I I’m eight years old and walking in the Welsh rain. The pace is fast and I imagine myself as a soldier who is not allowed to stop marching. As a child I knew that that is exactly what you do: you don’t give up.
Swallowing my loosened tooth during a camping weekend with my dad and his work friends so they wouldn’t think I was weak. Living in a tent for a period during your studies. I could make a long list of all the moments in my life where I didn’t stop; when I shut my mouth it sucked it in, manned me up and kept going.
But after a lifetime of perseverance, I finally reached the breaking point. I had been working as a station commander in the London Fire Brigade for four years, leading a team of civilians, senior officers and administrative staff. Since autumn 2019, my role has been to provide reports to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry on the 72 people who died in the fire. I helped officials understand how, when, where and why each of them died.
Every day for three and a half years, I thought about every detail we knew about the men, women and children there: what they had done in their lives before the disaster, and what had happened when they heard the fire had started . I listened repeatedly to the calls they made to emergency services. Calls in which they begged for help, cried and prayed. Calls where, paralyzed by toxic fumes, they saw fire entering their homes and approaching them. I heard their attempts to get out, or to reach the rescuers on the floors below, and I also heard the efforts we made to get through that hell to save them.
I listened to those calls for three and a half years. I wanted to get the reports right. For the brigade, for the investigation, but especially for the relatives, who deserved to know what had happened. And as time went on, I did it for people I listened to on the phone calls, dying. The people who live in my head now.
It was terrible. I became irritable and withdrawn. I started avoiding social situations and jumping at loud noises and sudden touches. Phantom pain plagued my body and I felt tremors. An expert would have known immediately that I was suffering from PTSD. But I was too busy manning it to stop.
I received a compliment from a commissioner for my work, the highest internal award in the brigade. I delivered a million and a half words of reports and I made sure everything in them was exactly right. But everything was fine, except me.
The day I delivered the work, I got sick. To be honest, of course I had been sick for a while. But I had ignored it. Manning. Sitting at my desk on the top floor of Brigade Headquarters, with my range paulettes and my commander’s title, with trembling hands and dizziness, I was really nothing more than that eight-year-old boy in the Welsh rain, refusing to give up.
I was sick from work for a few months. The constant hypervigilance and nervousness had become too embarrassing and debilitating for me to continue. I was on holiday with my family when bushfires swept through the outskirts of London, destroying a row of houses in the east. Several firefighters were hospitalized. The brigade declared a major incident.
On the Turkish Riviera my phone rang: “We need someone to investigate. To write the report.” My partner’s concerned look, which I immediately agreed with, should have made me think twice about it.
A year and a half later, after I delivered my report on the July 2022 fires, I was diagnosed with four autoimmune diseases in addition to acute PTSD, all stress-related. But even that wasn’t enough to make me realize I had to stop. The moment of realization only came when my daughter asked if she could go ice skating with a friend. I had to leave the room so she wouldn’t see me choking on intrusive thoughts of razor-sharp boots, soft child’s throats, and blood on ice. Thoughts that, even now, I cannot fully put into words.
I called my boss and said, “I’m giving up. I can’t be a firefighter anymore.” They were the hardest words I’ve ever had to say. The brigade responded with kindness and care, guiding me through the process of guidance, assessment and, unfortunately, medical retirement.
Of course I can go back and try again. But these days I can’t even play in the park with my kids; when they swing on a swing, I see them cracking their heads open. When they run to hug me, I see them tripping and smashing their faces like a watermelon on concrete. That’s what PTSD does to you. It has forced me to give up and not give up. I sometimes feel ashamed of being a quitter, but quitting has allowed me to try to heal and focus on being a better father. Now I allow myself not to be strong. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but sometimes you don’t know what can kill you until it’s too late.
The brigade is full of good people doing difficult work. When you put on the uniform and receive the salary, you accept that sometimes you have to be tough and persevere. You accept that you sign up for death and destruction. Even if it’s your own. But if I could go back in time with a message for that little boy in the rain in Wales, I would say: “Being strong is useful, but the strongest thing you can do is know when to say, ‘I have to fuses’. . I give up. ”