Forged with Flames

by Ann Fogarty

  Berwick and its main street had grown considerably since we lived there twelve years ago. There were two big supermarkets instead of the original one with its two short aisles, a variety of cafes and eateries—the Berwick Inn had been the main option before—and arcades between the shops. The town was spreading out and the open paddocks with their long, rippling grass were disappearing under housing estates. The block where the farmhand’s cottage had once stood was smothered with brick veneers. Berwick still felt like a village, only now it was just a bigger village.

  I crossed the busy High Street, too happy to notice anyone’s stares, and arrived at the school grounds a little early. Some mothers waited in their cars while several more were standing around chatting. I stood by myself to one side. The children slowly filtered out of their classrooms and began congregating in the playground. I didn’t notice anything unusual at first but gradually became aware that I was the centre of attention. I realised that I did look unusual, possibly incomprehensibly unusual, with the plastic facemask on and the rest of my elasticised body suit only partially concealed under my clothes. I began to feel uneasy and hoped the girls would appear quickly so we could go. Some of the children started to laugh and I sensed hostility from them, which was surprisingly intimidating. A few of the older children began to pick up small stones from the ground and I worried that it was only a matter of time before they started to throw them in my direction.

  Just then the girls appeared and I quickly gathered them to me and hastily left the area. My mind was racing as I tried to process what had just occurred and also respond to the girls’ happiness at seeing me there. They were thrilled to finally have me picking them up and chattered excitedly with me all the way home, oblivious to the reactions around them.

  When we eventually reached the safety of Ambleside Crescent and the door closed behind us, relief washed over me, but I felt as if I never wanted to venture out again. Mum saw how distressed I was as we came in but I mouthed ‘don’t ask’ to her—there was no way that I was going to tell her about this incident in front of the girls. I went into our bedroom, closed the door and wrote a poem about it instead.

  The school principal must have heard what had happened because when the children gathered for morning assembly a few days later, he explained to them why I looked the way I did, and told them a little of what had happened to me. The children were apparently receptive to all of this, and with understanding came a change in their behaviour. It was three or four weeks later that I ventured up to the school when I started helping out with the reading program. This time I was treated like royalty! All the children knew my name and came up to me, a little in awe. Their ‘Hello Mrs Fogarty, how are you feeling today?’ nearly undid me.

  After this incident I realised how powerful honest and direct communication could be. I gradually began to take the initiative in awkward situations instead of shrinking from them. Over time, I found that something as simple as a genuine smile or a remark such as, ‘I do look a bit unusual, don’t I?’ could be enough to break the ice. I learned that with children if I took a deep breath, kept calm and let them know briefly what had happened, it became easy to win their understanding and empathy. They always wanted to know how much it hurt. When I said that it did, their concern was heart-warming to see. It was a hard lesson, but a good one.

  31

  THE POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

  A knock on our door in those early months of 1984 was to send me on another path of self-discovery. The minister of the Church of Christ we’d been attending since we moved to Berwick called round unexpectedly. I’d liked Geoff from the first time I met him with his up-front, honest communication style. It drew me to him, yet scared the wits out of me at the same time because instinctively I felt that he could see right through me.

  My mother made us a cup of tea, and we sat in the lounge room and talked. He said he’d been a little intimidated about this pastoral visit, wondering whether he’d be able to say anything relevant or helpful in the light of all that had happened since the fires. I nodded and smiled back at him at the mention of Ash Wednesday. My coping style at the time was to always look as ‘up’ as possible, and I was very good at it. Outwardly at least, I seemed to be handling things amazingly well. However, Geoff saw through this ploy straight away and punctured it in one sentence.

  ‘You’re telling me one thing,’ he said, ‘but your eyes are telling me something quite different.’

  I was taken aback, astounded. No one else had ever cut through my reserve like that before or, at least, challenged me.

  At the end of the afternoon, Geoff offered to come back regularly to help me work through any issues, with the proviso, ‘I can only help you if you’ll be honest with me’. There were so many fire-related things that I wanted to keep buried, to stay in their boxes and, while I agreed to his offer, I felt ill at the thought of bringing them to light.

  So began a time that was to take me in a completely new direction in the way I communicated as I opened up about these and other experiences. I felt I could trust Geoff to understand and accept me. That trust enabled me to speak out about some of the more traumatic fire issues for the first time, and to confront some of my unexpressed fears. A deeply spiritual man, he brought alive what had been for me the abstract ideal of unconditional love.

  ‘There’s nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you’, he said one day.

  No one had ever said anything like that to me before; it really stopped me in my tracks.

  Geoff came once a week for most of 1984, until we realised we were starting to go over old ground. With his insightful guidance, these months of regular ‘work’ sessions gave me a chance to grow and heal in so many ways that when we decided to stop meeting, we knew we’d accomplished much. Although I’d shared more with Geoff than any other person in my life, I still hadn’t divulged to him the problem of my extreme shyness. I just couldn’t admit it to anyone because I felt it was a huge flaw in my personality, and felt incredibly ashamed not to have overcome it after all these years.

  However, for the first time since those troubled teenage years, I had begun in a small way, to drop the defences I used to mask my shyness. For the first time ever, I was beginning to feel safe being myself.

  32

  WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

  Because the Ash Wednesday fires had such a huge impact in Victoria and beyond, the media attention on those of us closely affected was intense. After my time at Hampton Rehab, I found that I’d become a sort of minor celebrity and was genuinely touched by the interest and generosity of so many people I’d never met. I’d received hundreds of cards in hospital and wanted to communicate with these generous members of the public even though the idea of such exposure was nerve-wracking. For that reason, and to promote awareness about fire risk, I felt obliged to agree to some requests for interviews.

  Terry and I did an interview for a Christian magazine first, when I was still in the Burns Unit at the Alfred. This was followed by many more requests for interviews from women’s magazines, newspapers around the country and the television stations. It was an unexpected and surreal experience to find my face looking out from the front page of The Sun (later to become The Herald Sun) one day after being interviewed in Hampton Rehab, and later, to see myself on television. The other patients teased me with, ‘Oh, here comes our celebrity!’ While the staff were proud of me, they were also very protective. Whenever I did an interview they were careful to make sure there was someone hovering in case it was too much for me. Terry was there, too. The result was an extraordinary groundswell of support with people sending in bouquets of flowers and gifts or beautiful heart-warming letters.

  The stories continued when we moved into Berwick in 1984, especially in February around the first anniversary of Ash Wednesday. There were articles in The Herald, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily News in Perth and The Star Enquirer. The stories made much of the way I’d shielded
the girls during the fires—and the mask. One called the mask ‘grotesque’; another story referred to me as ‘horribly disfigured’. The headlines ranged from the celebratory to the hurtful: ‘Tragedy Makes Anne an Outcast’ (my name was often misspelled), ‘Burns mum braves the world’, ‘Lady in the mask remembers’, ‘Fire Victim’s Daily Hell’, ‘Courage behind the mask’ and ‘Brave Anne takes on a fresh fight’.

  It was like reading about someone else. I’d smile to myself when they didn’t spell my name correctly but found it confronting to see myself referred to as “horribly disfigured”, even though it just confirmed in black and white, for all to read, how I imagined others saw me. After the magazine and newspaper articles came out, the requests came for television and radio interviews: on Mike Willesee’s programme, on Channel Nine with Kirsty Cockburn, on Good Morning Australia with Kerri-Anne Kennerley, as well as various radio stations.

  Not long after all this media exposure, we took the girls out to McDonalds for a meal. When we sat down, we became aware of a table of young people nearby nudging each other and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Fire Lady’. It was okay, though—they weren’t laughing and giggling, just acknowledging me. The Fire Lady indeed!

  My world over much of the twelve months since that fateful February day had narrowed into a detached bubble of existence where my attention, especially in the first six months, was focused on surviving the pain and staying alive. It wasn’t until the media’s attention on the first-year anniversary that I became aware of the magnitude of the destruction wrought by the Ash Wednesday fires and the death and havoc they had caused to lives and property. More than two hundred fires broke out on Ash Wednesday across Victoria and South Australia, injuring more than two thousand six hundred people. At one stage an arc of fire ringed the whole of metropolitan Melbourne. Forty-seven people lost their lives in Victoria that day and of those, Upper Beaconsfield, with its death toll of twenty-one people, featured prominently in these statistics and stories. In South Australia, twenty-eight lives were lost on the same day. CSIRO experts were quoted afterwards as saying that melted metal showed the heat of the fire in some areas rose to two thousand degrees Celsius.

  It was around this time, when I was dealing with the physical and emotional demands of giving interviews and public talks about Ash Wednesday, that I realised I had to be more realistic about my limited energy. I had to start letting people help me more in an ongoing way which wasn’t easy for someone who had prided herself on being very independent.

  Spending so much time in a hospital environment, where disability or physical deformities didn’t raise an eyebrow, hadn’t prepared me for the public reaction to my appearance that followed my return to the outside world. The school and bank incidents were just the tip of the iceberg. Everywhere I went people stared, and some screamed in surprise and horror. I tried not to take it personally but it was impossible to come home unaffected by it. A man walked up to me one day and said ‘What on earth happened to you?’ Just like that. Terry and the girls used to become very cross and upset when people stared, resulting in them being extra protective of me.

  Some days I simply couldn’t face another day of public scrutiny and would retreat into my shell where I felt like staying, forever. To give me some respite, Mum would frequently step in and take the girls to their various activities, but it was always on my mind that one day she would have to return home.

  On the other hand, the reaction of strangers could be surprisingly understanding. I recall one time when I was out walking our Collie, Ebony. Three children aged about ten or twelve started following us. I was wondering what was going to transpire, when one of them asked in a really nice way, ‘What happened to you?’ then said, ‘Oh, that would have hurt’, when I explained.

  The brown suit I was to wear in some degree or other until after my final surgery in 1989—five years later—was, in reality, a place where I could hide. I hated it for making me different and for its discomfort, but it did the job of covering up my raised and red burns scars which looked far worse than the suit itself. As I gradually discarded pieces of it, I realised that I was even more vulnerable without it. While I eventually became used to hearing, ‘Were you born like that?’ or ‘My goodness, what on earth happened to you?’ when people saw my scars, I could never shrug off the laughter or the barely contained sniggers.

  One unforgettable day, fifteen months after the first experience at school, a boy of about ten in the same playground looked me right in the face and said, ‘Oh, yuck’. Although I understood he was just a child, reacting with a child’s honesty, it was the most devastating reaction I would ever have to face. When I looked in a mirror later, his reaction was exactly how I felt about myself. This comment cut through any defences I had built up and hurt me so deeply that I’ve never been able to fully cast it aside.

  I began to appreciate how difficult it is for people to get inside someone else’s head if that person’s experience is beyond their own imagination. A friend once told me, for example, that her husband had wondered how I could go out looking the way I did. She was trying to convey how brave he thought I was, but the remark just flattened me. My counsellor told me not to worry about it.

  ‘It’s just the same for me being bald. Everyone stares, but you just can’t let it get to you.’

  I was tempted to point out that there was a bit of a difference. Instead, I retreated, resuming my careful approach to sharing my thoughts openly while trying hard to manufacture an ‘I don’t care what you think of me’ outlook. However, I really cared terribly. What I would have given to have my old face back again.

  33

  THE SCREAM

  By the beginning of 1985, Terry and I were experiencing difficulties in our relationship. A rift had formed in the marriage as Terry, in his protective way, tried to take over, and I, in my independent way, resisted. As a consequence we stopped communicating the way we used to and became awkward with one another. We both knew—but dared not say it—that we could never return to our former close relationship. It wasn’t that we didn’t love or care for each other, but the pressures of the past couple of years had been huge, too huge. Terry felt that both of us had endured as much as we could cope with. So mid-way through the year, we sought help from a skilled clinical psychologist called Paul, who had once been a Baptist minister. My respect and trust in him grew with each visit and I, at least, thought we were making positive strides. At first Paul worked with Terry and I together; later he invited us to have sessions with him separately.

  Although the reason Paul came into my life was not a happy one, it did have an unexpected consequence to it: he was about to become the only person with whom I’d ever come close to conveying my innermost feelings about how terrible the fires were and how profoundly they affected me, psychologically and emotionally. I had previously shared my thoughts with Sheila who had a different take on the fires, and Geoff, the minister, who was a trusted counsellor but not a trained psychologist. Paul could see that talking wasn’t really helping me to deal with the aftermath of the trauma in a way that would lead to a mental and emotional healing. He would suggest another way of expressing what the fires meant. A novel way.

  One day when I was seeing him on my own, he said that ever since we’d met he’d felt as if I had a huge scream inside me. Would I like him to help release it? Me, scream? About the closest I’d ever come to raising my voice was yelling at the dogs to stop barking. He told me to go away and think about it and make a decision. No pressure.

  How would I ever even start screaming? I wondered. After considering my options, which were not exactly crowding in on me, I decided to give it a shot.

  In the next session, Paul and I established that the scream really was indeed related to the fires. Then we set about releasing it. I looked at him and thought hard about opening my mouth. We were sitting in armchairs in his small consulting room, a shelf of psychology books on one wall, some prints hanging on the others and an obligatory box of tissues on a
side table. I looked from one print to another. We sat some more. I drew air into my lungs and lifted my shoulders but nothing happened. Almost two hours passed and nothing. The session ended. At the end of the next session I was no closer to being relaxed enough to let go and scream. I sensed that Paul was becoming frustrated and I know I certainly was. He then suggested hitting one of the cushions as a warm-up—but I still couldn’t scream.

  Finally, when it was looking as if we’d have to abandon the plan, he struck on the idea of screaming himself and if I felt able to, I could join in. I still had trouble, but this helped; at last my scream let loose.

  I screamed and screamed and screamed. The screams came from deep in my solar plexus, expressing all the pain, anguish and heartache of Ash Wednesday in ways words never could. Something primal took over. I was shaking, taking great gulps until I finally stopped. Trembling and exhausted, I gradually calmed down. I looked at Paul and managed to smile. Such relief! The feeling of being alone, of grappling with this huge burden had subsided, like a tide going out.

  I was on the road to healing.

  34

  ON THE BRINK, AGAIN

  On a balmy late summer day in 1986, I took Sarah to Emerald Lake Park, a short drive away, for a one-on-one day out. Sarah was eight and really enjoyed these times when we’d go shopping or see a movie or go for a drive together. I needed it, too. My marriage to Terry was finally unravelling. We had tried persistently in the best way we knew to bridge the widening gulf between us but to no avail. I felt frustrated but most of all intensely sad, as I know Terry did.

  The park was quiet this day and we decided to walk along one of the little bush tracks that surrounded the lake. Sarah was talking away in a singsong voice, trailing a little, when suddenly she stopped then exclaimed, ‘Look, Mum!’ All around her, and for as far back as we could see, was the most glorious stream of butterflies. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. They were all kinds of colours—little soft brown ones, white, yellow and orange ones—masses of them. We stood and took it all in, awed, then followed the many walks around the lake park, thin trails between the trees. Shafts of light streamed through a forest of pine trees as we passed beneath the distinctively fragrant canopy. The butterflies continued to flutter around us when we emerged, alighting for a while on a branch or flower, then flitting off again, some linked in pairs, tumbling through the air. Neither of us wanted it to end. The encounter became a vivid reminder that the world could become a joyous place in an instant; something simple and beautiful could shine through unhappy times. We left the park refreshed and lighter.