Forged with Flames (3 page)

‘I'm sorry,' I gasped, telling myself to be calm. ‘But we've got to get out of here, now!'

Adrenalin took over. I snapped the leads on Tammy and
Dusky and pulled us all together, pushing and herding everyone out of the house. It didn't occur to me to take anything else.

Mum bustled us out of the house and up to the neighbour's house two doors from us. I was scared, but not completely. Mum was there and I trusted her to know what to do, as you do when you're a child.

Gusts of acrid smoke hit me as I opened the front door. The wind was savage, buffeting us roughly as we made our way across the lawn and onto the street. The first flashes of fire reached us; spot fires breaking out everywhere. Eucalypts crackled and exploded. The darkness was alive with streaks of orange. Gaseous plumes writhed above us.

My mind raced. We should go with Alan and Carol and their two children, rather than attempt it alone. I tugged the children and dogs along the street, searching through the smoky haze for signs of their driveway. I could see silhouettes of people moving in front of the house. Something boomed in the distance as we ran.

‘Yes, come with us,' Carol yelled over the wind.

We all scrambled into their big old sedan: Carol and Alan in the front seat; the girls, the dogs and me, and their daughter, Janet, in the back seat. Then, we realised that their youngest, Darren, wasn't with us. Or anywhere outside the car. We all leapt out, panicked now, shouting his name into the wind and darkness. We could barely see beyond a few metres. Carol's face was stricken. We weren't going anywhere now—we couldn't go without Darren. It was too late to leave. We had to urgently shelter the other three children.

The wind had become incredibly fierce. It was terrifying, way beyond any wind I'd ever encountered. You knew it was menacing, that something terrible was happening. Embers hammered us with the force of cyclonic winds.

What occurred next seemed to take moments.

Burning branches started to crack and crash to the ground around us as we ran down to Carol and Alan's swimming pool and leapt in. Strips of flaming bark flew past our ears. The air thickened with the vapours of burning eucalypts. We gasped as smoke seared our throats and scorched our eyes.

‘We've got to get out!' Carol suddenly yelled. ‘The branches are going to hit us or they'll go through the sides of the pool. Alan's gone to hose down the house. We've got to get wet all over and get out!'

I dunked the girls' heads under the water and felt a pang as I caught sight of the confusion and alarm on Rachel's face. Carol ran to the house and reappeared with two blankets. We soaked them and draped them over the children. What presence of mind Carol had, but I was paralysed with fear. We sheltered between the pool and some rocks bordering it. It looked safe. Carol crouched next to Janet in the corner of the rocks, covering them both in one blanket. Darren was still missing. My girls were next to me and I was on the outside. I leant my body over them with my head down, shielding them. They were underneath a wet blanket. I wasn't.

I was dumb with terror. My whole body ran hot and cold with panic. It was impossible to live through what we were seeing, I thought. This is it, we will all die tonight. I felt this in a shocking, but strangely accepting, way.

We huddled together, hoping for a miracle.

Suddenly, we were overtaken by a deafening, roaring din. Shatteringly loud, like the force of a thousand jet engines bearing down on us. The wind was ferocious, but this was far, far beyond the sound of any wind.

Immediately, my body was wracked by the worst pain imaginable.

Someone started screaming. Somewhere in my subconscious I realised it was Mum, and pulled away from her.

My world exploded. For long seconds I was oblivious to anything but pain. A fireball had hit me: a rolling, roaring monster outpacing the fire front and the one-hundred-plus kilometre-per-hour wind, causing everything in its path to combust. Moments before, I'd been praying to stay alive, now all I could do was scream and plead, ‘Oh God, please let me die, please let me die'. Anything to end the terrible pain.

Alan grabbed Rachel and started taking her to the car. I hesitated for what felt like an eternity. Do I stay or do I follow my sister? I chose to follow my sister. I can't remember seeing Mum burn, but I must have seen or sensed something dangerous or I would never have left her. I recall with great clarity, as I followed Alan and Rachel, that I couldn't see the steps to climb them. It was dark and I told myself, ‘Why are you looking for the steps? We're in the middle of a bushfire. I'm sure no one will mind if you climb up the rocks.' So I climbed the rocks. I ran after Alan and Rachel, stubbing my toe twice on the way. Alan put us in the car, giving us instructions that I made sure we carried out, then disappeared. He came back a couple of times to check on us as
we waited. Once he moved the car out onto the road opposite our house. I remember telling Rachel not to touch the windows as they were very hot, and telling her not to fall asleep.

Alan lifted me into the pool, burning his arms and hands as he did. This man, this act, undoubtedly saved my life. I stood in the waist-high water. Carol was splashing water over me which amazingly eased the pain.

‘Are you burned?' I asked Carol.

‘No,' she replied, quiet.

‘I think I must be,' I added, ‘because all my skin is floating on the water.'

The fire was still raging around us. Carol told Janet to push me under the water each time the flames came close, while she worked to keep the pool free of falling debris. I wouldn't realise for years what Janet had done for me. For an adult to do what she did in such terrifying circumstances would have been remarkable; for a girl of only twelve, it was truly magnificent.

Carol, Janet and I stayed in the pool for what seemed like forever; in reality it was less than fifteen minutes. Shock set in. I turned my head to look at the girls but they weren't in the pool. I couldn't see my children. My mouth opened and closed like a goldfish but no words came out. Where were my girls? I was pushed under water again, confused. I hadn't seen Alan take the girls away from the sight of their burning mother. As far as I was aware, we had three missing children.

We were in the car parked in front of our house for a long time. I thought a lot. I remember seeing our house alight. I could see a bright light in Mum and Dad's bedroom and I thought, ‘Mum's left the light on in her bedroom; maybe I should turn
it off', but I knew in the pit of my stomach that if I went to the house I would die. I really knew what had happened and I knew what would happen if I left the car. I sat in the back seat with Rachel, believing that I wasn't going to see Mum again, that she was dead. I tried to get this idea out of my head. No one wants to lose their parents and I was young enough to think that somehow it might still be alright. But deep down, I felt sick with an overwhelming dread.

The worst of the fire had moved on but branches were still falling from trees. Somewhere above us I heard a creaking, groaning sound, then a sharp crack as a large limb cleaved from a tree and crashed to the ground, sending up a spray of sparks. Burning leaves swirled and lifted in thermals. As the minutes dragged on in the pool, my legs became weak. I panicked, thinking that I wouldn't be able to stand up for much longer. I couldn't let myself sit down, I'd drown. I was going to drown.

A fire truck came down the road and stopped by the car. Ignoring my earlier instructions to Rachel, I stuck my face and hands on the window so the men in the truck would see us. They did, and a fireman came and opened the door. He asked me if there was anyone else and where were they. I gave him directions and I remember feeling that it was the most important thing I was ever going to say. I tried very hard to be clear and tell him exactly where to go. It seemed so important. Another fireman put Rachel and me in the cabin of the truck.

Just when my legs were buckling, I heard a voice from the side of the pool. A firefighter in an official-looking jacket and yellow
overalls appeared out of the smoke and confusion, like a vision. He beckoned to us to come to the side and climb out. I struggled to wade over to where he was, swivelling one hip at a time through the water, but didn't have the strength to get out.

‘Quick, quick,' he said, reaching out. ‘Come on.'

‘I can't,' I replied weakly. ‘I can't.'

He looked closer at me, and gasped.

‘Oh, my God!'

I could not know what he saw in that moment. Tony, from a brigade further afield, recalled looking at a woman with skin hanging off her ‘like candle wax'. He swore under his breath as he saw the bone of my left arm.

I couldn't get out of that pool but somehow he reached an arm around me and hoisted me over the side. I clung onto his neck with all the energy I could muster. He carried me to the cabin of the fire truck and yelled instructions to the crew inside.

‘There's police on point duty stopping traffic. Take her there.'

The firefighters continued searching for other people along St Georges Road, picking up about twelve people, including Alan.

Here I was sitting next to my burned mother. I have never been able to remember what she looked like, but I know it was horrific. My brain was clinging desperately to the fact that Mum's hair didn't seem to be burnt. It was matted and messy, but surely Mum couldn't be burned! Wouldn't her hair be the first thing to go?

It was hard to hang onto the belief that Mum wasn't hurt when I could see it, and any time anyone touched her it was excruciatingly painful. I don't know if she even knew we were there. She didn't acknowledge us. The only thing she
mentioned was could we not touch her. I was sitting next to her and although I was trying really hard not to hurt her, I did. I remember feeling so very guilty for hurting her.

The trip in the fire truck only lasted about two minutes and then we were transferred to police cars. Mum went in one, and Rachel and I in another.

I was aware of little in the fire truck beyond being high up and the crackling, fuzzy radio with its broken stream of words. How could anyone understand that? One of the firefighters lifted me down and into a police car and lay me on the back seat. I struggled to sit up but I was too weak. Everything around us was ablaze as we moved off. Power lines dangled. It looked and felt like a war zone. Dull thuds sounded like mortar shells. We rolled past a car without windows, just jagged edges of glass, then the blistered side of a van. Black tree trunks were rimmed by orange licks of flames. Black and orange, smoke and headlights. A man with a face streaked with soot appeared like an apparition out of the smoke, looked blankly into the car and walked off. I felt so completely helpless lying there watching everything on fire, thinking, ‘We could still die—we're not out of it yet'. I closed my eyes for an instant and saw the flicker of flames.

We drove away from Upper Beaconsfield, from my home and my life as I knew it. I wasn't there to see the windows of our home explode in a shower of glass or the walls crack and collapse or the garden shrink to a crisp. I wasn't there to see our dogs, panicked and running loose, bolt away through the flames. I didn't ask about it at the time.

The police car moved slowly downhill to Berwick, pausing every now and then, until it arrived at a hastily set-up refuge
centre at the Akoonah Park showgrounds. Its rotating light bounced blue off a pavilion wall as we pulled up, and one of the police officers lifted me out. Hundreds of people milled around, searching anxiously for familiar faces in the churning crowd, desperately asking questions of whoever was there. ‘What was happening with the fire?' ‘Had anyone heard about this person or what was happening in this or that road?'

Families clustered together clutching bags of possessions or clasping dogs or cats or budgerigar cages. Refugees from the suburbs. As I was carried from the police car I looked around for the faces of the girls or Terry or Carol and Alan.

‘Where are my girls? Sarah and Rachel Fogarty. I need to see my girls!'

Paramedics in uniform and medical teams who'd rushed into the centre in their civvies moved around inside the sheds, eddies of human drama playing out around them. A woman with messy hair and burnt black spots on her sundress stood convulsing in tears on the spot as another woman clasped her shoulders. An elderly man resisted a paramedic trying to wash his eyes. I shook uncontrollably; I'd become bone-achingly cold.

Someone—a voice without a face—told me Sarah and Rachel were unhurt and were here, at the showgrounds, with Terry. He would look after them, the voice said. They were all okay.

Relief, such blessed relief. Something in me loosened and sighed through the pain.

I was carried into what looked like a meeting room in the pavilion. Half a dozen people were lying on tables. Firm hands laid me on a table and someone began cutting my T-shirt and clothes off with a large pair of scissors. I felt incensed being stripped so publicly, and outraged that the clothes my mother
had given me were ruined; and worse, as my wedding ring was cut from my finger. ‘Why are they doing that? Don't they realise they are wrecking them?' I cried inside. ‘I'll take them off!'

As I lay there, drugs took over and the surrounds retreated, like a scene from a play. Then Carol appeared at the side of the table.

‘It's okay. Darren's okay. We found him,' she said. ‘He got scared and ran away down the road when he saw the fire. He's safe. He's alright.'

One of the doctors motioned her out and a woozy wave of gladness overtook me. My horizontal view of the goings-on was becoming blurry. I still badly wanted to see my family and talk to Terry. I needed my husband.

Unbeknown to me, Terry had run across from the football ground to Akoonah Park. He later recalled the sheer relief as he saw a police officer come out of the crowd carrying Rachel and Sarah. The girls were dazed and he could see that they'd been through something terrible, but were unhurt.