But there was some&ndash thing else which tensed the mind and

But there was some– thing else, which tensed the mind and muscles. They wouldn’t let me ride one of their appliances without getting kitted up in full fire-fighter’s garb, complete with heavy boots, stiff padded trousers and jacket, and full orange helmet with visor Just climbing into it produced an odd sensation In part, it was an echo of some atavistic schoolboy thrill. Even before I first heard the urgent two-toned alarm go off inside the old fire station in Blackburn, to which I had been allocated with the men and woman of Green Watch, I had had a smell of that. But we shall come on to that.Not that an adrenalin-pumping sense of danger is not integral to the business of fighting fires even now. What kind of society refuses to pay a decent wage to people who risk their lives, on behalf of others, on a daily basis? Thus runs one of the key arguments for those who want to see the firemen get a substantial rise.It was arresting, then, to have people who rush into burning buildings for a living repeatedly insist they deserve more money precisely because the job has changed – and that reckless acts of daring are now less a part of it. The fact that fire-fighters rou-tinely expose themselves to highly dangerous situations is part of what so wins them the respect, and affection, of the British public. And none since.
One member of the service pointed it out to me this week as I arrived to spend a day riding a fire engine in one of the county’s 40 fire stations with the aim of discovering something about what it is like to be a modern fireman – and what it is about the job that has brought the nation’s 50,000 fire-fighters to the brink of their first national strike in a quarter of a century.The plaque shows how much the job has changed, I was told It seemed an odd thing to point out.

What is striking about it is that more than half of the names are of firemen who died in the 1950s There are only half that number in the Sixties Then, in the Seventies, it was down again, to just three None in the Eighties One in 1990. There’s a plaque by the entrance of the headquarters of the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service which commemorates those fire-fighters from the brigade who have died in recent years. But self-satisfaction is a distinct drawback to the memoirist of so richly neurotic a trade as journalism and – capital crime – soon becomes tedious to the general reader.. It’s not even a block to writing good books, especially on military history (Hastings’ forte). Nor, though his years saw the fall of Thatcher, the rise of Major and his failure, did Hastings influence events outside.Pomposity, even a certain priggishness, are not bars to being a good reporter (one can think of several, starting in the BBC). At a paper in need of new blood and modern presentation, he supplied both well enough But he was never an innovator or a campaigner He improved the paper but never really altered it. “Max,” recalls a former colleague, “always seemed to think that any form of self-doubt smelled faintly of homosexuality.” It tells in the writing.His decade of editing the Tory house journal was interesting enough.

He gave it freely, resisting the flattery.That may be because his self-opinion made him immune to flattery. He picks his team, reproduces his memos, recalls with strained patience the pressure from the proprietor (who once savaged him for a fashion page that declared the end of the miniskirt) and describes the times when Princess Di, Prince Charles and John Major – to name but a few – sought his advice. Journalists are easily deceived into self-regard.All this Max Hastings recounts at great length with studied fairness and patrician judgement. You are invited for your position and because politicians and businessmen think they can earn your paper’s favour by flattery, not because you hold any attraction in yourself And they are usually right. Much of the job today is inevitably more concerned with budgets, marketing and keeping the proprietor happy than with journalism as such.As for meeting public figures, that is easily misunderstood. Outside, the figure, however young and ill-equipped, commands the invitations of queens, prime ministers and visiting presidents.The trouble is that the actual craft of editing – the building of a team of creative journalists out of a mass of egos and neuroses, the endless concentration on headline and presentation – isn’t nearly as exciting to the general public as it might seem inside.