Forged with Flames Read online

  We drove away from Upper Beaconsfield, from my home and my life as I knew it. I wasn’t there to see the windows of our home explode in a shower of glass or the walls crack and collapse or the garden shrink to a crisp. I wasn’t there to see our dogs, panicked and running loose, bolt away through the flames. I didn’t ask about it at the time.

  The police car moved slowly downhill to Berwick, pausing every now and then, until it arrived at a hastily set-up refuge centre at the Akoonah Park showgrounds. Its rotating light bounced blue off a pavilion wall as we pulled up, and one of the police officers lifted me out. Hundreds of people milled around, searching anxiously for familiar faces in the churning crowd, desperately asking questions of whoever was there. ‘What was happening with the fire?’ ‘Had anyone heard about this person or what was happening in this or that road?’

  Families clustered together clutching bags of possessions or clasping dogs or cats or budgerigar cages. Refugees from the suburbs. As I was carried from the police car I looked around for the faces of the girls or Terry or Carol and Alan.

  ‘Where are my girls? Sarah and Rachel Fogarty. I need to see my girls!’

  Paramedics in uniform and medical teams who’d rushed into the centre in their civvies moved around inside the sheds, eddies of human drama playing out around them. A woman with messy hair and burnt black spots on her sundress stood convulsing in tears on the spot as another woman clasped her shoulders. An elderly man resisted a paramedic trying to wash his eyes. I shook uncontrollably; I’d become bone-achingly cold.

  Someone—a voice without a face—told me Sarah and Rachel were unhurt and were here, at the showgrounds, with Terry. He would look after them, the voice said. They were all okay.

  Relief, such blessed relief. Something in me loosened and sighed through the pain.

  I was carried into what looked like a meeting room in the pavilion. Half a dozen people were lying on tables. Firm hands laid me on a table and someone began cutting my T-shirt and clothes off with a large pair of scissors. I felt incensed being stripped so publicly, and outraged that the clothes my mother had given me were ruined; and worse, as my wedding ring was cut from my finger. ‘Why are they doing that? Don’t they realise they are wrecking them?’ I cried inside. ‘I’ll take them off!’

  As I lay there, drugs took over and the surrounds retreated, like a scene from a play. Then Carol appeared at the side of the table.

  ‘It’s okay. Darren’s okay. We found him,’ she said. ‘He got scared and ran away down the road when he saw the fire. He’s safe. He’s alright.’

  One of the doctors motioned her out and a woozy wave of gladness overtook me. My horizontal view of the goings-on was becoming blurry. I still badly wanted to see my family and talk to Terry. I needed my husband.

  Unbeknown to me, Terry had run across from the football ground to Akoonah Park. He later recalled the sheer relief as he saw a police officer come out of the crowd carrying Rachel and Sarah. The girls were dazed and he could see that they’d been through something terrible, but were unhurt.

  ‘You’ll need to go to the room where medical teams are treating the injured people,’ a policewoman told him, in a way that indicated the children weren’t to come. Terry gave them a cuddle and left them with a woman who used to live next door to us.

  When he entered that room, all he could see was my face with pieces of skin falling off it. Later, he told me that all he wanted to do was to hug me. Instead he touched me lightly on the stomach, knowing that our natural instinct is to double over to protect ourselves, so the stomach is one part of the body that is least likely to suffer burn trauma. I apparently told him what happened in the fire and asked where he’d been and how he found the girls. Were they scared? Who was looking after them now, I begged to know.

  ‘They’re fine but a bit dazed,’ he said. ‘I’m more concerned about you.’

  I can’t actually remember Terry coming in to see me at the refuge centre; I was so out of it.

  Soon afterwards I was lifted into the back of an ambulance, heading to Dandenong Hospital, sirens blaring. It seemed to take so long. The painkillers took over and I started to feel very tired. For weeks afterwards in hospital, every time I’d shut my eyes I’d hear a siren.

  Once we arrived, the doctors pricked me all over with a sharp needle.

  ‘Can you feel this?’ they asked, again and again. ‘Or this?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, relieved.

  This must be a good sign. Perhaps I wasn’t too badly burnt after all? I was so pleased that I could feel nothing. I didn’t realise that no feeling indicated that the greatest damage had been done: nerve endings had been destroyed as well as tissue, muscle and even bone.

  The doctors said I needed to be transferred urgently to the Alfred Hospital which had a specialised Burns Unit. An ambulance officer travelled with me in the back on this journey, a young man who kept talking to me, peering intently into my face, asking never-ending questions. I felt so weary and longed to sleep, but he wouldn’t let me.

  ‘Do you have any children?’ ‘Where do you live?’ he asked. ‘Do you work?’ ‘Do you have any animals?’ On and on.

  The trip seemed interminable but we eventually arrived at the Alfred, which was to be my home for the long, difficult months ahead. On this day, however, I had no idea about the terrible journey that was to unfold.

  I didn’t see Mum again for a very long time.

  As I was taken away for treatment, the CFA crew resumed their search for people still trapped by the fires. Tony, the firefighter who saved me, remembers continuing up St Georges Road until they reached the last house. It was down a steep drive and the crew had to look for a rock to stop the tanker rolling forward in the drive. They thought they’d found one until someone said, ‘Oh no, it’s not a rock, it’s a charred kookaburra!’

  When Tony finished his thirteen-hour shift the next morning he went home ‘knackered’, walked in the back door of his house and was greeted by his wife who told him that twelve firefighters had lost their lives in St Georges Road. They had been caught in a gully a hundred metres from that last house. Tony was devastated.

  2

  NIGHT PANICS

  Although I had experienced terror during the fires, my journey with fear had started decades ago. One evening in 1955, I stood alone at the top of the stairs in our two-storey stone house in Barrowford, wailing.

  ‘My heart’s beating too fast, my heart’s beating too fast!’

  I cried out for someone to come and stop the terrible pounding, for someone to bend down and look into my eyes and know what was happening to me. It was my first panic attack.

  I was just five years old.

  The bedrooms in our old house were up a steep, straight flight of stairs, cut off from the rest of the house. Lying in bed in the dark, I would fixate on the crack of light under the door. The television was just audible, a fuzzy rise and fall of voices with silences in between. My heart beat out in the darkness—ta dum, ta dum, ta dum—getting faster and faster. The more I worried about it, the faster and louder it became, pulsing out into the room: ta dum, ta dum, ta dum, until it was pounding like an out-of-control steam engine. My imagination ran with it. Disaster was just around the corner, I knew it. When the thumping reached a crescendo, I scrambled out of bed and screamed out to my father for help. My mother worked the evening shift at one of the local cotton mills, so wasn’t home.

  I stood on the landing until my father, immersed in his nightly viewing, yelled back distractedly saying that I was allowed to come downstairs. I descended that staircase, feet treading on each step, one at a time, and sat on the edge of the settee while Dad carried on watching television. Once I’d calmed down, I took myself back up to bed.

  Such incidents were to recur often throughout my childhood.

  3

  MY ENGLISH CHILDHOOD

  Panic attacks aside, I was a carefree, tomboyish sort of girl, always getting ticked off for ripping my dresses and losing countless hai
r ribbons as I tore around the streets and fields of Barrowford with the other village children. There were hardly any cars in the fifties and our mothers let us roam on our own for hours with the only admonishment being, ‘Make sure you’re back in time for supper, mind.’

  The village of Barrowford was a cluster of streets, mostly rows of terraces, solid and sombre, grey or brown, their facades joined. Some were a tad fancier than others with white paintwork around the windows. Our house was towards the middle of a stretch of these houses fronting the main thoroughfare, Carr Hall Road. Further up the road the posh people lived in imposing homes with titles like Carr Hall House and Green Fields fixed impressively on their front walls or gates. We were fascinated by these well-to-do places and their grounds, and would peer through gaps in the hedges or chinks in the gates, past the sweeping driveways and clipped lawns, at their ivy-clad facades. Some had porticos and bay windows and other such flourishes, their entrances flanked by clipped firs or rose gardens. We would wait and watch, keeping an eye out to make sure there wasn’t anyone around to catch us spying. Who or what we were hoping to see coming out of these houses, I don’t know, but it was intriguing nonetheless. We knew that looking at them was the closest we’d get to living in one. Life was mapped out for us elsewhere, in rows of houses with flattened facades.

  Our own single-fronted terrace was directly across the road from Victoria Park, with its stands of deep green oaks and elms, shady sycamores and ash trees. Pendle Water, a river, ran through it and joined up further along with Colne Water, which flowed down from the moors. We’d play at the water’s edge, squatting down to race leaves that would bob downstream over stones and shingles, or to watch and listen for the plop of fish jumping for flies. The neighbourhood kids collected conkers (horse chestnuts) there in autumn, threading them onto string or a shoelace and using them for conker fights. The aim was to smash your opponent’s conker off its string—there was quite an art to it. Some children, usually boys, cheated by baking their conkers in the oven to make them harder. When we weren’t playing in the park we’d be either running around in the fields close by or playing in the backstreets: narrow areas between the rows of houses, perfect for uninterrupted games of skipping or hopscotch.

  In summer, Mum would sometimes call a halt to the day’s housekeeping and announce, ‘Let’s go on a picnic’. We’d pack a picnic lunch of sandwiches, (always on white bread with potted meat, maybe tomatoes or cucumber); a bottle of pop in sarsaparilla or dandelion and burdock flavour; fruit, and if Mum had baked her chocolate cake, a slice each.

  Another of our chief delights was going to the Top Shop. Right at the crest of the next street, the Top Shop was one of two groceries that seemed to sell just about everything. Its front window was crammed with sweets; big glass jars and brown cardboard boxes full of them. We’d spend ages standing at the window deliberating between the “sports mixture” bag (little gummy sweets in the shape of cricket bats, tennis racquets and suchlike) or the bag with the rainbow-coloured kali (sherbet) and a Spanish (licorice stick). The Top Shop owners knew me as “Little Miss Dairy Milk” because each night after Mum went to work at the mill and my sister Jill was in bed, Dad would say, ‘Run up to the Top Shop and buy me a block of Dairy Milk’. I would trot off obediently with sixpence in hand. The shopkeepers would laugh when I came in, and say, ‘Here comes Little Miss Dairy Milk again’. If I were particularly lucky Dad would even give me a piece after he’d opened it, but not always.

  Life in Barrowford beat to a predictable rhythm. It had been a mill town since the sixteenth century: generations worked at the looms and there was hardly a family that didn’t have some connection to them. My mother worked in the Lilia mill as a machinist while her mother had been a weaver in one. Her father was a wheelwright and blacksmith. Dad’s father also worked in a mill—as an overlooker, checking the cloth after it had been woven. There were at least three cotton mills near us, and more beyond. You’d hear the sound of the workers in the streets going to and from their shifts in their metal-soled clogs—a wonderful noise, clunking on the cobbles. The mills, however, were daunting buildings with inky smoke belching out of their towering chimneys, dwarfing you as you approached. The unrelenting clang of machines grated from inside as you walked past the windows, a little quicker than you might otherwise. I would look up at them and shudder, knowing even then that I would never work in a mill.

  By the time I was an adolescent, the mills were in decline anyway because cheaper fabric was being imported, so it was becoming less common for people to take up jobs in them. Village life was also loosening up—but only just. Most people worked away from Barrowford, in Nelson, Colne or Burnley, the three closest large towns. My father worked first as a clerk in Nelson and later as an accountant in Burnley. He was given a car as part of his salary, a cause for some excitement as not many people had one. It was a mark of someone who’d done well in his job—one up on the neighbours! We thought the lime green Morris was the most wonderful car in the world. The first time Dad took us out in it he was so nervous he ran it right up onto the pavement.

  After Mum stopped working at the mill she was enlisted as a cleaner with a woman called Mrs Halstead, who lived in one of the big posh houses. Mum was a born cleaner—she loved everything to be ordered and in its place, something that rubbed off on me as a child and, in more extreme ways, later in life. She was often in her “pinny”, straightening things, dusting and vacuuming. I went with her to Mrs Halstead’s a couple of times when she cleaned, which was the closest I’d ever got to what I thought of as a posh person. It certainly beat spying on them. I knew Mrs Halstead must have been important because the name Halstead appeared here and there in Barrowford, including as the name of a main street, and because my mother made a special point of reminding me to ‘make sure you’re on your best behaviour, now’ before we went.

  I was quite in awe of Mrs Halstead despite her initially disappointing appearance—short with trim, black curly hair and glasses—not at all grand or regal as I’d imagined she might be. But there was a decided air of authority about her that stopped any thoughts of misbehaving around her on my part. I remember once being allowed to play in her ample garden and being in awe of the size of it, especially compared to our postage stampsized backyard.

  Although we knew many of our neighbours, my parents mostly kept to themselves. Dad was not one to engage in unnecessary conversation. Like most men of that generation, he demonstrated his love for his family by working hard and providing well. He was much more likely to give you a ‘quick clip around the ears’ than have a conversation with you. As a child, I longed to have my father’s approval—or even just his attention—but Dad seemed much keener on watching the television, particularly the wrestling. If I were in the room with him during The World of Sport, he would suddenly jump up from his chair in the ad breaks, grab me and pin me to the ground and say in great delight, ‘Hah! Get out of that then’. Of course I couldn’t, but I’d stay there as long as possible, until it got too painful. Dad always fell asleep in front of the television after work at night, but when Mum went to turn it off he would instantly spring awake again and bark, ‘What are you turning that off for, I’m watching it!’ A wiry man, he’d been athletic in his younger days and moved quickly. Mum and I would often leave him to the television and go into the other living-room where she played the piano and I sang, loudly and badly. Poor Dad, we could hear the volume go up on the telly by degrees until he drowned out our fun as he tried to hear it above our appalling singing. We would have loved him to join in, but he never did.

  When I was small I’d watch Dad playing cricket at Colne, where he’d grown up; later as he took scouts at Barrowford, where he eventually became district scoutmaster. Maybe he’d have noticed me more if I’d been born a boy. The only time he seemed to approve of me was when I was being obedient, not crying and not complaining—generally keeping out of his way.

  My sister, Jill, was born when I was almost five, around Christmas, whi
ch made the event extra exciting. I was so looking forward to the new baby coming home; I’d be able to put her in my doll’s pram with Elizabeth, named after the Queen, and wheel her round the neighbourhood with me. I imagined that I’d look after her in a very grown-up way until she was old enough to come on Enid Blyton adventures with me.

  Dad and I caught the bus to Colne the day Mum and Jill were due to come home from hospital, and we all caught a taxi back together. I was wriggling with excitement sitting next to my mother and brand new baby sister in the back seat. I leant over to kiss her, meaning only to give her a little peck, but must have been too rough because Jill started and cried. Dad delivered a swift, hard smack and told me off. Instantly, the joy was gone. I sat silently, smarting, the rest of the way home, misjudged and unhappy.

  As Jill grew, she became cuter and cuter. People cooed over Jill. It was one thing being upstaged by a new baby—I could almost cope with that—but the novelty showed no signs of wearing off. The more people focused on Jill, the more I tried to attract attention and the more annoying I became. I hadn’t exactly been a bonnie baby either—an aunt of mine thought I looked so fragile as an infant that she told my mother, ‘You’ll never raise that child’. Another aunt told me once that whenever she was at our house I was always getting myself into trouble for something or other.