the corner of the WO1s office. The RAF arrived and we won it
on our first night there. The Irish Rangers were not pleased, more so because
we wouldn’t share it with them.
When we arrived back at the TA hall
after that first call-out I unfurled my sleeping bag and fell into a deep
sleep. I woke hours later to the smell of freshly cooked food prepared by the
army cooks and eased myself, bleary-eyed and with mad hair, out of my green
turd. I was still smelling of smoke and sweat as I stumbled to the showers, but
after I had cleaned myself up and got dressed I felt vaguely human again. I
went to the dining area at the end of the hall and joined the queue.
There was generally two choices at
mealtimes – take it or leave it. If I had been a vegetarian (which I am most
definitely not) or didn’t like chicken I would have starved to death. Chicken
was served up each and every day, and as the days and weeks dragged on we would
stand in the queue at mealtimes and make clucking sounds, knowing that when we reached
the servery there would be the inevitable chicken meal awaiting us – roast
chicken, fried chicken, chargrilled chicken, chicken curry, chicken chasseur,
chicken salad, chicken fricassee, chicken and chips, chicken soup, chicken
pasta, chicken with chicken. If nothing else, the army cooks at Stretford certainly
knew how to prepare chicken and their imagination regarding the many varieties
in which to serve it up knew no bounds. If they never learned to cook any other
type of meat they would at least be able to find gainful employment at KFC when
they left the army. We ate so much chicken during the fireman’s strike that we
became chickoholics and it still amazes me to this day that our feathery
friends were not driven to the very brink of extinction.
After a few days of easing myself
out of my green turd I discovered that I had been given a nickname. It wasn’t a
nickname I would have chosen myself, but then only narcissistic monkeys with
overinflated egos choose their own nicknames. A nickname should be given to you
by your mates as a term of endearment, a form of acceptance into an exclusive
club, a male-only bonding ritual and my mates had been watching me waking up
each morning with increasing interest and fascination. Apparently they didn’t think
I climbed or crawled or jumped or stepped out of my sleeping bag. They thought
I slithered out of it.
And from that moment on I was known
as Snakey.
The fireman’s strike ended on
January 12th 1978, but we were kept at Stretford for another three
days – just in case. We never attended such a raging inferno again during our
time at Stretford and for the most part we had to combat boredom by reading
books or watching television. But for us the fireman’s strike was not just
about fighting fires. It brought back a sense of camaraderie that seemed to
have been missing for a long time in the RAF. We had to look out for each other
when we were called out. If not there was a real possibility that we may have
ended up like that poor alcoholic, covered in a blanket, looking like he had
just been on his holidays.
It also cured once and for all my
fear of fire.
But most of all the time I spent as
a temporary fireman was, believe it or not, fun. I’ll leave you with a
newspaper clipping which appeared in the Daily
Telegraph, following a report read by the inestimable Reginald Bosanquet at
the end of the ITV News at Ten, a
spot usually reserved for one of the more amusing stories of the day, but
which, in this particular instance, sent all the cat-lovers of the British
Isles spiralling out of their litter trays and into a national rage of
indignation.
‘NEWS AT TEN’ REPORT UPSETS CAT-LOVERS
Cat-lovers complained to
Independent television last night after ‘News at Ten’, read by Reginald
Bosanquet, ended with a report about a cat being rescued from a tree by troops
manning a Green Goddess.
The report said that the troops
recued the cat after a plea by an elderly woman, accepted her invitation to tea
and biscuits, then ran over the cat on their way back to the barracks.
The complaining cat-lovers said
they found the incident far from amusing.
We, on the other hand, found it hilarious.
