The big chill turns into the big red hot spill

Okay, firstly I’m going to express what an amazin time I had at both the retreat and then at the festival itself and then I’m going to tell you a rather horrifying story…….don’t skip to horrifying story first.

The retreat, in  a scary very much like the hotel in The Shinning stately home, was amazing. Our director Thierry was open to our ideas and the four of us, myself Byron, Charlie and Rukus very quickly got our heads round each other’s ways of thinking very quickly. The large Scottish barman at the local pub however could not get his head around Rukus’s request for blackcurrent in his Guiness, what a new fangled shiny spangled drink it is.

Drinks aside we worked very hard from ten until six with a lunch break in between, on one of  said lunch breaks we discovered Rukus has a rather special party trick which can only be appreciated visually ( Rukka Diary example please Rukus) The party trick did not make it to the show but what was shown was a brillinat example of how four poets working in separate parts of the country can bring four huge pillars of poetry and turn them into one column of poetic excellence. We managed to break our work down and disclover links and cross over that we had no ideas exist within the four works. I especailly enjoyed the acting exercises that Thierry provided as I really felt I was able to become my characters; walking and talking in the way they would. It was also very daunting to learn that we would not be taking our paper on stage and needed to  learn our lines, I#d never done this beofre biut am pleased to say I managed on the day with just a minor slippage of lines at the very end of my piece.

At the Chill itself I was with Sue in our campervan Dolores McNamara on a separate site from the rest of the crew. I have to say i felt the energy slip a bit here and realised how important it is to have that being in each others hair expereince if you really want to put a good show together. Also my phone had stopped working so i didn’t know I was suppose to be at the words in motion tent for 10.30 the next day. I ambled in at 12 and walked straight into a strange look of relief from Thierry and a bit of a growl from Rukus until I explained that I didn’t know I was late. I totally understand Rukus’s reaction at the tension really starts to build and for many of us this was the first time we were relying on other people to make the show work. We had a myplace hug and got cracking with last minute rehersals. i won’t go into the show itself as I’m sure footage is due to apper here. It was an amazing expereince and I want to tahnks everybody has been involved in the project. That one hour when it all came together was magic for so many reasons. I’m sounding too corny now so on to the horrifying story……..

Sue and I planned to leave Monday but late Sunday afternoon decided we’d get ahead of the queues and leave by 4.30 Sunday. We packed beloved Dolores McNamra and then had unfortuneate minor incident when we broke the roof as we pulled it down,( This is not the horrifying part), we some how managed to secure it and thought hmm, we’ll have to get that one fixed when we get home. We knew it was likely to be a six or seven hour slog so we decided one would sleep in the back while the other drove.  As we left the M5 we tamked up on fuel and I decided to get my head down in the back.

After a few strange post festival dreams I woke to discover we were pulling into a service station. Being a bit of a grumpy sleeper I started to complain about why were we pulling over and where were we. Sue gave me a nonsensical answer that involved something to do with steam.  I sat up to see we were in a carpark. “There’s steam coming from the engine,” she said.

Now the campervan is a 1976 blue Toyota, the engine is located underneath the middle front seat, so essentially inside the van. Sue lifted the seat and asked me to pass her a towel to wrap around her wrist as a hot engine / radiator could spit and some steam could come out. She wrapped her wrist and gave it a few minutes to let the engine begin to cool. I noticed to our right there was a woman in Muslim head dress sitting in the passenger seat of the car next to us resting her head on her husband’s chest who had one hand on the stearing wheel, she looked so peaceful and they were obviously very in love. I leaned forward to take a look at the antique machinary of our engine. Sue carefully unscrewed the cap a millimetre, nothing happened, she did it a bit more, nothing happened. Suddenly I felt someting sharp hit the corner of my right eye, i dived backwards on to the bed which was thankfully layed out and wiped my eye with the duvet, the sight i was greeted with as i turned back to Sue will stay with me. There was a fountain of brown boiling water gushing from the engine hitting the campervan roof and going all over Sue who was trapped in the cab unable to find the handle. The force of the water was immense. This lasted seconds and then Sue made an awful groan. To my horror the gushing came again and another fountain started. I slid open the door screaming get out get out and ran to Sue’s side. In the time it took me to get there she’d been hit with yet another skin peeling gush. As i opened the door Sue seemed to be paralysed I dragged her out and pulled her t shirt from her despite her weirdly out pf place protests. By now my brain had stopped working in, It’s okay i said over and over , I’ve got you, you’re out.

“It was hot water from the engine” I said to the Muslim woman and her husband who had jumped from their car,she later told me she thought it was coffee that had exploded because of the colour.

“Do you need an ambulance?” she said

“No” I said, thinking;”it’s okay, everything is okay because I’ve got Sue out”. I had my arms round her and Sue was gripping my waist, her head was on my left shoulder. Very quitely and with a shaky voice she said “Emma, I’m burning, my scalp is burning I need an ambulance”.

As Sue said those words the serious shit we were in hit me, i almost began to panic and my brain suddenly clicked back into action. All this happened in seconds. “Somebody call an ambulance” i began to shout.

“I need water” sue said, the Muslim woman started to pour what small amounts water she had over Sue from her plastic bottle, I desperately looked in the campervan for the water we had brought but couldn’t find it. I knew we had a tank that we used for washing dishes but i didn’t know how to access it. I did pathetic things like try to unscrew the tank ( this is impossible) i was so desperate to cool Sue down.

“I need running water” said sue, still eerrily clam. A first aider from the garage appeared and said there was a tap behind the garage. We took her there, sat her down under a freezing tap and waited for the ambulance. All the while people were going to the garage and getting icy bottles of mineral water from the fridge to pour over her wrists and arms. at one point I remember somebody gave me water that felt warm and i knew I couldn’t use i.

“It’s warm, i can’t use that, it needs to be cold,” i snapped at him. I ran to the garage myself and just grabbed bottles from the fridge. Sue was grey and had obviously gone into shock. The ambulance arrived, they got her in and she says that’s when the pain started, pain like nothing she’d ever felt. Sue’s pretty hard core – when she broke her leg within a week she was up a ladder stripping wall paper from the ceiling, i knew by the horrible unrelenting noise she was making that this was not a broken leg pain. They gave her two shots of morphine before we even left the service station. At the hospital I was ushered to one side as she was whisked away.

I’m going to curtail this horror story now – Sue is just about okay, she has second degree burns to large parts of her back, on her right shoulder there are some pathches that are almost 3rd degree. She has burns to her scalp, both wrists, her forehead and minor splashes on her upper arms and forearms. We are back home and being cared for by relatives and freinds who are bringing soup and helping to change the dressings. For the first 24 hours both of us were still shocked by what had happened and extremely tired after spending a weekend at a festival and then 24 sleppless hours in Newcastle under lyme casualty department. I’m back to normal and sue is recovering slowly.

In the last week I’ve learned a lot about people and about place, i’ve leraned how individuals gel together and work as a an intellectual and physical unit, how we need to be supported when working (sarah and Naomi) how we always meet characters in life (the scottish barman), how people appreciate art, talent and dedication and that there are some very talented individuals in the world, but mostly that when people need people, on the whole, thay are there for you. It doesn’t matter about the place you’re in or even the situation, a poetry performance or a crisis, it’s about the people you find in that place.

Thank you to everybody who has been in my life over the last seven days xx