Stuart Pawson - Some By Fire

"Yeah," John told him. "Some heavy shit up Chapeltown. House burned down. Didn't you hear the engines?"

Duncan was looking in the fridge, lifting out and inspecting cartons of milk and half-eaten packets, but not really seeing what he was doing.

"Mmm," he mumbled, as if uninterested. "Anybody hurt?" The toaster popped behind him, and the smell of burning bread set his saliva flowing.

"Shit!" he heard John exclaim.

"It burns at anything over number one," Duncan informed him.

"Thanks." John started to scrape carbon into the sink, trying to rescue his toast.

"So?" enquired Duncan.

"So what?"

"I asked you if anybody was hurt."

"Where?"

"In the fucking fire!"

"Oh, yeah, sorry."

Duncan hesitated, a carton of milk halfway to his lips. "Who? Did they say who?"

"Not really. Just that it was some sort of hostel. There were three women and five kids in it. They were all burnt to death."

Duncan reached his free hand out to steady himself, not realising that he was squeezing the carton and its contents were running down his jeans and over his plimsolls and soaking into the threadbare rug.

God, it was a long time ago. I was just coming to the end of my first week of night shifts at Chapeltown, Leeds, where I'd been transferred after making sergeant. I was tired, hungry and out of my depth. The radio in my clapped-out blue and white Vauxhall Viva burst into life.

Something about a fire at a dwelling in the Leopolds, wherever they were.

"Alpha Charlie to XL," I said into the microphone. "The intruder at the health centre was the caretaker, come in early to prepare the place for some function. PC Watson had it sorted.

Tell me where this fire is and I'll take it. Over."

"Thanks, Sarge," came the reply. "Where are you now? Over."

"Halfway out of the health centre gate, pointing at Roundhay Road, over."

There was some background noise, it sounded like laughter, then: "Turn left up Roundhay Road, right at the traffic lights, and the Leopolds are on your left. It's Leopold Avenue. Over."

"Ten-four, out." We were big on ten-fours in those days.

The lights obligingly showed green as I approached them and I swung right across a road that was freer of traffic than I'd seen it in the two weeks I'd been there. A good scattering of people were walking the pavements, though, in a variety of shapes, colours and modes of dress.

I saw yashmaks, jellabas, and severe old gentlemen wearing yarmulkes.

In Heckley, where I come from, we have plenty of Asians who came to work in the textile industry, but nothing like the mix I was witnessing here. The sun was already high and warm, adding to the illusion that this was another country. We were heading for a scorcher, and I was going to spend it in bed, once I'd sorted this fire.

I found the Hovinghams, the Dorsets, the Sandhursts and the Chatsworths, but there was a definite lack of Leopolds. They were streets of back-to-back terraced houses, built by hard-nosed industrialists in the nineteenth century and given inspirational names by their wives between bouts of swooning and fundraising for the vicar's latest campaign to save the heathens. Indoor toilets and hot water came much later. The heathens themselves later still.

I was weighing the embarrassment of radioing in for further instructions against the indignity of asking a pedestrian when I saw the fire engine coming towards me. He went by in a bedlam of noise and flashing lights and I made a U and raced after him. As soon as I turned round I saw the smudge of brown smoke over the chimneys, an affront to the morning. We crossed the main road and there it was, on the left Leopold Avenue.

I went past the fire tender and swung in next to one of our mini-vans that had beaten me there. A big PC I'd only seen at shift-change times was standing in the road, looking up, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun with both hands. As I got out he dashed through the gate in front of the house and leapt up the three steps to the front door. He held his head low, away from the door, and smashed the glass with his elbow. I looked up at the windows but I could see only smoke. The PC was groping inside the door, feeling for the latch, as more smoke swirled around him.

He got the door open as I reached him and went inside, head down, arm raised across his face. "What's happening?" I shouted at him.

He looked round at me, his face bunched with pain. "I saw someone!" he yelled back.

"Where?"

"The roof window." He dashed into the hallway towards where he knew the stairs should be, stumbled into them and started climbing. The smoke was yellow. I went back to the door, took a deep breath, closed my eyes and dashed into it. I caught him halfway up the first flight, doubled up and coughing. I grabbed him round the waist in a rugby tackle and dragged him back down the stairs. An oblong of light marked the position of the door. I smothered his flailing arms and bundled him towards it and out into the morning "What the fuck are you playing at?" a fireman shouted at me as the big PC leaned on the wall of the yard and coughed the chemicals out of his lungs.

"He saw a face," I gasped. "Up at the roof window."

"Right." He yelled the information to his colleagues, then told me: "A couple of lungfuls of that and you're a goner." He nodded towards the open door and dashed off towards the fire tender as another one came hee-hawing down the street.

Firemen were running all over the place in a well-rehearsed ballet.

"You OK?" I said to the PC.

"It was a l-little g-girl," he spluttered.

"It's out of our hands now."

"I could have got to her."

"Maybe."

I put my hand on his arm, saying: "Come on, we're in the way here." He pulled his arm out of my grasp but followed me across the road. We stood against the low wall of the house opposite and watched the professionals. They ran a ladder up to the attic window and pulled a thin red hose from the tender. A fireman in full breathing gear readied himself to go up, his mate adjusting his equipment for him while another ran down the street looking for the hydrant. Two more engines arrived. Word had got back that this was a big shout.

"You OK?" I tried again.

He nodded and tried to stifle another cough.

"Want a whiff of oxygen?"

"No."

Right, I thought. Please yourself. My left hand felt sticky. I looked down at it and saw blood. I gave myself a quick once over and decided it wasn't mine.

"Are you bleeding?" I asked.

"It's nothing."

"Let's have a look."

"I said it's nothing."

"And I said let's have a look." Because I'm the sergeant and you're a PC, right?

He held a bloody fist towards me.

"Open your fingers."

He opened them. It looked as if a sliver of glass from the door had sliced into the ball of his thumb.

"That needs stitching," I told him. "Let's get you to the Infirmary."

"It'll be OK."

"It needs stitching."

"I'm not going for it stitching."

He was a stubborn so-and-so, no doubt about it.

"Well, it needs a dressing," I insisted. "Let's see what's in the first-aid kit." I strode towards my panda without waiting for a reply and after a slow start he tagged along.

Not much, was the answer. A couple of dressings, a one-inch bandage, some rusty safety pins and the inevitable triangular bandage. The one from his van was worse. The neighbours were standing in little groups, watching the action, and an old lady let us use the sink in her kitchen. It was a deep porcelain one, streaked brown by a century's drips, its spindly taps encrusted with verdigris and dried calcium. A galvanised peggy tub stood in the middle of the room with a handle sticking out of the lid for agitating the clothes. Automation had arrived. I washed the wound with cold water out of the hot tap and smothered it with some Germolene she found. A big ginger cat jumped up to inspect my handiwork and sniffed the open tin. The cut was deep and really needed stitching. I put a dressing on it and told him to hold it there with his thumb across his palm. No blood came through so I covered the lot with a bandage.