SILLY DADDY
After dinner Terry sat down with his wife and two daughters to watch television. Only part of his mind was occupied with what he saw on screen. Foremost in his thoughts was that, when he left the house in the morning, he would be away on a work trip for several days. Half a dozen of more times a year, trips away for work provided welcome breaks from his life at home.
The hour or so of TV after dinner was a family routine, enabling Terry, his wife and two daughters to spend some undemanding time together. Unfortunately he had, over the years, increasingly found himself in a minority of one in choosing what to watch, and had slowly reconciled himself to being satisfied with whatever his wife and the girls decided to watch.
This was easier with some TV shows than others. On this particular evening he had to endure a quiz show that, were he to set aside his fatherly instincts, he would have called loathsome. A compère introduced several pairs of newly weds who competed for the prize of a beach holiday in the sun. With their spouses out of earshot, one of each duo was required to answer questions such as: 'What would you say is the thing that your partner most likes about you?' or 'Now obviously you must know each other really well, so tell me and all the viewers at home, does your partner like tulips?' - or antiques, or going to the shops, or some other personal trivia. To Terry these details about the lives of complete strangers were of no interest. His wife and daughters, however, clearly found them engrossing.
He sat patiently as the next couple was introduced. 'And how,' the compère Yvette asked, 'Did you two first meet?'
'We met at a night club,' came the response from a terrified contestant, probably alarmed by the enormous smile that that flashed across Yvette's face, the gleaming rows of big bright teeth seeming to crack out beyond the boundaries of her cheeks.
Terry thought about work, where his interests and opinions were not, as here at home, judged to be irrelevant. At work one of his colleagues was also the father of daughters, and during beaks they would sometimes share grumbles about the price of girls' shoes, school uniforms and the like.
His firm supplied fire safety equipment, alarm systems, fire extinguishers and, best of all, training sessions for customers' staff who were appointed as fire wardens. He enjoyed meeting customers and discussing their needs for equipment, and most of all he enjoyed giving fire warden training. The trips away, when he taught groups of up to twenty to put out small fires, were his favourite activity. The firm paid the cost of his hotel room and meals in restaurants, as well as a generous allowance for other unspecified expenses, the latter really an incentive to compensate trainers for being away from home. An incentive was hardly needed in Terry's case, but the firm paid it anyway.
The next morning he set off for work in a jaunty mood, knowing it would be three days before he would have to sit down again with his family to watch TV. Calling at the firm's offices, he collected the course materials: the fire extinguishers he would use for demonstrations; the canisters of inflammable liquid; and the paperwork he would hand out to trainees. The mix of age and sex in every group was different, and the trainee fire wardens were always happy to have a change from their routine work, even those who found the practical side of the course frightening. Unless someone was very scared, fortinstance visibly shaking with fear, he would get every one of them to put out a controlled fire of some kind that he had carefully set and ignited.
Experience helped him select those who were likely to prove most capable. He would start with paper smouldering in waste bins, progress to a fire in a pan of cooking oil, go on to a larger blaze of inflammable liquid in a shallow tank, and then finish with the most serious fire it was safe for a non- professional fire fighter to tackle, that of a sheet of flame from spilt petrol spreading over tarmac. In setting these fires he had to ensure they could easily be tackled by one person using the right type of extinguisher, and that, should a student panic, he could intervene and extinguish the fire himself.
