—What’s your favourite colour?
—Who’s going to win the FA Cup?
—Do you like ice cream?
The answer’s probably not long, but it definitely seems to work a couple of times before the doctors and nurses finish what they’re doing and they can start shouting at him and keeping him busy and not dying. So we say goodbye and wish him luck and walk out of resus and into medical history, having invented the precordial conversation.
Like I said. Maybe.
Part of the reason I failed in journalism was I was terrible at job interviews. At one I saw the news editor of a major Sunday paper on a hot August day. I began to sweat so heavily rivers were running down my face. The editor looked concerned, as if I might have malaria, and asked if I was all right. Another time I went for a job with a big charity. My research was going to the library to look them up and find out they were the largest pressure group in the UK. One of the panel was an enormously fat woman.
—What do you know about us?
—I know you’re a pressure group.
—What else?
—You’re large, I said. Very large.
Silence.
Shit.
Even with a bit of experience, in this job, it’s very easy to say the wrong thing. It’s called foot-in-mouth disease. Val’s often very helpful in pointing it out to me.
Val
When I joined the service there was a strict progression of experience before they let you loose on an emergency ambulance. (There still is.) First you did patient-transport work, ferrying people in and out of hospital for booked appointments. Then if you wanted to move to A&E you had to do a two-month course to become a trainee ambulance technician. You worked as a TAT for a year, always with someone more experienced. Then you had a two-day assessment to see what you were like, hopefully followed by qualification. After that you were let loose – allowed to work with someone who was less experienced than you.
You are in charge.
The first day of doing this – I’d been in the service about three years – was frightening. My first day in charge was a while ago now, with a trainee – Valerie. We had dead bodies both ends of the shift, my blood pressure went through the roof, but I think we got away with it.
Val’s a bit like me, falling into the service after various jobs – airline stewardess, office worker – hating them all. I think she worked in a zoo once, which she quite liked. I bet that was good training for the job.
Val and I stayed together after this, as regular crewmates, for a while. You learn to depend on each other. You end up knowing the other’s opinion on everything from Islamic fundamentalism to emulsion paint. Having a good solid crewmate’s like having a good left leg. It’s difficult without it.
Monica and Gordon
Midnight.
We’re called to a female, twenties, in labour, childbirth imminent. This is not an unusual type of call, but the next bit is. They’re in a field.
Or rather, parked beside one.
—Shit, says Val.
What’s happened is she’s gone into labour, so they’ve made a break for the hospital, but then the baby’s decided not to play ball. It’s playing I’m coming out now! The trouble is they don’t know where they are or what road they’re on, and so they’ve got right royally lost.
So we have an interesting ten minutes or so driving on blue lights up and down the road, looking for them. We come off the motorway. We go back on. No sign of them. At this rate the bloody thing will be collecting its old age pension before we find them.
Eventually, from up on the motorway, we see the van in the moonlight, hazards on, out in the country in the middle of nowhere. Five minutes later we pull up behind. Inside the scene is … novel. Mum is a young girl, naked from the waist down. She’s already given birth while driving along, and the poor sausage has fallen out and landed in a heap in the footwell of the van before they even had time to stop. There’s what looks like a massive Irish Wolfhound, or maybe a small horse, going bonkers in the back.
—Woof!
The whole inside is filthy. It’s obviously a well-used vehicle, an old camper van, and hasn’t been cleaned or tidied in years. Mud everywhere. Baby’s now wrapped up in an old towel which doesn’t look too clean either and is being cuddled by Mum.
The problem is the placenta hasn’t been delivered yet, and we need to get Mum out and on to the ambulance, and the baby properly wrapped up in something that doesn’t look like it’s used to dry off the beast in the back. Luckily the police have arrived behind us, so they close off the road, so that we can draw alongside, and they hold up a blanket while we get the stretcher out and get Mum and baby on board. Not that there’s anyone around here, anyway.
I go round to tell the person sitting in the van with her what we’re going to do. He’s an old man, maybe sixty or seventy, and looks Middle-eastern. Balding but with a pony tail. Maybe he’s her father? He can hardly hear me over the dog.
—Woof!
—Are you a relative?
—I’m the father.
—Her father?
—No, the baby’s father.
—Woof!
Shit.
Brilliant. Val mouths at me. Fantastic. Well done.
I’ve put my foot in it. Not for the first time. Oh well. Never mind.
As we get her on board and he follows us into the hospital, it’s the elephant in the room – or ambulance – all the way in. We try and give the midwives a bit of a discreet warning so they don’t blow their own feet off like I did, but it’s difficult. Funny old world.
Funny very old world.
Mum and baby are doing fine when Dad arrives, thankfully dogless, shuffling in looking confused, every inch the mad professor. The midwives make everyone comfortable and test the newborn to make sure it hasn’t suffered from the unscheduled rolling around on the filthy floor.
My crewmate and I wish them all well and leave, wondering how soon we’ll be back out to him with dementia or something.
The interview with my boss Len for the ambulance service was pretty successful, compared with the charity fiasco. For some reason I didn’t feel so nervous. Maybe I knew I wanted the job. Or that I might be OK at it.
Did I mind blood, vomit, faeces? Was I hard-working? Did I like people?
No, no, no, yes, yes.
Was I reliable and good in a crisis?
Yes and maybe.
Did I have any unsightly or offensive tattoos?
I looked at his arms, covered in tattoos from elbow to wrist.
No, but I can get some if you want.
It was pretty much the only time I had ever seen him laugh.
Silly bastard.
I was in.
So that’s how I started.
The service itself started earlier. Wikipedia will tell you the first recorded ambulance was a hammock-based cart affair ferrying around leprosy and psychiatric patients a thousand years ago. Presumably everyone else had to walk. The first emergency ambulances were used by the Spanish 500 or so years later, and London had a civilian service for cholera patients a few hundred years after that. All pulled