For some time now, I’ve been working on a book about first responders and PTSD. The idea’s simple enough: I profile three men and women – a copper, paramedic and firie – who’ve been profoundly scorched by their work. I wanted, and am grateful to have received, their trust and candour, because my idea was not to survey the clinical literature of trauma, nor to treat their “war stories” as macabre entertainment, but to render intimate profiles of those few who rush in. Why did they enter their jobs? Why did they stay? What domestic costs were incurred while trying to quarantine their family from what they saw? What, precisely, were the moral, mental and physical taxes of their job?
With the profiled paramedic, Peter James, we spoke for almost a year before I barely wrote a line. I stayed with him and his wife, spoke with his friends, interviewed his former psychologist, Simon Webb – a Vietnam vet with his own trauma. Simon fell gravely ill not long after our conversations, and it was when I was staying with Peter in Launceston, that he was submitted to the ICU. He passed away around the time Peter was driving me through his small town, and his subsequent funeral forms a part of the book.
Peter James helped rescue the Beaconsfield miners, attended the site of the Port Arthur massacre, and entered the insecure buildings of Christchurch after their great earthquake of 2011. But it was the years – decades, in fact – of accumulative trauma that did him. The countless, unheralded stuff: the drownings and SIDS deaths; the road fatalities, child murders and family notifications.
I’m grateful that I got to know Peter. He’s a haunted man, but still gracious, and his story is as remarkable as he is tender.
The book’s draft will be finished later this year. I’m faintly ashamed it’s taken so long, but my own diagnosis of the very thing I’m writing about delayed things a little. And so, for the first time, I’m sharing a little bit of it here – a brief excerpt, taken from the start of Peter’s section. Presumably, it will emerge in the book in slightly different form. But, for now, here’s the small beginning of Peter’s story – and, in sharing it, I help to reassure myself that it’s real.
One of his first jobs was driving to the midwifery home for single mothers on Monday mornings to collect the gauze-wrapped bodies of still-born babies and placing them in cardboard boxes once used to pack margarine. There was one baby per box, and on some days he would carry as many as seven or eight boxes to his ambulance. Then he would drive to the Royal Hobart Hospital’s mortuary, where he would unload the boxes and place them carefully on the sandstone shelves of the mortuary’s fridge. Once, a woman miscarried triplets, and two babies had been delivered on the bed, one perfectly formed and lying face down in a pool of his mother’s blood.
This job of transporting bodies was called the “baby run”. It was 1976, and Peter James was seventeen, a student paramedic. “Your brain takes a photograph every now and then,” Peter says, “and you can recall it as clearly as looking at a photo.” These were his first photos of thousands.
He thought he was unaffected at the time, but many years later, swept in on the tides of trauma and the fact of his own fatherhood, those babies would re-visit him. And so would the fact of the insulting crudeness of their packaging, to which, in his naïve and well-meaning deference, he was mostly oblivious at the time.
He was also oblivious that this was his first moral injury, a subtler one than the others, but the first time that the virgin smoothness of his values – in this case, respect for the dead – met the coarseness of reality. Hospitals weren’t churches but logistical sites, and death and disease had their processes. Forty years later, he would tell a senate inquiry: “At the time this did not impact me, but as the years and decades have rolled on, I think about this often.”
Peter’s a tall man, and still wears the moustache he cultivated in the ‘70s, but he stoops slightly and shuffles now, his confidence and physical charisma long dissolved in the acid bath of trauma.
*
Peter James was born in Manly, Sydney, in 1959, the youngest of two, a shy and sensitive boy bewildered by his parents’ divorce at ten. “The world turns on its head,” Peter says. “Your toys are boxed up, and you move schools.”
He wondered if he was to blame, and for years hoped vainly for their reunion. This guilt and yearning were suppressed, and he never discussed the divorce with his parents. Today, when both are gone, he’s still unsure of its causes.
It was an early lesson in the impermanence of things, something which decades later, after the massacre and the earthquakes and the suicides and domestic shootings and road wrecks and SIDS deaths, would resolve into a melancholic fixation: that families dissolve, buildings collapse, and peace is broken.
After the divorce, Peter stayed with his grandmother and changed schools to Manly Primary. It was the only school he ever felt comfortable in, though he can’t really say why, but he recalls gentle teachers and the sound of cicadas outside the classroom in summer. Some mornings, when he was walking to school, he’d wander to the beach if the surf was up and sit and watch the breakers. His school was less than a hundred feet away, and when he heard its bell he stood, brushed the sand off his legs, and trundled obediently to class.
He often fished with the boy next door, and sometimes he rowed his inflatable boat out onto the busy Sydney Harbour by himself, making sure to rest beside a navigation buoy, and from his tiny boat he watched the larger boats go by.
Peter didn’t know it at the time, but his great-grandfather had professionally fished the waters nearby, and in doing so had pulled many children, women and men from them. William Sly was one of five brothers, each of them locally renowned fishermen, of whom the newspapers would regularly report upon the size of their catches and the nature of their rescues:
On May 15, 1908, shortly before midnight, a man named James Davidson fell into the water from the passenger wharf, Manly. William Sly, who was on the wharf at the time, dived, fully dressed, into the water, and reaching Davidson held him up, at the same time calling out for assistance. His cries attracted the attention of Stanley Wild, who assisted Sly out of the water, and Davidson was got on to the wharf by means of the line which Sly had previously tied round him; but after prolonged efforts had been made by Dr. Hall and others to restore animation, life was pronounced extinct.
About six o'clock last evening a boy named R. White, residing in Cliff Street, Manly, fell into the water while fishing. A wharf-hand, W. Sly, who is employed at Manly, immediately jumped in, fully dressed, and rescued the boy, who was none the worse for his experience.
Florence Simpson, a domestic servant, aged 18, was charged before the Water Police Court yesterday with attempting to commit suicide by drowning herself. The evidence was that George Sly, a fisherman, was fishing off Blue Fish Point, at Manly, on Monday last, when he heard screams. He pulled in the direction of the sound, and saw a woman struggling in the breakers. With some difficulty he managed to rescue her from her dangerous position. She was then quite unconscious. Subsequently she was taken to the Manly Cottage Hospital, where she remained until yesterday. Constable Gippel went to the spot at which she was rescued, and later on charged her with attempting to commit suicide. She had gone over the rocks from a height of about 20ft. An hour's imprisonment was ordered by the Bench formally, and the girl was taken away by some friends.
One of those brothers had found Henry Lawson at the bottom of Manly cliffs after a suicide attempt in 1902. In a brief newspaper column many years later, Frank Hardy wrote: “Years after his fall from the cliff at Manly, Lawson revealed that a fisherman named Sly had rescued him from the rocks. Sly took him to Sydney Hospital. Lawson later told poet-friend Edward Brady that he was ‘Sly by name and sly by nature’ because, when taking his leave of Henry at the hospital, Sly had said: ‘Better luck next time, Mr Lawson!’”
In the land of the Sly Brothers, suicide was illegal, an affront to Nature, and so was daytime swimming, so threatening were partially naked bathers to moral order. A year after Lawson’s rescue, in 1903, the half century prohibition on swimming was lifted in the Manly area, and the brothers established Manly Lifesaving Club, only the country’s second. It was in these waters that Peter scattered the ashes of his mother, more than a century later.
*
Peter’s father worked at a plastics factory, and sometimes Peter helped there by grounding discarded plastic for recycling. Often his job was taking defective music cassette tapes and separating their clear plastic from the dark. The air was warm and thick with the sweet fumes of plastic, and he was sufficiently diligent that his father’s boss proposed to sponsor him for a scholarship at a plastics and chemical institute. But Peter had already decided: he wanted a career, not a job. He wanted to be a paramedic like his grandfather, Eric Gray.
He’d heard a few stories about him. How he had rescued children from an overturned bus. How hydrogen cyanide was once a common fumigant, and how frequently people were poisoned by it – including his grandfather, who collapsed in 1943 after entering a house to treat victims and was taken to hospital in his own ambulance.
Just before Christmas 1974, after meeting his son for a few beers at the Manly Hotel, Peter’s grandfather was bashed to death as he walked home. He was found in a laneway the next morning. He was 67. Police never found the killer. Peter was 15 at the time and, like the divorce, he never spoke about the murder with his father.
“He loved his cricket and a beer,” Peter says. “I remember the cyanide wrecked his lungs, and he smoked heavily to stop the coughing for the rest of his life.
“His death knocked my father around. They were best mates. There was a big funeral, and I remember they played the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’. He was buried, and his wife used to visit his grave every Sunday. I liked visiting, but I’d never get buried – I don’t want to become a chore to others to visit and remember.”
*
As a student paramedic, on the days that he wasn’t on the road, transporting bodies or stretchers or oxygen tanks, Peter was assigned to the dispatch centre where he answered the public’s emergency calls. There was little instruction, just a quick demonstration of the switchboard, and he was often left alone in the ambulance station. Nearby was an aluminium coffin reserved for decomposed bodies, and when trucks drove by the coffin rattled noisily with the vibrations. “I don’t remember being nervous,” Peter says. “I just got on with it. There was a lot of trust, and there were no stuff ups, but I wouldn’t dream of letting a 17-year-old take the calls today.”
In those days, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, there were three shifts: eight to four, four to midnight, and midnight to eight, and if you finished at midnight you’d head to the casino for beers, or across the road to the carpark of a petrol station where you brought slabs of your own. In the middle of the carpark was a fire pot – a half 44-gallon drum stuffed with wood – and the paramedics and coppers would gather ‘round the fire with their cans of beer, sometimes sitting on the bonnets of the police cars, their engines still running, to better keep warm in the winter. They were exclusively male, and they would shoot the breeze and stoke the fire and transform their arcane knowledge of death and transgression into pitch-black banter.
One night, when their wood ran low, a few of the coppers walked over to a nearby property occupied by some well-known “dropkicks” who’d too often obliged their professional attention, and they kicked their fence down, broke up the planks with their boots, and brought them back to the fire. “We didn’t have deep and meaningful discussions then,” Peter says. “Black humour was a big thing, a vent for us. We were unwinding, but not realising it. Drinking became the norm. The term PTSD didn’t exist but we were people always coming across someone having their first day, or last day, or worst day of their life.”
And Peter loved it, even later when it broke him.
*
They were in Scotland now, the second stop on their honeymoon, and Peter remembers the discomfort of wearing heavy clothes on sunburnt skin. From Hawaii they came to visit Christine’s grandparents in the old coal mining town of Cardenden on the Fife coast, where it was quiet and windy and grey.
It was the first week of May, 1986. Peter was 26, and his new wife Christine 21, and 3,300 kilometres away the ruptured No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear plant was issuing a radioactive cloud across Europe. You couldn’t see the radiation, but if the winds were right and there was heavy rainfall, the rain would carry radionuclides to the earth. In Cardenden, newsmen on the radio warned against going outside if it was raining. There were sharp increases in the sales of bottled water, and commensurate declines in the sales of milk. Farmers bought Geiger counters, and slaughtered their livestock. Across Britain, thousands of cows, sheep and chickens were culled.
And Christine would say to Peter: “It’s following us.” She wasn’t referring to the radiation, but the powerful sense that strange calamities seemed to stick to them, “like shit to a blanket,” Peter says.
Beautiful writing. I look forward to the book.