Forged with Flames (21 page)

Relocating to Berwick brought an unexpected boon. My friend Sheila, who'd been injured in the Ash Wednesday fires, moved in around the corner after she and her husband, Howard, sold their house in Upper Beaconsfield. We'd kept in contact since I left the Alfred but now we began to see each other regularly, babysitting, helping each other out, and visiting when either of us went back to hospital for more surgery. It was comforting and therapeutic to be able to share my thoughts and feelings with someone who'd gone through the same experience. Barely a conversation went past without us discussing the fires—every facet of our lives seemed to link back to that night. Talking about our families and the unfolding effects of Ash Wednesday on them helped us to gain some perspective on these momentous events. Sheila's daughter, Jane, had visible keloid scarring on her neck as I did—a cruel blow for a teenager. Conversation wasn't always serious, though. Sheila had a great sense of humour which meant we'd often laugh and make dark jokes about the predicaments that bonded us, comments others who hadn't shared our experiences may not have found at all amusing.

The move to Berwick at the end of the year also meant the girls could begin the new year at the local primary school, a quaint pitched-roof building sitting in the lee of a big oak. They were now aged five and seven, so Rachel was joining her sister at ‘big' school which made it much more convenient for drop-offs and pick-ups. Unfortunately, because of the heat in February, I couldn't be there at the school gates on their first day to see them
off. My lack of sweat glands meant I had to stay in the house near the airconditioning on hot days so I had to wave goodbye from our porch and watch them walk away with my mother, carrying their little cases, one each side holding her hands. I pushed the door shut with a pang of deep regret; I knew I had to be patient until the cooler weather arrived.

I didn't have to wait that long, though, because one day in the middle of February was unseasonably cool, with the temperature low enough for me to walk to the school—about fifteen minutes away—and pick the girls up. I made my way to the school grounds slowly, enjoying casting an eye over the colourful gardens of my neighbours as I walked, revelling in the experience and imagining how surprised and delighted the girls would be when they saw that I'd come to collect them. Just like a normal mum ... finally.

Berwick and its main street had grown considerably since we lived there twelve years ago. There were two big supermarkets instead of the original one with its two short aisles, a variety of cafes and eateries—the Berwick Inn had been the main option before—and arcades between the shops. The town was spreading out and the open paddocks with their long, rippling grass were disappearing under housing estates. The block where the farmhand's cottage had once stood was smothered with brick veneers. Berwick still felt like a village, only now it was just a bigger village.

I crossed the busy High Street, too happy to notice anyone's stares, and arrived at the school grounds a little early. Some mothers waited in their cars while several more were standing around chatting. I stood by myself to one side. The children slowly filtered out of their classrooms and began congregating
in the playground. I didn't notice anything unusual at first but gradually became aware that I was the centre of attention. I realised that I did look unusual, possibly incomprehensibly unusual, with the plastic facemask on and the rest of my elasticised body suit only partially concealed under my clothes. I began to feel uneasy and hoped the girls would appear quickly so we could go. Some of the children started to laugh and I sensed hostility from them, which was surprisingly intimidating. A few of the older children began to pick up small stones from the ground and I worried that it was only a matter of time before they started to throw them in my direction.

Just then the girls appeared and I quickly gathered them to me and hastily left the area. My mind was racing as I tried to process what had just occurred and also respond to the girls' happiness at seeing me there. They were thrilled to finally have me picking them up and chattered excitedly with me all the way home, oblivious to the reactions around them.

When we eventually reached the safety of Ambleside Crescent and the door closed behind us, relief washed over me, but I felt as if I never wanted to venture out again. Mum saw how distressed I was as we came in but I mouthed ‘don't ask' to her—there was no way that I was going to tell her about this incident in front of the girls. I went into our bedroom, closed the door and wrote a poem about it instead.

The school principal must have heard what had happened because when the children gathered for morning assembly a few days later, he explained to them why I looked the way I did, and told them a little of what had happened to me. The children were apparently receptive to all of this, and with understanding came a change in their behaviour. It was three or four weeks
later that I ventured up to the school when I started helping out with the reading program. This time I was treated like royalty! All the children knew my name and came up to me, a little in awe. Their ‘Hello Mrs Fogarty, how are you feeling today?' nearly undid me.

After this incident I realised how powerful honest and direct communication could be. I gradually began to take the initiative in awkward situations instead of shrinking from them. Over time, I found that something as simple as a genuine smile or a remark such as, ‘I do look a bit unusual, don't I?' could be enough to break the ice. I learned that with children if I took a deep breath, kept calm and let them know briefly what had happened, it became easy to win their understanding and empathy. They always wanted to know how much it hurt. When I said that it did, their concern was heart-warming to see. It was a hard lesson, but a good one.

31

THE POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

A
knock on our door in those early months of 1984 was to send me on another path of self-discovery. The minister of the Church of Christ we'd been attending since we moved to Berwick called round unexpectedly. I'd liked Geoff from the first time I met him with his up-front, honest communication style. It drew me to him, yet scared the wits out of me at the same time because instinctively I felt that he could see right through me.

My mother made us a cup of tea, and we sat in the lounge room and talked. He said he'd been a little intimidated about this pastoral visit, wondering whether he'd be able to say anything relevant or helpful in the light of all that had happened since the fires. I nodded and smiled back at him at the mention of Ash Wednesday. My coping style at the time was to always look as ‘up' as possible, and I was very good at it. Outwardly at least, I seemed to be handling things amazingly well. However, Geoff saw through this ploy straight away and punctured it in one sentence.

‘You're telling me one thing,' he said, ‘but your eyes are telling me something quite different.'

I was taken aback, astounded. No one else had ever cut through my reserve like that before or, at least, challenged me.

At the end of the afternoon, Geoff offered to come back regularly to help me work through any issues, with the proviso, ‘I can only help you if you'll be honest with me'. There were so many fire-related things that I wanted to keep buried, to stay in their boxes and, while I agreed to his offer, I felt ill at the thought of bringing them to light.

So began a time that was to take me in a completely new direction in the way I communicated as I opened up about these and other experiences. I felt I could trust Geoff to understand and accept me. That trust enabled me to speak out about some of the more traumatic fire issues for the first time, and to confront some of my unexpressed fears. A deeply spiritual man, he brought alive what had been for me the abstract ideal of unconditional love.

‘There's nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you', he said one day.

No one had ever said anything like that to me before; it really stopped me in my tracks.

Geoff came once a week for most of 1984, until we realised we were starting to go over old ground. With his insightful guidance, these months of regular ‘work' sessions gave me a chance to grow and heal in so many ways that when we decided to stop meeting, we knew we'd accomplished much. Although I'd shared more with Geoff than any other person in my life, I still hadn't divulged to him the problem of my extreme shyness.
I just couldn't admit it to anyone because I felt it was a huge flaw in my personality, and felt incredibly ashamed not to have overcome it after all these years.

However, for the first time since those troubled teenage years, I had begun in a small way, to drop the defences I used to mask my shyness. For the first time ever, I was beginning to feel safe being myself.

32

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

B
ecause the Ash Wednesday fires had such a huge impact in Victoria and beyond, the media attention on those of us closely affected was intense. After my time at Hampton Rehab, I found that I'd become a sort of minor celebrity and was genuinely touched by the interest and generosity of so many people I'd never met. I'd received hundreds of cards in hospital and wanted to communicate with these generous members of the public even though the idea of such exposure was nerve-wracking. For that reason, and to promote awareness about fire risk, I felt obliged to agree to some requests for interviews.

Terry and I did an interview for a Christian magazine first, when I was still in the Burns Unit at the Alfred. This was followed by many more requests for interviews from women's magazines, newspapers around the country and the television stations. It was an unexpected and surreal experience to find my face looking out from the front page of
The Sun
(later to become
The Herald Sun
) one day after being interviewed in Hampton Rehab, and later, to see myself on television. The other patients
teased me with, ‘Oh, here comes our celebrity!' While the staff were proud of me, they were also very protective. Whenever I did an interview they were careful to make sure there was someone hovering in case it was too much for me. Terry was there, too. The result was an extraordinary groundswell of support with people sending in bouquets of flowers and gifts or beautiful heart-warming letters.

The stories continued when we moved into Berwick in 1984, especially in February around the first anniversary of Ash Wednesday. There were articles in
The Herald,
Brisbane's
Courier-Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily News
in Perth and
The Star Enquirer
. The stories made much of the way I'd shielded the girls during the fires—and the mask. One called the mask ‘grotesque'; another story referred to me as ‘horribly disfigured'. The headlines ranged from the celebratory to the hurtful: ‘Tragedy Makes Anne an Outcast' (my name was often misspelled), ‘Burns mum braves the world', ‘Lady in the mask remembers', ‘Fire Victim's Daily Hell', ‘Courage behind the mask' and ‘Brave Anne takes on a fresh fight'.

It was like reading about someone else. I'd smile to myself when they didn't spell my name correctly but found it confronting to see myself referred to as “horribly disfigured”, even though it just confirmed in black and white, for all to read, how I imagined others saw me. After the magazine and newspaper articles came out, the requests came for television and radio interviews: on Mike Willesee's programme, on Channel Nine with Kirsty Cockburn, on
Good Morning Australia
with Kerri-Anne Kennerley, as well as various radio stations.

Not long after all this media exposure, we took the girls out to McDonalds for a meal. When we sat down, we became
aware of a table of young people nearby nudging each other and saying, ‘Look, there's the Fire Lady'. It was okay, though—they weren't laughing and giggling, just acknowledging me. The Fire Lady indeed!

My world over much of the twelve months since that fateful February day had narrowed into a detached bubble of existence where my attention, especially in the first six months, was focused on surviving the pain and staying alive. It wasn't until the media's attention on the first-year anniversary that I became aware of the magnitude of the destruction wrought by the Ash Wednesday fires and the death and havoc they had caused to lives and property. More than two hundred fires broke out on Ash Wednesday across Victoria and South Australia, injuring more than two thousand six hundred people. At one stage an arc of fire ringed the whole of metropolitan Melbourne. Forty-seven people lost their lives in Victoria that day and of those, Upper Beaconsfield, with its death toll of twenty-one people, featured prominently in these statistics and stories. In South Australia, twenty-eight lives were lost on the same day. CSIRO experts were quoted afterwards as saying that melted metal showed the heat of the fire in some areas rose to two thousand degrees Celsius.

It was around this time, when I was dealing with the physical and emotional demands of giving interviews and public talks about Ash Wednesday, that I realised I had to be more realistic about my limited energy. I had to start letting people help me more in an ongoing way which wasn't easy for someone who had prided herself on being very independent.

Spending so much time in a hospital environment, where disability or physical deformities didn't raise an eyebrow, hadn't prepared me for the public reaction to my appearance
that followed my return to the outside world. The school and bank incidents were just the tip of the iceberg. Everywhere I went people stared, and some screamed in surprise and horror. I tried not to take it personally but it was impossible to come home unaffected by it. A man walked up to me one day and said ‘What on earth happened to you?' Just like that. Terry and the girls used to become very cross and upset when people stared, resulting in them being extra protective of me.

Some days I simply couldn't face another day of public scrutiny and would retreat into my shell where I felt like staying, forever. To give me some respite, Mum would frequently step in and take the girls to their various activities, but it was always on my mind that one day she would have to return home.