Читать книгу More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea - Tom Reynolds - Страница 38

The radio sparked into life, ‘General Broadcast, General Broadcast—are there any crews able to deal with a ceiling collapsed on a mother and her two-year-old child?’

We were just finishing up the paperwork on our previous job so we asked for it to be sent down to us. I was driving and we were soon at the house. From the outside everything looked normal.

However, inside the house it was pure chaos.

There were seven children running around the house, all of them under the age of twelve. A single mother was clutching her two-year-old to her chest. At first glance they looked unharmed. The mother seemed more frightened and angry than injured.

We soon got the full story: the mother and her child were having a nap in the bedroom when the ceiling had fallen on them. We entered the bedroom expecting a few scraps of plaster. Instead we were met with the sight of one-and-a-half-foot plaster and lath ceiling, a huge chunk of which had fallen six foot onto the bed.

The hole in the ceiling was about five feet in diameter; there was a lot of heavy debris spread across the bed and floor.

Rather understandably the woman was a bit upset—the individual pieces of plaster that had dropped on her were about the size of my hand and were over an inch thick. I couldn’t estimate the total weight of the plaster, but each lump was very heavy.

It was about now that the headache I’d thought I’d got rid of earlier in the evening started to return.

As a single parent who had just moved into the area she had no other relatives to help look after the children so she was refusing to go to hospital. My crewmate took her and the toddler into the ambulance so that he could examine her more fully. If he found nothing too serious then we could leave her at home to look after her children.

So off they went to the ambulance.

Which left me looking after six anklebiters.

I don’t like children.

While he was in the ambulance my crewmate phoned the patient’s GP and arranged for them to come and visit the patient. He then arranged for the police to turn up and give the patient some legal advice. Rather obviously the patient was a trifle annoyed at the landlord who had assured her that the house was fit to be lived in.

Meanwhile I was doing my best to entertain the children. My best wasn’t enough.

I was relieved when the children’s older brother arrived with some takeaway chicken meals. Yes—there were now eight children in the house of this 36-year-old woman. This older brother was more like a father to the others and he soon had these apparently feral children under control.

Luckily for the woman and her child our initial guess was correct—neither she nor her child was seriously injured.

My crewmate and I escaped from the scene as soon as the police arrived.