Web Site Story

charge and who should be giving the orders to whom. There is often a tendency for the first to arrive on the scene to put themselves in charge, whether they should be putting themselves in charge or not. There can be an awful lot of posturing and pulling rank and being difficult and, well, being male really.

It's a 'man thing' and it has a lot to do with the uniform.

One might have thought that in Brentford, things would have been rather different. But if one might have thought this, one would have been very wrong. Would one.

Men will be men and boys will be boys and so on and suchlike and whatnot.

The race along the High Street was a good'n though. Two of the police cars just managed to overtake the ambulance, but they were held back by the fire tender, which took to violent swerving and then skidded to a halt at an angle effectively blocking both sides of the High Street. This left for a fifty-yard two-legged dash along the pavement. Bookies in the crowd were already taking bets.

First to reach the crash site should have been fire officer Arnie Magoo. He was first out of the tender's cab and very fast on his feet. But faster was constable Cavendish and far more powerful too. Winger for the Metropolitan Police All Blues rugby side, he grounded fireman Magoo with a splendid tackle, which drew much applause from members of the crowd who were laying their bets on the bobbies.

Whilst the first two gallant lads grappled it out on the pavement, it was left to Acting Fireman Howard Chubb and Police Constable Edward Flanders to battle for lead position. These two were old adversaries and well versed in each other's tactics. Whilst Flanders favoured rib-elbowing, Chubb was an eye-gouge merchant.

They had once drawn a joint first place at a road traffic accident in Abaddon Street, back in 2020. A milk float had collided with a jeep containing soldiers home on furlough and brought down a pillar box, setting it ablaze.

This particular accident had led to a most interesting situation due to the number of uniformed personnel all finding themselves in the same place at the same time. The soldiers naturally felt that they should take charge of the situation, but a passing postman declared that he should. The driver of the milk float, who argued that his uniform held as much rank as anybody else's, threw in his twopenny worth and Flanders and Chubb [4] arriving together, as they did, were drawn into a five-way confrontation.

They were, however, outnumbered by the military on this occasion, who effectively demonstrated that guns held rank over truncheons and fire axes.

So.

While Cavendish struggled with Magoo and Chubb held Flanders in a headlock and poked him in the eye. And fire officer Gavin Rupert sat upon the chest of Police Constable Meredith Wainwright. And fire chief Lou Lou had Chief Constable Eric Mortimer Ronan-Bagshaw up against the window of Mr Beefheart's butcher's shop. It was left to the enterprising and nimble Police Constable Ferdinand Gonzales, five times winner of the Metropolitan Police 'You're it' championships, to break away from the pack and claim the disaster for his own.

Before sinking slowly to his knees and passing from consciousness.

'Now will everyone back away please!' ordered ambulance driver Lesley Jane Grime, loading up a hypodermic with a potent anaesthetic, whilst at the same time discarding the one she had just used on the backside of Constable Gonzales. 'I am in charge here and now…'

But she really didn't stand much of a chance and she soon went down beneath the flailing fists of bobby and fire bloke alike.

‘I’ll have to break this up,' said Kelly, squaring up to employ her Dimac. 'I can't allow this to continue.'

'Best to keep out of it,' Derek advised. 'These things eventually resolve themselves and as there's been no loss of life…'

'There's injured people upstairs on the bus.'

'Ah look,' said Derek. 'Here comes Mr Shields.'

The editor of the Brentford Mercury jostled his way through the crowd, pushing a small and worried-looking man before him.

'This is Gary,' said Derek to Kelly. 'Gary's our press photographer.'

'I don't like the look of this,' said Gary. 'This bus might explode at any minute.'

'It's quite safe,' said Kelly. 'But there's injured people upstairs.' She stepped aside as a fireman blundered by with a constable clinging to his throat.

'Go up and photograph them, Gary,' said Mr Shields. 'Have you brought the doll?'

Gary nodded. Kelly said, 'Doll?'

'The discarded child's doll,' Mr Shields explained. 'It makes for a great front-page picture. Adds that touch of pathos. Often there isn't one at a crash site, so press photographers always bring their own.'

'Mine's called Chalky,' said Gary, producing Chalky from out of his pocket. 'She's quite a little star, aren't you Chalky?'

Kelly's jaw fell open. 'Don't you understand?' she said. 'There are injured people. Real people. Suffering.'

'Any dead?' the editor asked.

'Thankfully not.'

'Shame. But one or two might always die on the way to hospital.'

'What?' Kelly looked appalled. She was appalled.

'Ah,' said Mr Shields. 'Well, I know that might sound callous, but actually it isn't.'

'Isn't it?' asked Kelly, as two confused constables rolled by, wildly swinging at each other.

'It's a cathartic thing,' the editor explained, stepping aside to avoid being hit by an ambulance man. 'Vast public outpourings of grief. It started back in the 1990s. People began placing bunches of flowers at the sites of road accidents or murders. Then there was the Hillsborough disaster and of course the death of Princess Di. Conspiracy theorists suggest that it was a cabal of florists who came up with the original idea. But I tend to the belief that the public need that kind of thing. It makes them feel caring and takes their mind off their own problems for a while. And thousands and thousands of bunches of flowers all laid out do make for a very colourful and poignant front page…'

Mr Shields never saw the punch coming. Kelly laid him out with a single blow.

Order was finally restored with the arrival of FART. The Fire Arms Response Team. They had been called in when Mr Pendragon, the proprietor of the Plume Cafe, who had just popped around the corner to the cheese shop shortly before the demolition occurred, and had tarried rather longer than he should have done in the pub next door to the cheese shop, returned to find a bus sticking out of the front of his now defunct cafe and a whole lot of uniformed men beating eight bells of bejasus out of each other all around and about.

Somewhat upset by this downturn in his fortunes, he had managed to locate his old service revolver from amongst the wreckage of his business premises and started taking potshots at the crowd. As one would.

It was all well and truly over, however, by three in the afternoon.

Derek and Kelly sat in the waiting room of casualty at the cottage hospital. There had been no fatalities through either crash or conflict. Mr Pendragon lay in a private ward, straitjacketed and suffering the after- effects of nerve gas. Mr Shields had recovered consciousness and returned to his office, where he sat composing headlines of the bus crash plume boom doom persuasion. The uniformed walking-wounded had licked their wounds and walked and only those who had been aboard the bus remained tucked up in hospital beds.

Derek was making notes in his reporter's notebook.

Kelly sat and teased strands of her golden hair. Twisting them between her fingers, slowly backwards and forwards. Back and forwards and back.

Dr Sebastian Druid, son of Ted and brother to Conan Barbarossa Firesword Druid (who lived in a world that was very much of his own), breezed through the double doors that led from the general ward and smiled a warm and friendly smile at Kelly Anna Sirjan.

Dr Druid was a man of moderate height and immoderate sexual appetite. He had much of the tawny owl to his looks, but a little of the okapi. He knew his stuff when it came to first aid, but was totally lost