The author recounts a personal experience of accidentally burning their foot while shoveling ash from a bonfire and the subsequent medical treatment they received.
I set alight a bonfire that had been intended for the previous year's firework night. It was extremely large, and my son and I had to stand a long way back to avoid the heat.
There is something exciting and wonderful about bonfires, but they are also sinister and dreadful. Without fire there is no cooking, no warmth in winter, no metal, no civilisation, but, as we all know, this creative power has a sinister, diabolical, destructive shadow.
Whenever I stand by a bonfire, I find it impossible not to think of the countless thousands who were burned at the stake by righteous fanatics who sincerely believed that they were thereby saving a soul from burning forever in Hell. In Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur one unexpectedly discovers that burning was the medieval punishment for unfaithful wives; Queen Guinevere has to be rescued at least twice.
I once did a tour of the Cathar towns and castles of the Languedoc in France, where thousands of 'heretics' were burned alive by good Christians who had been told by their commander not to be bothered by whether or not a victim was really a heretic.
'Kill them all, God will know His own,' declared Simon de Montfort. I have stood tearfully in the square in Rouen where poor, naïve Joan of Arc was killed. Anyone with a strong imagination finds themselves appalled, sickened and overwhelmed by the thought of death by fire, especially if it is inflicted on purpose. I often think that such an act exposes the human race as so despicable that it scarcely seems worth preserving.
When my bonfire had burned down, I began to shovel the ash. Suddenly my foot sank into the ground, and for a second or two I thought nothing of it. Perhaps there had been a rabbit hole there.
Then I felt the teeth of the most intense pain suddenly bite into me, and realised that my boot had filled with cinders. Louis de Bernieres, the creator of Captain Corelli, says a bonfire accident has made him understand Joan of Arc's agony when she was burnt at the stake. There are different kinds of pain, and it would be hard to compile them into any kind of list in order of severity.
Women know the extreme agonies of childbirth; my older sister once described it to me as 'like s****ing a cannonball'. In my own case, I once completely snapped a bone in my leg in a motorcycle accident, and when I tried to stand up it was like being struck with a sledgehammer, and I cried out and fell back down.
In the hospital I begged them to cut my precious motorcycling boot off me, because having it pulled off was unendurable. Another time I woke up in the morning and wondered how I had managed to break every bone in my foot while I was asleep.
It was a pain so intense that even the cat brushing past made me wince; my ex took me to A&E and I was embarrassed to discover that it was only an attack of gout. When I realised I was being burned, I shouted at the top of my voice and struggled to undo my lace, but it had turned into a granny knot, and I was in too much pain to focus.
I ran to the rain barrel on my tool shed and filled my boot with water from its tap. I am thankful that I was wearing bamboo socks. Any artificial fibre would have melted into my flesh. In the kitchen I removed the boot and the sock and sat for an eternity with my foot in a washing up bowl of cold water.
With some interest, I watched the blisters bubble up and join together. Eventually my girlfriend came in and found me. I know I should have gone to A&E, but I was in no mood to go all the way to Lowestoft in Suffolk and wait the usual three or four hours to be attended to, so I decided that I would deal with the problem myself.
I found a large gauze pad, soaked it in aloe vera gel, and bound it on. It was deliciously cooling. The next day I replaced it with a gauze soaked in antiseptic cream. That evening I actually drove to my book club, feeling perfectly well.
On the third day I decided to leave the dressing off overnight to let the wound dry out a bit, and the following day I saw that my foot and lower leg had reddened and swollen, and I began to feel a little weird. My three worst burns were 'debrided', which is a nice way of saying that all the dead and infected flesh was removed.
Then my own offcuts of skin were both stapled and sewn in place. So I spent my three hours in A&E anyway, and experienced the first of many agonising interventions as a young doctor tried to snip away the dead skin. Photographs were sent to Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, the burns centre for my area of England, and I was duly summoned.
Fortunately I have some grubby old NHS crutches from a heap of scrap that I once found in a field when I was walking somebody else's dog, so the next morning I went by train to Chelmsford, accompanied by my son. I was admitted immediately and put on an antibiotic drip, because they could not perform skin grafts on infected flesh. A few days later I was wheeled to theatre
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