Strike a flame

I have written about this before, and now I will write about it again, but this time from a different viewpoint.

My first memory isn’t one: just a story I’ve been told. It was 1979, and I was only three; and anyway, the nature of it, the beck and call, was unexceptional. This day, contact had been lost. The way I imagine it, there was only static from the radio - or maybe nothing at all. Flight TE901 had set out hours before, with excitement, and canapés, and shutter cameras pressed against the windows. When contact was lost, all the men were called into town - they were all men at that time - because it was thought there might be an emergency landing. Invercargill fire station was the closest point.

There was no emergency landing. Operation Overdue was the name of the recovery. The emergency workers spent two weeks on the ice. It was November, and the sun didn’t set in Antarctica, so the horror of one day simply merged into the next. The problem with the smaller body parts, they were hard to identify. The problem with the larger ones, they were difficult to get into body bags. They’d contorted as they froze at the foot of the mountain.

I remember the old Invercargill fire station on Tay Street. It had a pole, like you see in movies, from the first floor to the ground floor. My brother and I watched with delight as our dad slid down, playing for laughs from the preschool crowd.

It was replaced by the station on Jed Street. That one had a concrete tower where the officers trained, storeys high. They had to wear their gear, including breathing apparatus - twenty kilos - and practice carrying people out over their shoulders, a so-called fireman’s lift.

There was a canteen at the new station, with a bar and a spacies machine. We hung out there, sometimes, with the other families. I remember one little girl, about my age, and about as shy. Her dad was struggling, although not many knew; but unlike most, he said it to his boss. He said it, with all the courage it took to say a thing like that, almost four decades ago. It didn’t help him. He was finishing his shift one morning, but he was unlucky. Just as he was about to leave, an industrial accident was phoned in - and he was the most senior officer on that watch. He was told to attend the scene, and to cut the deceased out of the machinery with a hand knife. His daughter was sweet. She had bobbing pigtails and an open heart. I hope she never knew.

At that time, they didn’t talk about trauma. It came out in anger, I suppose: like the one who stood up abruptly one night watch and said fuck the lot of you, I’m out of here. He never came back. I imagine for others it was simply an attrition, the quiet folding down of the soul, like a deck chair when the rain sets in. Sometimes our idea of masculinity intersects wholly with our notion of dispensability, but it’s working class men, so we don’t really notice. I am not even so sure we talk about trauma now.

We think of them as grunts, I guess, as if that might excuse the dispensability. They are not. The calculations they make are not from desks. One of the things I learned was that flammable gas can be heavier than air. It will seep below you, through man holes and grates and cracks in the floor; and if you calculate things wrong, you burn from your feet up. Flashover, by comparison, happens when the heat reaches an intensity that everything suddenly ignites. You’re more likely to burn from your head down.

Because of all this I knew how to teach my kids, the same way I was taught. You start from your bedroom. You assume you know nothing: even if wasn’t dark, the smoke and the panic will disorientate you. On your elbows and your knees, you must find the nearest exit. You practise making your way through, groping, hauling your sluggish body through a window. First, get out. You don’t help anybody by choking alongside them.

And I know how to make a 111 call. Maybe that sounds silly, but it’s not. It has to be done right. Every second you panic is a second they lose. No matter what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, you must do the same thing. It doesn’t help to scream or to cry. Give the nature of your emergency, the location, a description.

Just get the words out. If you can do that, they’ll know what to do with them.

So pay them. Just pay them.

And stand up for them. Stand the hell up. It’s what they do for you.

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