I should be thinking about the article.
I am.
A little.
But mostly I am thinking about Pippa telling me to text her when I get home, as if the road between here and Carlisle is not an ending.
Because it is only distance.
Because distance is something people can cross.
22
Chapter 21
Carlisle Gazette
What We Don’t See When the Fire Engine Leaves
By Anthony John Hodgson
At Fellside Fire Station, the kettle is rarely cold.
That is not a romantic detail. It is not a cosy image placed here to soften the harder parts of the job. It is simply true.
Tea is made between equipment checks, after training drills, before community visits, during paperwork, and in the quiet spaces after incidents wheneveryone in the room knows that quiet does not mean nothing happened.
On one night shift, the crew returned from a call where an elderly man had died.
They changed out of wet kit. They made tea. Someone suggested toast. A few minutes later, they were checking radios, updating notes and preparing to be available for the next emergency.
That is the part of firefighting most of us do not see.
We see the blue lights. We see the appliance leaving the station. We see smoke, water, helmets, ladders and the visible urgency of response. We see firefighters arrive when something has gone wrong, and often we measure their work by the outcome we wanted.
Was the building saved?
Was the person saved?
Could more have been done?
Those questions are understandable. They are also not always the right questions.
At Fellside, a rural station serving villages, farms, tourist roads and fell communities, much of the work happens before anyone calls 999. It is in the routine checks that mean equipment is where it should be. It is in training that teaches the body what to do under pressure. It is in prevention visits, school talks, local knowledge, weather awareness, familiarisation with difficult roads and farms, and the constant preparation for situations that may never happen but would be far worse if no one had planned for them.
The public often imagines firefighters waiting for emergencies.
The reality is more active and more complicated.
They train. They check. They clean. They rest when they can because fatigue is a safety issue, not a personal weakness. They visithomes to fit alarms. They teach children not to hide in a fire. They talk to frightened residents, angry residents, confused residents and people having the worst day of their lives.
“People think it’s mostly fires,” one firefighter told me during my time at the station.
He was right.
It is fires. It is also road traffic collisions, flooding, alarms, rescues, rural access problems, welfare concerns, public reassurance and the difficult emotional labour of standing beside people when there is no sentence that can make the situation better.
I spent two weeks embedded with the crew at Fellside after this newspaper reported on a farm fire in the area. The original article raised questions about the incident and the decisions made at the scene. It also placed those questions beside the fact that the incident was overseen by Watch Manager PhilippaHart, the county’s first female watch manager.
