Page 23 - THE FIRE STATION

21
SOMETHING MANY CHILDREN WANT TO BECOME
WHEN THEY GROW UP
A CHILD’S DREAM COME TRUE
“I was born in 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War.
My family was quite poor.” I was told this by François Hallet
(name changed), while his charming wife served me a slice of
the delicious redcurrant tart she had made specially for my visit,
and the smell of hot coffee rose from my cup.
That was around the time the Charleroi fire brigade was re-estab-
lished. Housed in Charleroi city hall, it consisted of some fifteen
firemen, helped out by the mobile Civil Defence unit which had
previously been in charge of fire-fighting in Charleroi.
At that time, the only vehicles they had were one small lorry and
two fire engines with room at the back for the firemen, sitting on
benches exposed to the elements. The fire engines had:
– no on-board pump (the trucks still towed a standalone pump)
– no ladder (there was a 14-metre wooden ladder which had to be
towed by a vehicle. It was only used when specifically requested
and was manually operated by means of a crank. It was some-
times supplemented by a ladder with hooks on the end, the use
of which can only be described as acrobatic),
– no water tank (water was accessed by hoses, sometimes cover-
ing quite a distance. In the best case, water would come from
a fire hydrant, but sometimes it might even come from a stream,
a rainwater cistern or a manure tank),
– no high- or medium-pressure hose reels.
The fire hoses still had no tap and information had to be passed
to the person in charge of the pump to open or close the valve,
a method which obviously caused extra damage.
F. : “I only went to primary school. At the age of fourteen, my fa-
ther sent me to work as a typesetter in a Charleroi printing shop.
Then came military service, where I did duty in the Green Berets
as a paratrooper. After that, I had no intention of going back to
typesetting. That wasn’t what I wanted at all. I needed something
a lot more physical. I applied to the police and the fire brigade. I
could have gone to either, but I chose the fire brigade, something
I’d dreamt of as a child!”
On joining the Charleroi Fire Brigade in 1961 at the age of twenty-
one, there was still a small Civil Defence unit there, made up of a
dozen men.
François entered the fire service together with five of his class-
mates, receiving no. 45 as his ID number, the last of his year. He
was thus the forty-fifth professional to become a member of the
Charleroi Fire Brigade, eight of whom were already no longer in
the service (two had died, four had taken retirement and two had
been relieved of their duties).
These thirty-seven professionals (officers, sergeants, corporals,
drivers and firefighters) were able to provide firefighting services
to an area roughly equivalent to what it is now with just seven
vehicles (three pumps, one 32-metre ladder, a rescue vehicle, one
small lorry and a command vehicle), thanks to the support of the
“policiers-pompiers”, policemen-cum-firemen permanently as-
signed to the fire station.
F. : “I signed on out of a passion for the work, without any knowl-
edge of the number of hours involved or the wages. At that time, I
was still living with my parents. As was customary in those days,
I had to hand over my full wages to my father in order not to be
dependent on him. On receiving my first wages, I realised just
how little I was getting – about one third less than in the private
sector. You know, they often ‘taxed’ us for spending the whole
day playing cards! That’s why our wages were so low! Though
it was wrong, we didn’t quit! My father advised me to quit, but I
preferred to carry on, while working as a typesetter on my days
off, i.e. every other day. That meant I was quite comfortably off.”
There were no intercoms in those days. Life in the fire station
was punctuated by a bell sending out signals like Morse code.
It reverberated in all rooms and was activated from the storage
room by the operator:
uninterrupted ringing for an emergency response,
∙ ∙ ∙ three short rings for a chimney fire,
∙ ­­ — one short ring followed by a long ring for the roll call.