When I was a little girl, I would sit near the front door after breakfast, waiting for my Dad to come home. A key in the lock, and I would run to hug a man who reeked of smoke and petrol and boot polish, a man who sometimes came home quiet and shaken, and didn’t often talk about his working days and nights.
I overheard glimpses of conversation; tiny babies carried lifeless down ladders, a mum found dead in bed with her children cuddled in close and an ashtray on the bedroom floor. A man trapped in a burning caravan, his charred corpse found huddled and clawing at the door. The burning buildings loomed large in fitful nightmares, and to me, my dad was a hero. As were his watch, a loud group of muscular men who we would visit on weekends.
I grew up in the Fire Service, and eventually joined it myself, answering emergency calls and dispatching fire and rescue appliances. People died, screaming and terrified, in my ear, in unforgiving Sennheiser audio, as I calmly delivered instructions to try to guide them to safety. Seven years later, and those screams never leave you. Many more people were saved, with authoritative direction, with empathy, by guiding them on to the floor where the smoke would have cleared, soothing them up and on to the ledge while a colleague sent radio messages to the firefighters en route to tell them exactly where to throw their ladders. We waited on the other end of phones in silence as a woman in her 80s jumped from a third floor, for the radio message from the crews that she was alive. Lungs full of smoke and a broken leg, shocked and shaking and sobbing, but she was alive.
People accuse me of being hard around the edges sometimes. Abrupt. Military. I want to ask them, is it any wonder? And now, David Cameron thinks he can do that job. “Sometimes I feel like a firefighter,” he said. “We’ve been putting out a blaze in this building and there is Ed Miliband coming round day after day – the man who set the fire there in the first place – complaining we’re not putting it out fast enough.”
My dad, who retired last year after more than 25 years in the Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, didn’t appreciate the comparison. “We get less than £28,000 a year to work 15-hour shifts, and five weekends out of seven,” he said. “We pay a sixth of our pay into a pension with less than a 20% chance of getting out what we put in due to premature deaths. We manoeuvre around pitch black buildings in temperatures that make our skin boil. Recovering dead kids, dead adults, attending coroners courts. Compare that to £142,500 a year, free accommodation, free transport, a full pension and a £1m book deal when you leave. Cameron, a firefighter? Don’t make me laugh.”
As part of the application process, prospective firefighters are given a list of personal qualities and attributes and asked to provide comprehensive recent examples of fulfilling them. It’s to weed out the wheat from the chaff, and the process is brutal.
So, David Cameron, give me an example of “treating people fairly and ethically” – as prospective firefighters are asked to do. Cutting housing benefit from parents who use a small spare bedroom to store their profoundly disabled child’s hoists, chairs and specialist equipment? Jobcentre sanctions for the woman who didn’t attend her appointment because she was in hospital?
How about “awareness of the community and understanding its needs”? Closing SureStart children’s centres – not only depriving working parents of a good childcare resource, but taking 20 people out of employment and on to the dole, with less money to spend in their local communities.
“Accepting accountability for your own actions”? Labour “spent all the money and we’re cleaning up the mess” just doesn’t cut it. Try harder.
How about “considering immediate and wider objectives and implications and planning ahead”? Cutting – sorry, “capping” – benefits means people have less money to spend on their basic living essentials, and end up in food banks. Any idiot could have predicted that, so why does it seem to come as news to the prime minister?
And finally, awareness of the impact of changes to the Fire and Rescue Service? I imagine a silence as the PR-brain flails, furiously trying to spin the closures of fire stations, the loss of frontline staff and longer response times unravelling years of community fire safety initiatives. All the “getting your finger out” to test your smoke alarm won’t save you when you need that fire service and it’s too far away. It takes 60 seconds to lose consciousness from smoke inhalation. London Fire Brigade recently released an advertisement for trainee firefighters. Thousands will apply for about 12 jobs. Would Cameron get in? “I wouldn’t have him cleaning the windows on the appliances,” my father says.