The Fire Fighter

You learn a lot of useful stuff in the English Brownies.

I was a Brownie for two years in my childhood and I adored it. My parents were noticeably less enthusiastic about the organization, whose founder, the British Victorian military hero Lord Robert Baden-Powell, had proved himself somewhat too stalwart a vertebra of the British Empire for the comfort zone of Patrick Aloysius and Mary Josephine Donnelly, and whose official Brownie Promise included the phrase “to do my duty to God and the Queen” with never a mention of Our Lady, or the saints in heaven, or even His Holiness in Rome, and what sort of environment was that for them to send their only daughter into? But I begged and begged and at last they relented, and the Monday evening Brownie meetings – girls instead of brothers! Fairy stories instead of cowboys on television! Dancing around a toadstool instead of dodging food fights! – became the highlight of my week.

Photo by John Maldonado on Unsplash

I was fiercely proud of my Brownie identity. My unit in our Brownie pack was called the Elves: we wore a blue emblem on our uniforms, and skipped weekly around the toadstool singing our own special song, “This is what we do as elves, think of others not ourselves” – lyrics which reduced both of my parents to such fits of laughter that they were required to help each other to the sofa. I would write ELVES in soap in shaky capital letters on the bathroom mirror, leading my mother to ask me in some bafflement just when my humbug-sucking, hopscotch-playing, Little Women-obsessed self had become a fan of Elvis Presley. At school, my friend Jackie Marteau’s mother had decided to eliminate an extra task on Monday afternoon by dressing Jackie in her Brownie uniform in the morning – I never asked Jackie how she felt about this herself, but would gaze at her every Monday in a fever of envy, wishing to the depths my soul that I, too, could proclaim myself to the world as a Brownie all day long.

Truth to tell, I was better as a Brownie at skipping around the toadstool than at any of the more practical skills we were expected to acquire there. I never did attain the coveted Golden Hand badge, and the baby’s bonnet that I knitted for one test was so … unusual … that our kind-hearted leader Brown Owl, a gentle woman with short white hair and sensible shoes whom we all loved, was required to confess, sadly, that even she had failed to find a way to approve it. But I tried hard and exuded enthusiasm and every Monday afternoon before the meeting I would spread newspaper and Brasso on the kitchen table and scour my Brownie badge until it gleamed, and at last Brown Owl took pity on me and made me a Sixer, and for those short weeks until I aged out of the pack, my life was complete.

I also learned some useful life lessons along the way. I learned how to use flags to signal in Semaphore, for which there turned out to be infrequent demand on the 29 bus journey from home to school, but you never knew. I learned how to distinguish a reef knot (good) from a granny knot (boo, hiss, very bad indeed, although just what it had ever done to earn such vilification remained mysterious, but if Brown Owl said it were so, then so it must be). And I learned – although in what context this was taught to me, and how the success of its comprehension would have been tested on me, and why in the world it was thought appropriate advice for a 9-year-old, I could not now begin to guess – that if a companion happened to burst into fire in front of me, the way to save their life was to wrap them in a rug and roll them on the floor to extinguish the flames.

Life moved on. First I left the Brownie pack, and then I left London and moved to Los Angeles, where I met and married Mr. Los Angeles. One evening early in our marriage, when neither of us could be bothered to cook, we had decided to send out for pizza, which it was my task, as the one who worked from home, to order.

The pizza arrived early, so I put it into the oven, box and all, to keep it warm. Unfortunately, when I did so, I had neglected to adjust the oven temperature from last night’s baked potato heat to tonight’s pizza warming heat, with the result that some minutes later I re-entered the kitchen to find billowing smoke issuing from the oven door and a molten mess of flaming cardboard and burning cheese leaping alarmingly inside.

A lesser woman would have panicked. Not I: remember that I had my Brownie training to fall back on. I could signal in Semaphore. I could tie a reef knot. I could save a burning child. It was true that a medium pepperoni pizza with extra garlic and chili flakes was not what you immediately pictured when you thought of a child; but it was incontrovertibly burning, so how different, I thought, could it be? Now all that I needed was a rug and a floor to roll it on, and we would be in business.

Except that there was no rug. The living area of the apartment boasted a shining hardwood floor that was our landlady’s pride and joy; the kitchen, a pristine white linoleum which she had as proudly installed just weeks before. It was an attractive apartment, whose charm drew many compliments from visitors; but it must be also acknowledged that as a source of ground coverings, it fell lamentably short.

Not to worry, I told myself: Brownies were taught to be resourceful, and if a rug were not to hand, then surely something else would do. As I looked around the room, my eye fell on the morning edition of the Los Angeles Times, lying discarded on the coffee table – and there, it became immediately plain, was the answer to my problem.

There had been a green area, I now remembered, outside the church hall where we had our Brownie meetings, and a bench on which a homeless person called Jimmy had lived, who had begged for pennies from churchgoers, and sometimes splurged on a bottle of beer, and in the winter, lacking a blanket, had wrapped himself in newspaper to keep himself warm. It was really very simple, I noted, if you had the Brownie training. If sheets of newspaper could substitute for a rug to keep warm the sleeping Jimmy, then clearly they could do the same for me to extinguish a burning pizza. And they called me impractical!

Heady with excitement, I snatched several pages of the Calendar and Sports sections of the paper, folded them into one substantial sheet the better to envelop the flames, and made my way into the kitchen with firm tread and a resolute arm. My hour had come, I thought triumphantly: Golden Hand badge or no Golden Hand badge, here at last was my opportunity to prove that you could take the girl out of the Brownies, but you could never, ever take the Brownie training out of the girl. Firmly, I opened the oven door with rug-substitute wadded newspaper held high in my hand, and prepared to show the flames inside it just which particular former Sixer of the Elves was boss here.

“Are you familiar,” said Mr. Los Angeles an hour later as we stood in the still drifting smoke on the scarred ruins of the formerly white linoleum floor and waited for a different delivery person to bring mu shu pork and vegetable fried rice, “with the expression ‘fanning the flames?’”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “But it wasn’t one we used very often in the Brownies.”

From half the world away, in a quiet and peaceful graveyard somewhere in North London, came the faint rustling sound of Brown Owl turning in her grave.