Work and PTSD

Ex-work observations – not such easy reading. [Edit – Not easy at all, but it’s just a thing, things make life rich, it’s not a call for help.. it’s the sort of thing though that was the start of me spotting that a hug and a cuppa are good things]

The first thing I usually do, before 7, is turn on my work phone to check early morning messages. This has been largely unnecessary for years and years but the habit was burnt in.

My second job, soon after I started, included urgent briefing to ministers, direct on the phone, if there had been a serious road traffic incident overnight. I had to get info to them so they could go on the Today prog between 8 and 9.

What counted as “serious” was set by criteria – more than 5 killed, 3 if children, or in a tunnel, a fire, a bus/coach – something novel. There would be faxes ready for me to read when I got in soon after 6am. Most incidents happen over night and in the worst death times, the early hours as drivers fell asleep or were drunk, or just speeds on empty roads.. or all of those things.

The faxes were typed by very tired, very busy, very stressed police officers in a rush – they were hard to make sense of.. I’d pick through to see how many people had died and if their deaths had been awful enough to interest the media.

9 people – 5 teens died as their car caught fire after they drove, fast and drunk, into a couple with a baby and a toddler who had parked in a layby to sleep.. that sort of thing. The police described their injuries – ‘skinned face’, ‘hands missing,’ ‘can’t tell what sex’ ‘child or dog – no limbs, too charred’.

Occasionally one like that hit the criteria. I’d have to ring the phone no on the fax and try to get hold of an officer actually dealing with the case. This would always be a live incident – patched through via a radio to the road side, awful line, sirens blaring, shouting. .. I had to get info from extremely busy people – precise details, speculation of the cause, when would it all be clearer up.

I was not at all popular, I had to be very determined to bully info out of the police – they’d shout at me, I’d have to shout back knowing if I gave up I’d just have to call back. My boss would be on another phone (he was usually still at home, not in at 6 – he only covered the work when I was on leave) barking at me to get more info and also to have the minister’s office on a 3rd phone. They’d be shouting at me to say whether or not the press were aware – who else had the police briefed, and who knows what.. it was an awful adrenaline filled nightmare.. I cycled in, 45 mins, from Tottenham, via Camden, Trafalgar Square, into Westminster.. I cycled fast, very fast.. must be in by 6.

Obviously, most days, the small pile of faxs, as I picked through the daily numbers of dead, their injuries, their likelihood of living, the ‘serious’ criteria point wouldn’t be reached. .. 1 man died on his motorbike on the Ilminster Bypass (well known locally as dangerous… mildly newsworthy) .. his head was missing.. his family found it, still in it’s helmet, a mile away.

A dad had driven to the shops to buy a child safety seat and was driving home when he drove, fast, into a tree and the heavy (not yet fitted) child seat flew out of the uncovered boot and killed the child who never got to sit in it.

A man and 2 kids were fine, completely unhurt, after they drove fast into some wooden fencing beside a motorway – but a section of fence had gone through the windscreen, though the face and skull and headrest of the woman (mother) in the passenger seat and skewered her there in front of them… It was the thought of the three of them fine, sat there with her, so dead, that never left me.

The faxs continued through the days – I’d pick through, reading the dry, clunky, police-speak version of horrors – most lives and limbs are lost in unexpected ways, death takes people by surprise, mostly.

That was 1991-93.. somehow it’s still in my mind whenever the phone rings unexpectedly, it’s still what I expect with early morning texts, it’s what I was expecting as I checked my work phone this morning.. but stopped.. the phone is off.. it’s staying off..

… so hard not to check it or just to check my own phone the moment I’m awake.

As years pass, it’d be cool if we could select the memories to keep and those to lose.