Once upon a time, a long time ago. Look when you’re a GOF, everything is a long time ago. Deal with it.

I pulled a man out of a burning car. The details are still very clear in my mind and I think they are interesting in what they tell about this kind of emergency situation.

Get this straight right now. This is NOT about heroism or bravery or courage. As far as I am concerned it is just an interesting anecdote for the details of what took place.

I was a hot summer’s night ( thanks Meatloaf), I was driving from Manchester to Altrincham on a three-lane suburban main road. There was a string of traffic tooling along at 40mph, the legal speed. Some clown came hurtling along the outside of the queue and cut the back off a white car that was making a perfectly legitimate turn.

It burst into flames.

Now we have to do the details.

I was driving a Triumph Spitfire, a little sports car, convertible, with an 1147cc engine.

Cars of that era did not have rollover protection, airbags or any of the modern stuff.

I was wearing a seatbelt. They were just coming into use. It was lap and diagonal with an aircraft-style flip up release.

In a crash there would be fair chance that this type of car would flip and anyone in a seatbelt would be trapped and probably decapitated.

I had devised a drill for getting out of the car as soon as possible in the event of a crash:

• Grab the handbrake. No need to turn off the engine, change gear or brake. The handbrake would stall the engine and the car would slow and stop on its own.
• Flip the seatbelt release
• Punch the doorhandle. I  had turned the handle upside down so that it was push to open, not pull. Much quicker
• Roll out of the car. The seatbelt would come off, the door would open, roll out on to the road.

So there I am, looking at a blazing wreck and my car is next up.

I do the emergency exit, roll in the road, jump up and start running towards the wreck.

I said it was a hot night. I’d taken off my shoes and every time my feet thumped on the tarmac, a voice in my head screamed, “Stop Running! It’s gong to blow! He’s already dead! You’re going to Die!”

But,

I had disobedient feet. They went “Nah! We’re doing the running thing, Boss. Try to keep up!”

My head kept screaming that I was going to die, but my feet kept running.

And I mean they took no notice of my commands to run in the opposite direction.

I got to the wreck. The passenger door had jammed. A passer-by had run to the other side, that door was open. I ran round the back of the car and we got the driver’s door open.

The driver was holding his arm, “Leave me alone, I’ve broken my arm!”

Everything behind the driver’s seat was angry read fire. I don’t mean flames, they were blazing away all round the back of the car. Inside, it was like looking into a furnace of molten glass. Just brilliant, featureless red heat.

“how do we move him?” the other guy yelled.

“Easy,” I said, “just get him on the ground on his back, grab his jacket collar and run!”

We ran the driver across the road, hands in his jacket collar, up the kerb and sat him against the wall.

And that’s the end of that.

The next thing in my memory is my fellow rescuer saying,”We better go and tell someone what happened.”

So we did. There was a policeman directing traffic around the mess, so we told him what happened. He wasn’t interested. So we sloped off and went on our ways.

Now the interesting bits.

• I have no recollection of heat in any of this. I was standing less than a metre from a raging petrol fire and I do not remember any heat. My clothes were not singed. My hair was not singed. There was not any burn on my hands or arms.
• The back of the car had been cut off. I mean it wasn’t there. The fuel tank had obviously been split and the contents sparked off on the exhaust or some such.
• I don’t know how long it took for the police and emergency services to get there, but there is no gap in the memory timeline. I think I smoked a cigarette, but that’s it.
• When I got back to my car, it had run up the pavement, missing a lamppost and coming to rest with its nose 4 inches from a 10ft stone wall. It didn’t have a scratch.
• The inside of the wreck was such a featureless wall of fire, I have sometimes wondered if there was anyone else in it. Not that it would have mattered. By the time we got the driver clear, anyone else would be gone.

But this is the important bit.

Nothing that happened in this sequence was spur-of-the-moment. Everything had been thought out in my mind long before.

What would I do in a crash, to get out of my car?

How to move a victim in this situation? We did that in a first-aid course at school.

Running towards the car?

Well, there are two parts to that.

My feet had obviously made up their mind about that a long time before. I resent that a bit. It was alright for them, they had a fair chance of remaining intact long after the rest of me got blown to pieces. Selfish brats.

The other part also goes back long before. I had met an ex-policeman who told me about an accident he attended.  A truck driver was trapped in his cab, his foot jammed under the pedals. The policeman climbed in to try to free him. Then the truck caught fire. And the policeman had to get out. He told me he would hear that driver screaming until his dying day. I knew I could not live with someone screaming in my head like that. So I ran towards the car.

As far as I am concerned there was no bravery or courage involved. All the decisions, if any, had been made long before that idiot clowned into the back of a car.  I just happened to be the next car in the queue.

And I’ve often thought I should have thanked the driver behind me for not running me over, after all, a loony rolls across the road out a car doing about 30mph? deserves to get run over.