What we almost didn't catch

I retired from the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 2019 after thirty-one years. People think firefighters either want to write about the heroic ones or they can't write about any of them. Neither is true in my experience. The fires I keep going back to in the writing are the ambiguous ones. The ones where we arrived and had twenty seconds to make a call and made the right call for reasons we couldn't have explained to anyone. The ones where the cause was never determined. The 1997 job in Thomastown where the owner was standing outside when we arrived, calm as you like, and the whole back wing went up like it had been waiting. Nobody was charged. I think about that one. I live in Reservoir now. My daughter thinks memoir is self-indulgent, which is fair, but she also hasn't read the draft. My writing group meets on Tuesday evenings in a back room of the Commercial Hotel in Preston and they are mostly retired teachers who are very kind about what I bring in. What I'm working on isn't entirely memoir and isn't entirely fiction. It's the gap between what you report and what you remember, and whether those two things ever fully agree.