Text 1: Burnt toast and broken cars, by Holly Brennan

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The alarm goes at 2.14 a.m., a harsh electronic shriek that drags the four firefighters of Blue Watch out of their bunks. Fifty-eight seconds later, by my phone’s stopwatch, they are dressed, booted and rolling out of the station doors, blue lights washing across the empty high street.

The call is to a block of student flats. On the way, Crew Manager Leanne Ward reads the building plans from a tablet clipped to the dashboard: where the stairs are, where the gas meter is, how many people live on each floor. When we arrive, three hundred students in dressing gowns are standing in the car park. The cause, it turns out, is a crumpet.

‘That’s most nights,’ Leanne says, without irritation. Fires in this city have fallen by more than half in twenty years, thanks largely to smoke alarms, safer furniture and fewer smokers. These days Blue Watch spends more time fitting free alarms in pensioners’ homes, visiting schools and training for floods than putting out flames. The job, she says, has turned from fighting fires into stopping them.

But not entirely. At 4.40 a.m. comes a second call: a car has left the road and hit a tree on the bypass, and the driver is trapped. This time nobody talks on the way. At the scene, the crew work with a fierce, quiet speed. A thermal camera checks the engine for hidden heat. Hydraulic cutters slice through the door pillars as though they were cardboard, and within twelve minutes the whole roof of the car has been lifted away and the driver, a young man shaking with cold and shock, is passed carefully to the paramedics.

Back at the station, as the sky turns grey, someone puts the kettle on and someone else makes toast, a little ostentatiously, under the grill. The joke lands. For a moment everybody laughs. Then they clean the cutters, refill the tanks, and wait.

Text 2: A night with the fire engine, by Thomas Wadsworth

An original magazine article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine article, written in 1874, a writer describes a night spent at a city fire-engine station.

I had been sitting for three hours in the watch-room of the Mercer Lane engine station, and had begun to suspect that the city intended to remain unburnt for the whole of my visit, when the bell above the door gave a sudden and furious clamour.

What followed I can scarcely describe, so rapid was it. The horses, which stand all night in their stalls with the harness hanging above them, were led out and in the shafts before I had found my hat. The men came tumbling down the stairs, pulling on their tunics and brass helmets as they ran. The engineer flung a lighted handful of shavings into the furnace of the boiler, and in less than two minutes from the first stroke of the bell we were out of the gates and thundering down the street, the steam rising as we went, and the men shouting ‘Hi! Hi! Hi!’ to clear the way.

The fire was at a timber yard by the river. We saw it long before we reached it, a red glare upon the clouds, and heard it too, a roar like a great wind. By the time the hose was run out, the flames had climbed the stacks of planks and were leaping from one to another like living things. The engine throbbed and hissed, the jet struck the fire with a sound like a whip, and the men went in among the smoke as calmly as if they were entering a church.

One of them, a young fellow named Cole, fell from a ladder when a stack gave way beneath it, and was carried out with a broken arm. He made light of it, and asked only whether the yard was saved. It was not; but the houses beside it were, and that, the foreman told me, is what counts.

We returned at dawn, slowly now, the horses steaming and the men black with smoke and silent with weariness. Within the hour the engine had been cleaned and polished till it shone, and the horses stood once more in their stalls beneath the hanging harness, waiting for the bell.

Both of these texts are about spending a night with firefighters.

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