I was eighteen years old and thought I knew everything. And then I got a girl pregnant. We weren’t really planning a family at that age, so it was kind of unexpected. When I told my mum, I was wearing the same Diadora T-shirt I’d had since I was about thirteen. Mum wasn’t exactly over the moon. But she soon calmed down and vowed that we’d bring up the baby between us. Dad is a man of few words. He had even less than usual to say about this particular matter.
My daughter Maddison was a beautiful little thing, an absolute cracker. The one big problem was that me and her mother were just a couple of immature teenagers who didn’t get on particularly well. But I thought that I should at least give it a go. I didn’t want to be an absent parent and not be part of it, so I thought that maybe we’d spend the first year together, watching our daughter grow up. Then, about eleven months after Maddison was born, my girlfriend became pregnant again. Telling my mum was pretty much the same as the first time, except this time she was even more upset.
A few months later, my girlfriend went for her first scan. The nurse said, ‘Right, I can see the baby there.’ Before adding, ‘Oh, I’ll just need to grab a doctor . . .’ I was standing there thinking, What the hell is wrong? The doctor came in, took one look at the scan and said, ‘Congratulations, it’s twins.’ I went home and said to Mum, ‘You know I said she was pregnant again? Well, she still is. But this time there’s two of them . . .’
Twenty-seven weeks into the pregnancy, my girlfriend’s waters broke and she went into labour. The twins – Rhianna and Courtney – were born thirteen weeks early and transferred straight to intensive care. They looked like little aliens, but they were our little aliens, and we immediately loved them immensely. One of them had a collapsed lung; both of them were on ventilators. The doctor told us they were probably going to die. Never mind how old I was, this type of news would have ripped the heart out of anyone.
I couldn’t live at the hospital, or even in my car, because we had another baby to look after. I stayed off work for a bit, but there’s only so much leeway your bosses can give you. So after about a month, I had to go back in. I can’t blame them. They didn’t tell me to have a kid, let alone three in eighteen months.
I was already working for the ambulance service, and had been since two days after my eighteenth birthday, which made me their youngest ever employee. As such, you might think joining the ambulance service was a burning ambition, almost an inevitability. But I stumbled into it.
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School wasn’t really for me. Even at primary school, I struggled to fit in. I remember on a school trip to France, everyone writing down who they wanted to share a room with. The teacher reached the bottom of the list and I was the odd one out. I had a lot of pent-up frustration and would stand my ground. If anyone said anything I didn’t like, chances are I’d lump them.
One of my fellow pupil’s dads, who was a policeman, took a particular dislike to me. He thought it necessary to visit the headteacher and tell him that, in his professional opinion, I was a bad person, destined to end up in prison and shouldn’t be in the school. It’s possible I’d punched his son. Mum and Dad were devastated. A copper deciding your son is a wrong ’un carries a lot of weight.
Eventually, I was referred to an educational psychologist and diagnosed with dyslexia. And once that diagnosis was made, the frustration died down. I was given support, which changed everything. Once I understood that there was nothing wrong with me, I started to thrive.
But secondary school wasn’t much better. I didn’t fit the template of a model student. I struggled to deal with people dictating to me the way things were supposed to be. There were certain things I wasn’t willing to accept, so I was always asking why. For example, I hated inequality. From an early age, I thought everybody should be treated the same, regardless of who or how old they were. I didn’t understand why we’d all be lining up outside in the rain while the teacher was inside drinking a cup of tea, looking at us through the window. I didn’t understand why we weren’t allowed to take our blazers off when it was 100 degrees in the classroom. I didn’t have an authority problem, I just didn’t like being treated differently from adults. A teacher said to me once, ‘Stop acting like a child!’ I replied, ‘Stop treating me like one!’ And he replied, ‘You’ll never be anything in your life if you don’t buck up!’ I spent the rest of that lesson in the corridor.
So I muddled through school, before leaving with three GCSEs at C or above. I wasn’t thick, I just didn’t want to be there and couldn’t wait to escape. There must be so many kids like me.
My uncle had a plumbing firm, so I started an apprenticeship with him. Summer was great, autumn less so. Then it got to February. I was carrying some lead up a ladder, dropped it on my toe and thought, You know what? Sod this. After that day, I never went back. I was already working weekends at a garden centre to bump up my wages and now I started working there full-time. I did a bit of sweeping and hoovering, restocking shelves, helping elderly ladies load compost into their car boots. It was wonderful, completely stress-free. And zipping around on the forklift made me feel like a man of the world. The whole way through secondary school, I’d wanted to be an adult. And now I was. At least I felt like one. Now I’m actually an adult, I want to be a kid again.
My next job was working for a travel agency, selling holidays over the phone. I was trained by some lovely people, including a guy called Russell, who was an absolute legend and tragically died of an asthma attack some years later. It was also where I met Neil, who’s still my best mate. I had a whale of a time, but it was commission based, and I wasn’t always available on the phone. I was busy doing other things, like chasing girls in the café and enjoying the usual distractions of a teenage boy.
I stayed at the travel agency for a year or so, before seeing an advert in the newspaper for an emergency medical dispatcher (EMD), answering 999 calls and dispatching ambulances. I had a bit of telesales experience, quite fancied a job in the services (my parents both worked for the prison service – my mum in HR and my dad taking prisoners out to do community work), so I applied.
Having the opportunity to do something exciting and make a difference appealed to me. This wasn’t a case of selling a service to the public; this was a case of the public desperately wanting a service from me. And the pay wasn’t based on commission.
Up until this point, though, I hadn’t had much to do with the ambulance service, or even the NHS. But when I was working at the garden centre, a sign fell over and hit a lady on the head. What I remember most about that day is that while I was flapping, the person who answered my 999 call was so incredibly calm. That left a lasting impression on me.
I was only seventeen when I went for the interview, so didn’t hold high hopes. But the guy who interviewed me recognised my desire and passion and offered me the job. They sent me on a four-week course, where I learned how to answer the calls – ‘Pick up the phone. Press that button. Stay calm. Ask these questions, based on the patient’s condition. Stay on the line and offer the relevant advice until the ambulance arrives. Put the phone down. And repeat’ – and that was pretty much it.
Well, that’s not quite true. EMDs are at the lower end of the ambulance service pay scale, and among its least appreciated employees. When you think of the ambulance service, you don’t think of someone sat behind a desk, you think of paramedics bursting through a door, dripping with medical paraphernalia. But being an EMD was the hardest, most stressful job I’ve ever done. Whereas on the road I might do ten jobs a day, on the phones I might do fifteen jobs in half an hour. And you’ve got to be achieving. Everything you say can be listened to and a certain percentage of calls are audited, which is why I was a little bit worried the time my tapes got seized by the police for evidence, as they might have heard me ordering prawn crackers, crispy shredded beef, chicken kung po and egg fried rice on the previous call. Well, it was Chinese night. I just hope it never made it to court.
Some of the stuff that happened while I was doing that job was surreal. Someone phoned up and said, ‘I know where you’re based, I’m gonna be in the car park waiting to kill you when you’re finished.’ It was often impossible to tell whether my abuser was drunk, high on drugs, had mental health problems or was simply an idiot. People would phone and say, ‘Mate, I’ve got no money for a taxi. You’re gonna have to send an ambulance to drop me off at home, otherwise I’m going to die of hypothermia.’ What can you say? I couldn’t help but despair at times.
Very occasionally, an EMD will take a call that is horribly close to home. One colleague was on her very first shift when she took a call from her ex-husband, who had taken an overdose. Imagine that. But I also had my own dose of reality. One day, a call came in from my girls’ nursery. I asked my colleague for the name of the patient and she said, ‘Maddison Farnworth.’ My heart sank. I took the headset off my colleague and the caller told me my daughter was having a fit. I legged it out of the office, jumped in the car and slammed my foot down. If a copper had tried to pull me over, he would have had to follow me all the way to the nursery. I wasn’t stopping for anyone.
When I got to the nursery, just after the ambulance, I was shaking like a leaf. It turned out my daughter was having something called a febrile convulsion. These happen when a child has a fever and their temperature suddenly rises, sending their body haywire and causing them to have a seizure. They’re not usually life-threatening, but I didn’t know that, so was absolutely terrified.
I travelled with my daughter in the back of the ambulance, carried her into hospital and when I put her down, the nurse said, ‘Leave it with me.’
‘No, I’m staying.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m her dad.’
I forgot I was still in my uniform. The nurse thought I was part of the show.
I delivered a baby over the phone once. I said to the bloke, ‘The ambulance is on its way. But it might not make it on time, so I’m going to talk you through it.’ That’s one of the last things a bloke wants to hear. I told him to grab some towels, and I heard him huffing and puffing up the stairs and rummaging around in his airing cupboard with his phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. I was sat there thinking, This is ridiculous. I’m sat here in a bright air-conditioned room drinking a brew and this guy’s partner is having a baby. I could hear screaming and yelping in the background, and eventually a baby crying. Suddenly, that feeling of ridiculousness was replaced by a glow of satisfaction.
One time, a woman called from a motorway hard shoulder. Both her children were unconscious in the back of her car and her husband was drowsy and vomiting. That was a tough job, because it’s hard to get a location when someone is on a motorway. Some people don’t have a clue where they are and a few don’t even know which motorway they’re on, which can be very stressful for the EMD and the caller. Having worked out where this lady was, I sent an ambulance out and it transpired that the exhaust was leaking into the car. The kids eventually came to, but if the dad hadn’t started vomiting when he did, they might have died, because they looked like they were just sleeping.
Taking those calls was like reading a particularly vivid book. And it was difficult to know whether the pictures I painted in my head were worse than reality or not. I heard some horrific things and had to talk callers through how to administer CPR on numerous occasions. That’s a hell of a responsibility, and it comes with a heavy dose of impotence. You can tell people how to do something as clearly and calmly as possible – and you can hear them on the other end of the phone – but you have no idea if they’re doing it right.
EMDs hear a lot of screaming and shouting, some of it incomprehensible. But however hysterical the caller was, my job was to stay calm. EMDs are taught ‘repetitive persistence’ and ‘action and reason’. For example, if a caller is screaming down the phone, ‘Help, my dad’s not breathing!’ over and over again, I’d say, ‘I need you to give me your address so we can help your dad.’ And I’d keep saying it until the caller gave me the information I needed. An EMD’s words are fairly scripted, which is why when you listen to 999 documentaries, they often sound quite cold. But if you deviate from the script, you can get into bother. The methods the EMDs use are tried and tested and proven to work, while going off-piste could land you and the patient in trouble.
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So, this is how I ended up trying to save lives down a telephone, while my twin daughters were fighting for their lives in the hospital. Every now and again someone from the hospital would call to tell us that they’d taken a turn for the worse and we needed to come in immediately. Then they’d rally and I’d go straight back to work. But how are you supposed to concentrate while two of your babies are in intensive care and another one is at home? I was doing twelve-hour shifts, sometimes five days in a row, so I might not see them properly for almost a week. That was soul-destroying.
During that long, agonising period, I became personally acquainted with the NHS and its staff that apparently work miracles, particularly the wonderful doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit. And eventually, due to their hard work and vigilance, the twins turned the corner. After about six months, they were able to come home, which was an incredible moment. Being able to bring them home was like becoming a father all over again – in more ways than one. Whenever I took them out shopping, I’d have women looking in the pram and saying, ‘Oh, look at these beautiful new-born babies!’ and I’d have to explain that they were actually born the previous year.
Now I had three babies at home and I was still only twenty. It was very difficult to make sense of it. All I could do was try to keep calm, which was easier said than done. Because just when you think that things can’t get any more complicated, life has a habit of chucking a little bit more at you.