Kit Wharton - Emergency Admissions - Memoirs of an Ambulance Driver

Nice. (Makes a change from drinking the alcohol gel I suppose.)

End of shift and good night.

When the going gets tough – we’re out of here.

We go back to the station – a huge, cavernous building with two sets of double doors that you drive in and out of. Ambulances come in one end and out the other, like sausages. Old and a bit dirty. Occasionally a pigeon flies in and we have to shoo it out. The station tells you a bit about the service. There are pictures on the walls of ambulances parked in formation, back in the 1970s and 80s and 90s. In the days when ambulance crews washed the ambulances, kitted them out, cleaned the station, even sat down and had a meal together. Nowadays, we’re so busy that teams of people do all that for us – we collect our ambulances at the start of the shift and we’re off out and might not see the station again until twelve or thirteen hours later. Though sometimes, on quieter nights, you can open up little cupboard rooms around the station and find old abandoned equipment and stuff in them, decades old. There’s probably a body in there somewhere. Or someone living there. Maybe a patient?

I tell one of the bosses about the shift.

He’s a very tall, thin man, slightly frightening and balding, called Len. Ex-forces, in the job a million years. A man of staring eyes and whispered words, unsmiling. Whatever bit of the forces he was in may not have been the Charm School Corps. He’s retired now. Modern ambulance officers are a little more … cuddly, I suppose. He ponders the jobs a few minutes, then gives his stock response to a lot of things.

—Stupid buggers.

—I felt sorry for them, says Val. Especially the one who’s mentally ill.

Len stares at her.

—What d’you want to feel sorry for him for? He’s a nutter.

I get home about midnight – dog-tired – as Jo’s going to bed. The kids who I left too early to see this morning are long in bed and I won’t see them tonight. I pour myself an industrial-sized whisky. There might be another after that.

Jo looks at me.

—You know you’re drinking too much, don’t you?

This is the life. Just another long, crazy shift. Ours not to reason why, ours just to bitch and moan and wonder how the hell we all ended up here. What’s the Talking Heads song? ‘Once in a Lifetime’?

And you may ask yourself:

How did I get here?

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