I am eight years old and walking in the Welsh rain. The pace is fast and I imagine I’m a soldier who mustn’t stop marching. Even as a child, I already know that that’s just what you do: you don’t give up.
Swallowing my dislodged 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 university. I could make a long list of all the times in my life when I didn’t quit; when I shut up, sucked it up, manned up and carried on.
But after a lifetime of pushing through, I finally reached breaking point. I had been working for four years as a station commander in the London fire brigade, leading a team of civilians, senior officers and admin staff. Since the autumn of 2019, my role involved delivering reports to the Grenfell Tower inquiry on the 72 people who had lost their lives in the fire – helping officials understand how, when, where and why each of them came to die.
For three and a half years, I spent each day poring over 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 learned the fire had started. I listened repeatedly to the phone calls they made to emergency services. Calls where they pleaded for help, cried and prayed. Calls where, paralysed by toxic fumes, they saw fire break into their homes and approach them. I heard their attempts to get out, or get to rescuers on the floors below, and I also heard the attempts we made to get up through that hell to save them.
I spent three and a half years listening to those calls. I wanted to get the reports right. For the brigade, for the inquiry, but most of all for the bereaved families, who deserved to know what had happened. And as time went on, I was doing it for people who I listened to on the calls, dying. The people who live in my head now.
It was awful. I became irritable and withdrawn. I started avoiding social situations and jumping at loud noises, sudden touches. Phantom pains plagued my body, and I developed tremors. An expert would have known straight away that I was suffering with PTSD. But I was too busy manning up to quit.
I received a commissioner’s commendation for the work, the highest internal award in the brigade. I delivered one and a half million words of reports, and I had made sure that everything in them was exactly right. But everything was right except me.
The day I delivered the work I fell ill. In truth, of course, I’d been ill for a while. But I had been ignoring it. Manning up. Sat at my desk on the top floor of brigade HQ, with my rank epaulettes and my commander title, with my hand tremors and dizziness, I was really nothing more than that eight-year-old boy in the Welsh rain, refusing to quit.
I was signed off sick from work for a few months. The constant hypervigilance and jumpiness had become too embarrassing and debilitating for me to continue. I took a holiday with my family as wildfires raged through London’s suburbs, destroying a row of houses in the east. Several firefighters were hospitalised. 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 look of concern as I instantly agreed should have made me think twice.
A year and a half later, after delivering my report on the July 2022 fires, I was diagnosed with four autoimmune illnesses, all stress-related, in addition to acute PTSD. But even that wasn’t enough to make me realise I needed to quit. The moment of realisation didn’t come until 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 kids’ throats, and blood on ice. Thoughts that, even now, I can’t bear to put fully into words.
I called my boss and said: “I give up. I can’t be a firefighter any more.” They were the hardest words I’ve ever had to say. The brigade was kind and caring in its response, guiding me through the process of counselling, assessment and, unfortunately, medical retirement.
Of course, I could go back and try again. But these days, I can no longer even play with my kids in the park; when they swing on a swing, I see them crack their heads open. When they run towards me to hug me, I see them trip and smash their faces like a watermelon on the concrete. That’s what PTSD does to you. It has forced me to give up on not giving up. I feel shame, sometimes, at being a quitter, but quitting has allowed me to try to heal and to focus on being a better dad. Now, I’m allowing myself to not 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 a difficult job. When you put on the uniform and take the pay, you accept you’re going to have to be tough and push through sometimes. You accept that you’re signing up for death and destruction. Even if it’s your own. But if I could reach back through time with a message for that little boy in the Welsh rain, I would say: “Being strong is useful, but the strongest thing you can possibly do is to know when to say: ‘I need to quit. I give up.’”
JD Murphy writes poetry, plays and journalism. He was previously a senior officer in the London fire brigade
