3:14 am
Allen Hancock
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Allen Hancock
Cover design by A Hancock
Photograph from MS Office Clip Art
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3:14 am. I suppose at that hour on a Sunday morning in the middle of a Melbourne winter the exact time doesn’t really matter, but 3:14 am was what the clock on the console flashed when I started the engine.
As we pulled away from the kerb I switched on the wipers to try to clear away the thin layer of frost forming on the windscreen even though I’d just finished wiping all the windows with a chamois. The wipers had little effect, the frost reforming on the cold glass almost as soon as the blades had passed, but I knew that by the time the heater warmed the air the view would clear.
“The lights on that house are bright,” I heard my wife remark as we drove along the last block before the end of the street. I could see what she meant. The front of the house was lit by a bright, flickering light, not so unusual at any other time but totally out of place in a dark street at 3:15 am..
“That’s a fire,” Lyn said almost calmly. She didn’t call out, she didn’t exclaim it in sudden horror and she didn’t scream at me in panic. She simply said, “That’s a fire.” I couldn’t see a lot through the frost settling on the windscreen, only a flickering orange glow as we drew level with the second last house in the deserted street. “STOP!” She shouted at me this time. “That house is on fire!”
I stopped. I stopped the car in the middle of the street without bothering to pull over to the side. I don’t think it sank in completely even then. Not until I climbed out and saw clearly.
The house was typical of its period, and of the street. A federation timber cottage with a verandah across the front, the entrance in the centre and a window on either side indicating rooms running off a central hallway. I knew the type of house quite well. I’d helped Lyn’s brother when he started renovating his own home in that street about ten years earlier and I can remember only too clearly the lath and plaster of the interior walls. The old, dry waste timber made excellent kindling.
I could see flames under the roof of the porch where fire was trapped like molten metal in an upside down cauldron slopping out from beneath its curved shape. Fire was licking the veranda post on the right and it was the dancing light from this that had first caught Lyn’s, and now my own, undivided attention. As I looked beyond to the window I could see more flames inside. Only the upper right hand side of the window showed any sign of burning but as I stood there watching, the whole room seemed to suddenly catch alight. In no more than the few seconds it had taken me to stop the car and get out, the fire had spread to cover the entire right hand side of the house.
There wasn’t another soul in the street. At 3:16 am everyone was tucked up snugly in bed, their warm blankets keeping out the chill of the early morning. Including most probably the people who lived in that particular house. If anybody was inside they needed to be woken up and got out. The people in the houses on either side needed to get out too, the distance between them being no more than about three feet. We needed help.
As I moved in the direction of the front gate I heard Lyn shouting at the top of her voice. I can’t remember exactly what she was calling but the words “HELP!” and “FIRE!” stand out most in my mind. I was thinking that we should have sounded the horn of the car, but in hindsight that would most likely have only served to make people think a mob of hooligans was messing about in their street. We didn’t want people to peek out from behind their closed curtains. We wanted them outside in the cold with us.
I’m not set in the mould of the person I’d ever pick to do anything remotely resembling heroic. I’m 46, overweight and I smoke too much. I wasn’t about to go and kick the front door in. Everything I’d ever learnt about fire up until that moment told me not to get too close to that house. Still though, I moved towards the front door knowing that at least one of those rooms on either side must be a bedroom.
I only made it as far as the front gate before I saw the orange glow of flames shining through the crack surrounding the door. Even if anybody was in the house they were not going to be able to get out through the front. I tried not to think about anybody in the room already engulfed as I veered to the left and headed up the path to the door of the neighbouring house on that side.
It was a brick building of an uncertain age but I knew that if the fire got a hold of it then, brick or timber, this house would go as quickly as the other. Aside from that fact I had no idea what was behind the burning rooms and I needed help. I formed my fist into a mallet and hammered against the door, shouting as loud as I could. “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! WAKE UP!”
There was no answer. I thought I was making enough noise to wake even the deepest sleeper as I thumped the door repeatedly but not, as I later learnt, enough to wake the owners from where they were visiting in Italy. I should have gone to the house on the other side. It was closer to the fire and obviously in greater danger from it. Only when I stopped shouting and thumping did I notice that Lyn had also stopped. A man had come out of the other house.
“Ring the Fire Brigade.” Lyn called out to him. He seemed to show no reaction, only the confused look of somebody woken from a deep sleep. “CALL THE FIRE BRIGADE!” she screamed at him. He looked in the direction of the fire and his lips mouthed the words I was thinking but maybe that was my imagination because that was what I wanted to shout. He suddenly ran back into his house and I hoped he was calling for help.
Soon I could see people standing in the yards of the houses beyond and I knew that the other house had been evacuated. A woman had a telephone handset to her ear. “Is anybody in there?” she called out.
“I don’t know,” I called back to her across the yard but even as I moved towards the gap between the houses I could see flames filling the window of the room closest to me. I didn’t know if anybody was inside but I could hear the pop and tinkle of windows shattering from the heat and I knew then that if anybody was in there the chances were good that they wouldn’t be coming out.
Suddenly there were more voices, much closer, as people staggered out from between the houses and they climbed onto the verandah where I stood. I thought of them then, and I probably always will think of them, as only kids. At my age anybody of around the same age as my own children are just that, kids. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, aged I guessed around twenty. The expletives died away as each of them took time to become aware of what was happening. I asked the question while I tried to move them away from the house to the opposite side of the road.
“Is anybody else in there?” I asked.
“No,” said one.
I started to relax, finally confronting the reality of the one fear I hadn’t been able to face from the beginning. That somebody would be trapped inside that inferno and there would be nothing anybody could do about it. The people were out; the fire brigade was on its way and we could all live with the small comfort that only property was being destroyed.
“What about Chris and JC?” I heard somebody ask. “They were asleep in the bungalow.”
I was too slow. One of the girls broke away and ran back to disappear into the gap between the buildings. I thought about following but it was all I could do to stop the rest from running after her, and I had no idea of where I’d be going in the dark.
“No.” somebody continued in a voice too distraught to identify. “They were drunk and passed out in the front room.”
My stomach suddenly felt like it had a lead weight in it. “Which room?” I asked.
“That one.” Whoever said it pointed to the left-hand front room already well alight as I moved them across the road. The weight in my stomach seemed to spread to the rest of my body and I wanted to collapse against the side of my car. I knew that people rarely burned to death in a house fire. In general, they die from asphyxiation, all the available oxygen being sucked out of the air by the fire. Any person going in there had no chance of rescuing anybody and only a small chance of coming out themselves. And there was still the girl who had run to the back of the house.
“There’s nothing you can do for them now,” Lyn said in a voice too calm. Small groups of people had gathered to watch as they slowly woke up to what was going on. The fire had taken hold of the full frontage of the house and the roof had been lifted away, the flames exploding into the black sky.
The sound of a man’s voice crying for help came suddenly from inside the house. Someone was alive in there. But the hallway was on fire and the flames would be blocking any exit through the door, a curtain of fire across the window making escape impossible.
“There’s nothing anybody can do,” I said, the feeling in my stomach too much to bear and I wanted to turn and run from that street. I saw that Lyn was holding one of the boys and the other girl and then I noticed that the girl who had run back had somehow reappeared as the screaming voice disappeared into the roaring noise coming from the house.
“Where’s the fire brigade?” I heard somebody ask impatiently. “What’s keeping them?”
I saw movement in the gap beside the house. “That’s them!” I heard somebody say. One moment I was standing in the middle of the street and in the next instant I was on the verandah as two staggering figures climbed over the fence to safety. One of them was asking for water and I felt the top of his head. His hair was hot, it could even have been smoking but it was hard to tell.
“Don’t let him drink,” a woman ‘s voice called out. “He’ll be in shock.” I should have remembered that, I thought.
Our own home is on a busy road not far from a fire station. In the time we’ve been living there we’ve grown used to the sound of sirens coming to us in the distance; the dog howling back at the noise; the roar of the truck’s engine as it passes and then disappears. Sometimes we wonder where the truck is going but usually we take only a passing interest, if we notice at all now. Unless any of our own children are out. As I stood helplessly watching I listened to the distant wail of a siren coming out of the night and it was probably one of the sweetest sounds I’ve heard in my life.
As I moved everyone back to the road again and away from the fire the first fire truck turned into the street and stopped in front of the house. “Is anybody inside?” a fireman demanded. Somebody I couldn’t see said that there were still people inside but another voice, it could have been my own, said that the last two were now out.
“Is anybody injured?” the fireman asked quickly but another voice I could hardly hear above a second siren coming from the opposite end of the street gave an answer I couldn’t make out and the fireman turned his attention to the fire.
I went back to where my car still stood in the middle of the street, tiny and insignificant against the business-meaning bulk of the first fire engine parked beside it, and in the way of the second fire engine as it approached. Quickly, I climbed in and moved it out of the way, parking safely in a car park I hadn’t noticed before behind the growing crowd that had gathered on the side of the road.
As I walked over to join Lyn once more, I’d hardly seen her since this whole thing began, I passed two boys sitting alone on the ground. One had blood on his hand and I realised that these were the two from the house. I’d been under the impression that somebody else was looking after them.
I had a close look at the cut hand but it didn’t look too bad. The other one worried me more. His skin looked grey in the bad light and he said that his face had been burned a bit. As he spoke I thought I could see blackness inside his mouth. They had run through the flames to escape from the room and I was pretty sure that he would have burns to his respiratory system. Without oxygen equipment I had no way of helping him. All I could do was to get out the blanket we kept in the back of the car to help against shock. While they sat there together I put it across their shoulders to keep them both warm and without comment they wrapped it around them as they stared at nothing in particular.
I felt terrible about having left them in the house but it wasn’t as if there’d been anything I could have done. These two had run through the flames to get out and if anybody had gone in to get them they also would have had to face those same flames. Twice, with no idea of what they would find when they got there. The only people they had to thank that they weren’t dead were themselves, and the one whose name I could hear being muttered by the people in the crowd. But they still needed more help.
I assumed that an ambulance would be on the way but I needed to be certain. A police car pulled to a halt nearby so I walked over to it. “Can you make sure an ambulance is coming?” I asked the driver through the open window as his passenger got out.
“You’ve got somebody hurt?” he said almost as if surprised that anybody had been.
“Yes,” I said. “Two of them. They were in the front room of the house.”
I could hear the driver talking urgently on the radio asking for confirmation that an ambulance was coming as I turned to go back to the two boys. I didn’t wait to find out the answer. All I needed to know was that an ambulance now would be coming. I knew I couldn’t do much for them apart from keep them warm but they were scared and they needed somebody with them.
There were so many flashing red and blue lights by then that I didn’t even notice when the ambulance arrived, only when I saw two ambulance officers looking about for their patients. “Over here,” I called out when I saw them stop to talk to somebody only to receive an I don’t know shrug. I backed away to give them room to work and in that instant I became just one more in the crowd of onlookers.
The fire had grown rapidly in the short time my attention had been concentrated on other matters and even though fire engines blocked much of the view, I could see that it had spread into the rooms further back. Flames roared from one of the side windows igniting the dry timbers of the adjacent house and the firemen were having a hard time trying to stop this new fire from spreading further by a burning gas meter set against the side fence.
“My mother’s going to kill me,” one of the boys was saying to Lyn. “It’s her house.”
Lyn suddenly took him by the shoulders. “I’ve got two kids about the same age as you,” she told him. “If I were her I’d just be happy to know you’re alive.”
The ambulance officers wheeled the worst of the two boys away on a trolley, his face covered by an oxygen mask as the other joined him in the back of the ambulance. The blanket lay on the ground so I picked it up and threw it to the others. “You may as well keep it,” I said. You probably need it more than we do.”
At least nine people had come from the two burning houses but almost as suddenly as it had begun our involvement ceased. The police took statements from us but there wasn’t much more to be done other than to watch the flames consume the house. Lyn and I were spectators, outsiders. We didn’t belong there. We needed to be in our own home and I felt an overwhelming desire to check the batteries in the smoke detectors.
There was no frost on the windows of the car as I started the engine. The clock on the console flashed the time at me. 4:14 am.
~~~
3:14 am is based on a real life incident that took place between 3:14 and 4:14 am on 1 June 1998.
From hard experience I’ve learned that people who have been involved in or witnessed an upsetting event, frequently experience emotional change. It is generally recognised that the sharing of thoughts and information with others can provide relief. In a way that’s why I wrote this story.
If you need to talk to someone or to seek further support or advice, Lifeline can be of assistance. In Australia Lifeline can be contacted 24 hours a day on 131114. (www.lifeline.org.au)
If you enjoyed 3:14 am and would like to read more, try:-
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- The Battlefield
- The Billabong Incident
- The Big Cheese
Novels
- The Chance of a Storm
- Song of the River
Records Management
- Gordon Ramsay and Alphabet (Expletive Deleted) Soup – The Future of Recordkeeping is Simple
- Recordkeeping for Knuckleheads
Allen Hancock was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1952. He joined the Australian Regular Army in 1970 and spent the next 21 years moving around most areas of Australia. He left the Army in 1992 and has been working as a professional records manager since then. Allen has more than 40 years association with the records and information management industry working with Federal and State Government agencies as well as in higher education and private enterprise.
Allen lives in Melbourne with his wife Lyndal where after raising four children