Burn Baby Burn

Warming Up

8005/20946

A day that will go down in history as the Great Fire of Hitchin. Almost the whole town was burned down overnight and it was only the intervention of the fire brigade that kept the flames at bay in the industrial estate where the conflagration had started.  So only maybe one building was affected, but it's horrible to think of what might have happened if no one had called 999.

Apparently the industrial estate has about four fires a year, so they are especially lucky that the fire fighters show up. If I was them I'd not bother until these industrial people get better at not setting fire to their own buildings.

A cloud of smoke drifted across Hitchin as I walked the kids to school and it looked like it was heading directly for their school, which was a bit frightening. I had to explain why smoke was both deadly and why they didn't have to worry about heading into a big cloud of it.  I wasn't entirely convinced by my own argument, but although you could smell the smoke in the air (and it didn't look too dirty or chemically) it was actually passing some way from the school and was also high up in the air (though sensibly the kids were kept in at playtime).

I told them about the time that I was in a fire, but they were only vaguely interested. I thought I would have written about this before, but a search of the blog only throws up a mention of it here (though it has reminded me that a decade of so ago I'd thought about writing a show about my year off called 1985 about my year off (though even though the title is fun, it wouldn't be entirely accurate as most of the stuff I did in my year off was in 1986 - still not a bad idea though)

So I can tell you that story.

I had done Camp America in the summer of 86. It had been a long, long summer, with 6 sessions (a fortnight each I think) at Camp Mendocino https://www.campamerica.co.uk/camps/camp-mendocino in the Redwood forests of California. Many American summer camps service the wealthy, but this was one for kids from less privileged areas from San Francisco and maybe LA too and it was pretty tough work. I had done well to begin with, winning awards for best cabin leader and best activity (I'd transformed the Jungle Gym into something amazing) and get promoted to tribe chief. Then things had fallen apart a bit as the kids become more demanding and I was put in charge of the youngest kids and had no training or idea what I was doing and after an incident where I slapped a kid who was misbehaving I was demoted and nearly sent home. I can't claim to have been in the right here, but it was crazy that I'd been put in such a stressful position when I was 18 and had never looked after kids before, let alone ones from a US inner city.

On the last night of the Camp, after the final lot of kids had been sent home, there was a big party. It finally centred around the maintenance cabins up on the hill and everyone was drunk and getting off with each other. I was drunk. And went to my bunk alone.

I was woken in the early hours of the morning, and not easily as I was out for the count, by the alarm ringing and someone shouting and shaking me. The cabin on the hill had gone up in flames and everyone was rallying to try and tackle the blaze. We were something like 50 miles from the nearest fire station and were living in a huge forest made of notoriously flammable redwood trees. We were in charge of our own destiny. Luckily there was no wind and the day or so before there had been the first light rainfall of the summer. But the fire was big and the cabin was right by where all the fuel was stored and I remember (correctly or not, I don't know) one of those fuel stores exploding and watching a tree be engulfed with fire.

Drunk untrained teenagers had to load up cars with kitchen equipment full of water and drive it up the hill. If we couldn't extinguish the flames our only hope was to all jump into the creek and hope for the best as the fire passed by. But I can't see how that would have worked.

Amusingly my friends Brian and Geoff back in Cheddar had got their times wrong and attempted to ring me just as the fire took hold. Someone had had to break into the office to ring the fire brigade, but got them calling up instead and they were no doubt told to fuck off.

I wasn't heavily involved in the fire fighting and was scared and in disbelief. I'd been fairly convinced I would die young and before I'd had sex and had successfully managed to hold on to my virginity throughout this long summer. But the proper men (and women) got the fire under control and no one was hurt, though one guy came very close to getting run over and a couple doing rather better than me at having sex had escaped the cabin at the last minute.

The fire engines arrived once the crisis was under control, but it could have been a very different story.

We were lucky no kids were in the camp, but to be fair most of the staff were my age or younger so it could have been the more terrible tragedy if things had gone differently.

I told the kids that none of us would have been here if things had taken that turn. Though to be fair so many things had to happen over the last 13 billion years to make that a reality, so avoiding death in a fire in a redwood forest is the least of it.

You'd all just be staring at a blank page on the internet now, wondering why you'd come here.

The Great Fire of Hitchin also fizzled out and we all got to live to see another day.

RHLSTP Book Club with sex bomb Danny Wallace (I know I should judge him by his work not his body, but I can't help myself - please don't cancel me) talking conspiracy theories is up here