On Sunday evening I noticed for the first time the Christmas lights the firemen had put on their tower in the Phoenix Industrial Estate, making the town’s second ugliest building into one of the prettiest in one imaginative step. It brought to mind the close-hand view I got of the firemen at work a few months earlier as I sheltered in a twitten photographing them putting out the fire above Mackays. How some of them dedicated themselves to pushing the passers-by away from the fire as others piled in towards it. Towards the fire. Brave men. Later on that evening I got a phone call from a relative who’d just watched the national news. There had been a fire in a fireworks factory in Lewes, she said. Was everybody in our household OK? I had to wait until the next morning to find out more. Not in Lewes, but near Ringmer. Two firemen killed. Twelve injured. The proximity of the disaster made its tragedy all the more palpable. The image of the firemen running around on School Hill returned vividly to my mind. I was shocked, of course, and saddened.
A couple of days later I was in the Phoenix Industrial Estate talking to a woman in the Old Market Lane Garage, which is temporarily being turned into an art gallery. We mentioned the Christmas lights on the tower down the road. “I thought they’d take them down after the fire,” she said. I thought about this, and realised they were right to leave them up. Because every time I see those lights, I don’t think of the dubious joys of Christmas. I think of the bravery of the men in the fire service, and I think about the sacrifice of the two men killed in the disaster, and the others who were injured. Everybody involved in this webmag sends their condolences to anybody who knew and loved the victims of the tragedy, and applauds the bravery of all the men and women in the Fire Service.