I’ll miss my mates, says Leslie as he stands down
This week Marden fire station says goodbye to its longserving watch manager, Leslie Chappell.
Mr Chappell, a self-employed tiler and bathroom fitter, joined the retained crew when he was 35, shortly after moving from Larkfield to the village.
He said: “A neighbour was already in the service. He suggested I go along and take a look. I did and liked what I saw.”
The decision led to five years as a firefighter, seven years as a leading firefighter and then 11 years as a watch manager, which means he still went out with the engine on calls but also had to deal with the backroom paperwork.
He said: “I’ve enjoyed my time immensely. It’s the excitement of never knowing what you might face.
“When your bleeper goes off, you might be asleep, but you’ve got just five minutes to get dressed, get to the station and put on your gear.”
At one time, Mr Chappell offered to help out his full-time colleagues when a vacancy arose at the Larkfield station.
He said: “It was supposed to be temporary for six months – somehow that stretched to three and a half years.”
It meant that until May this year he was both a fulltime and a retained fireman simultaneously.
Mr Chappell has attended some of Maidstone’s biggest blazes. The worst was the inferno at Clarke’s furniture store in 1995.
He said: “I was the driver on our engine. I remember having to send the message back to control: ‘Make pumps 30’. It’s not often you have to do that!”
He was also among the first crews to arrive at Grove Green Tesco two years earlier when the store burnt down.
Some of the most difficult times have been at road traffic accidents. Mr Chappell said: “I’ve been to 25 accidents that have resulted in fatalities. Unfortunately, we end up picking up the pieces.”
Perhaps the only unsatisfactory part of his job was not knowing the fate of those he and his men were able to rescue from a crash:
“You see them go off in an ambulance and never find out how they get on after that.”
One notable exception was a car crash in which an eight- year-old girl was trapped in the back of the vehicle with a broken leg. Her parents in the front of the car escaped relatively unscathed.
Mr Chappell said: “I sat with that little girl the whole time while my colleagues cut her out. She wouldn’t let me go.
“Afterwards I did make a point of visiting her in hospital – and she gave me her teddy she was so grateful.
“Afterwards the family would send Christmas cards to the station every year.”
Mr Chappell also recalls a fire in Staplehurst 10 years ago when his crew saved a young woman’s life.
He said: “When we arrived, the house was well alight. There was a young lady in her early 20s, a medical student as it happens, leaning out of a bedroom window with smoke billowing out behind her.
“We quickly got her out – and after a little oxygen she was OK.
“It was only later we discovered she was a cousin of one of the crew.”
As he contemplates his retirement from the service after 23 years, Mr Chappell said the thing he would miss most was the camaraderie with crew members.
He said: “They’re all solid gold. When you turn out to a shout you have to be able to trust the other crew members completely – your own life might depend on it – and I’ve always been able to do that.
“It’s been a privilege to serve with them.”