The Keyworth Rescue

Neil Riley and I were on nights working Tango One Alpha, which was the city centre traffic car. As traffic department beats go this was quite a small area, basically covering the NG1 postcode of the city. As there were few fast roads in the area we didn’t deal with too many road accidents, most of the work being helping Central section officers with jobs in the city.

As boredom promotes hunger we stopped off at the fish’n’chip shop up Carlton Road to feed our faces and to make the car smell of vinegar for the morning shift to suffer. Immediately after downing our cholesterol cocktails and neatly folding and placing the chip papers in the glove compartment for later disposal, if we remembered, we heard the Control Room on the radio, “Any mobile Keyworth for a reported explosion at a house?” We both listened to the pause that followed. It was always interesting to listen to what jobs were being farmed out to units throughout the conurbation area of Nottingham. Surprisingly there was no response to the call and the control room started to go through the procedure of asking all mobiles for their location to see who was the nearest to the incident – a lengthy and time-wasting procedure considering the apparent urgency of the call.

I said to Neil, “Shall we see if we can go? Fancy a nice steady lorp to Keyworth?”

“Hello, NH, We are City Centre. If no one else is available for Keyworth we can attend – One Alpha over”

After a pause – still wasting time while decisions were being made Control Room responded, “Travel.”

Next came the good bit. At eleven at night I drove us from Carlton Road to Keyworth in eight minutes. Those Triumph 2500TCs took a bit of winding up but they could do a ton without too much trouble. On turning into Wolds Drive at Keyworth we were both looking for the smoke and red glow in the sky. An explosion was surely to cause some disruption to normality, especially in Keyworth. But there were no fire engines, no smoke, no red glow, nothing! The bungalow looked okay to us considering it had had an explosion causing us to drive there at break-neck speed.

Neil knocked on the door. The woman who came to the door looked just like Tom in the Tom and Jerry cartoons – you know, when a bomb goes of in his hand and his face is all black and smouldering. “Hello, love, everything alright? We’ve had a report of an explosion here.”

“What, your son’s exploded?” asked Neil, which I thought was a rather silly thing to ask, although having just eaten a massive bag of greasy chips I knew the feeling.

I could see that while we were stood at the door the hallway was full of smoke, which presumably was why the woman had a black face. Didn’t take much for a Nottingham Traffic Officer to work that one out!

The woman led us through the bungalow to a closed door that she said was to her son’s bedroom. Smoke was seeping from the sides of the closed door and the electric ceiling light was looking dimmer as the smoke filled up the hallway.

“He’s in there. He won’t come out and I can’t get the door open,” she said.

We tried opening the door but saw that it only opened a few inches and then came up against an obstruction of some sort, maybe the man having fallen down behind it. Well at least it was a bungalow so climbing in through the window shouldn’t be too hazardous so Neil and I went back out of the building and ran round through the garden to the bedroom window. Using my truncheon and putting my cap across my face, I smashed the window and Neil climbed in. Smoke then billowed out of the window. It had a strange smell, not like the plastic fumey smell that you’d expect from a house fire and there were no flames – just horrible choking smoke. I climbed in after Neil and saw him kneeling against a man lying unconscious on the floor dressed only in underpants.

We each instinctively grabbed an arm to try to drag the man out of the room, not really having an idea which way to go. Where’s the door? The big problem was, we couldn’t see the door because the man had pushed his wardrobe against it. We couldn’t move the wardrobe because the man was lying in front of it. We couldn’t move the man because we were between him and his bed, which was up against the window. He was a big chap who had a very small bedroom! If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been quite funny really. On looking back after all these years, Bernard Cribbins’s song “Right Said Fred – have to take the Door Off” would sum it all up.

“Pull him towards the window, Bob, while I shift the wardrobe away from the door,” said Neil.

I managed to drag our friend a couple of feet across the carpet to enable Neil to shift the wardrobe only a short way from the door, which of course opened inwards, so we needed it moving a bit more. “No, bring him back again and to the side. There’s a space round the other side of the door post.” So I tried to drag him back again. The problem was, the room was getting smokier, and hotter. My hands were sweating and I couldn’t get a proper grip on the man’s arm. So, it was not surprising really, that whilst tugging on this floppy arm I lost my grip, fell backwards against the wardrobe and pushed it all the way back against the door again. Bloody marvellous - back to square one!

By now Neil and I were finding it really difficult to breathe with all the exertion in rearranging this man’s bedroom furniture for him while he laid motionless on the floor. That was a point. Was he dead? If so, why the hell were we messing around in there, progressively getting poisoned by smoke to recover a dead body? The thought never crossed our minds. It sounds corny now, I know, but we just wanted to save this bloke and ourselves too. Sheer desperation and bloody-mindedness took over. On realising that we could die shortly, we just frantically kicked, pushed and shoved the body out of the way, swore, shouted, “lets ***ing get out!” and together with some last burst of strength which comes with desperation, we moved the wardrobe away a few feet. No friendly patient care followed. Why had this man made it so bloody difficult for us to rescue him, the ungrateful, awkward fellow? We then grabbed an ankle each, made a wish, and dragged him out of the door, feet first through the hall, out of the front door and threw him and ourselves down in a pile on the front lawn.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember too much about the next few minutes. Neil and I were okay although we were coughing like crazy. So much so in my case that I lost control of my stomach. Remember the fish’n’chips I had half an hour ago? I was immediately reminded of them!

I think the man’s mother, still with the blackened face, was hysterical now on seeing her son laying unconscious and two policemen nearby coughing and spluttering, and vomiting on her lawn. I was just relieved that we had all got out and pleased to see that we had been joined by a local section officer.

After a short time in A&E for smoke inhalation Neil and I retired off duty for the rest of the shift. We never did find out what happened to the man and his mother at the house although it later transpired that his intentions that night was to commit suicide by burning chemicals to asphyxiate himself.

Nine months later Neil and I were proud to be awarded the Queens Commendation for Bravery.