Into the Fire by Edric Kennedy-Macfoy

Author:Edric Kennedy-Macfoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

10

Persons Reported

A few months in, I was ordered to stand by at Stanmore fire station on a day shift. I grew up in Harrow so knew the area pretty well. I liked working at different stations and with different people. It was always a different experience wherever I’d go. As previously mentioned, you need a minimum number of firefighters on a truck. If you have over that requirement you can afford to send a firefighter out to stand by at another station in London that has insufficient riders and therefore cannot attend incidents. It was my turn to go on standby, and I ended up at Stanmore fire station. The morning was quite quiet, but early in the afternoon we received our first call of the day. I ran to the pole house, slid down the pole, and jumped into my boots and leggings before getting on the truck. I wasn’t aware of the location or details as I hadn’t stopped in the watch room to look at the tip sheet – that was the watch room attendant’s job. As I was putting my fire tunic on in the rear cab, I heard the words, ‘It’s a one under!’ for the first time.

Then someone else shouted out, ‘We’ve got a stiff at Queensbury station!’

I was so curious as to how I would feel about my first encounter with death on the job.

A stiff, in case it’s not already obvious, is a dead body. ‘One under’ is firefighter speak for ‘one’ person ‘under’ a train.

As we whizzed up the road cutting in and out of traffic, everyone around me was fully geared up and chatting away as usual, but I remained quiet and in isolation as I gazed out the window deep in thought. I was about to see my first dead body as a firefighter.

I knew this day would come at some time, and I was keen to see how I would be affected by it. When I applied to join the Brigade, the job, in my mind, was about putting out fires and rescuing people. There were no dead bodies in my version of it. But I soon learned how wrong I was. I now knew we were also responsible for recovering bodies from incidents, and that it would only be a matter of time until I found myself involved in one.

In a way, my mum’s death had set me up for this moment, and this job. Watching her die in the front room of our home, holding her close as her body turned cold, putting her in a body bag and placing her in the compartment at the back of the funeral director’s van. Nothing could ever be worse than that, I thought. Nothing I could ever see as a firefighter – or in any other job – could do to me what that experience did.

When I started the job, I felt I was ready for anything.

It wasn’t just the experience of my mother’s death that geared me up for this.

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