Briefly, it told how my friend Paddy Connolly and I
fought a blaze in a warehouse packed to the roof (literally) with butane gas.
Paddy and I should have been awarded the George Cross. We should also have received
a substantial reward from the insurance company for saving them a considerable
amount of money. But we didn’t because the management lied. Paddy got nothing,
and I got a veiled accusation from the boss that it was I who had started the
fire in the first place. (It wasn’t.)
That’s about it, really. No justice.
(Oh, but then there was the time when I should have been
keel hauled, drummed dishonourably out of the navy, and possibly held in chains
for much of my natural life. But I wasn’t, partly because I was unbelievably lucky
that night, and partly because I engineered a delightfully plausible cover
story on the spur of the moment – of which I was immensely proud, I might add,
and rightly so. But it was a lie, wasn’t it? It was, sort of.)
OK, so life’s complicated after all.
(And I had the belated thought that maybe this post should
have been entitled ‘A Lie for a Lie.’ That would have been cleverer, but it
would also have involved a minor re-write so I’m saying it here instead. Now I’m
cheating. There you go.)
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