Out of the Ashes: The restoration of a burned boy

By Peter Gladwin and Jan Greenough

Peter Gladwin was barely one when a domestic fire left him horribly scarred. The third of nine children, he was raised on a rough council estate in Halifax. Peter was always in trouble with the police, in and out of care homes, spending his time on the streets. Then he was stabbed and effectively lost the use of his right arm. Every relationship failed. For years Peter took refuge in gambling, drinking and drugs. His sister Annette, four years senior, was called after Peter contemplated suicide. She insisted he accompany her to a local church. 'Little did I know that God was there For the first time in weeks I went to sleep without being drunk or high on drugs.' It was the start of Peter's profound transformation. In 1993 he started a two-year course at the Elim Bible College in Cheshire, and met a lovely Swiss girl, Sarah, who is now his wife. After several years working in drug rehabilitation, and as a probation officer in a cat B prison he now works as a full time evangelist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Release date: Oct 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857212405

Peter Gladwin

Peter Gladwin is a former probation officer and a regular contributor to the radio station UCB. He is author of 'Out of the Ashes' and 'Out of the Darkest Place'.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Out of the ashes

You be a good girl and look after the boys, said Mum. I’ll only be next door if you want me.

Mum liked to go next door for a cup of tea some afternoons – she said it was the only break she got. Three kids in the house and another one on the way, she said to her friend Sheila. It’s a good job I’ve got Annette.

She’s a proper little mother, agreed Sheila, even at four. How are you feeling?

Tired, said Mum. Seven months gone now. Too big to be chasing after toddlers.

In fact my brother John was the only toddler – he was two, and he started whining as soon as Mum went out. But Mum knew Annette would soon calm him down. She’d left them both eating bread and jam at the table. I was the baby, just under a year old, and at least I wasn’t walking yet. She knew I’d stay where she put me, lying on the hearth rug. She’d lit the fire and got it drawing up nicely with some sheets of newspaper, so I’d be warm enough.

She settled herself down in Sheila’s armchair. I left the Yale on the latch. They’ll be all right for half an hour.

She wasn’t a bad mother. But the babies had come along so fast, and she was always worried about money, and what her husband was up to – usually at the bookie’s or the pub, drinking his benefit money. Sometimes she was desperate for a minute’s peace.

This is lovely, she said, stirring her tea. Just what I needed.

A minute later she heard screaming. Annette was banging frantically on the front door.

Oh, what now? she said. Sheila opened the door and Annette ran in, dragging John crying behind her. For a minute or two they couldn’t make any sense of what she was saying, between her sobs.

Fire, Mummy! The rug’s on fire! I couldn’t get hold of Peter – too much flames…

Mum had been holding John and trying to quieten him down. Now she thrust him into Sheila’s arms and ran outside. The baby!

She pushed at her own front door but it didn’t move.

I left it on the latch! she shouted. How can it be locked? She kicked and hammered on the door, but she realized what must have happened. When Annette ran out, the door had slammed behind her, knocking the Yale catch out of position. The keys were inside where she had left them. The front window seemed to be full of smoke.

Call the fire brigade! she yelled at Sheila. Then she looked round desperately. She had to get in the house somehow. Under the window there was a heavy wooden hatch to the coal cellar. She lifted it and clambered awkwardly over the wooden rim, but it was no good. Her pregnant belly was too huge to fit in the small opening. Tears were streaming down Mum’s face. Peter! My baby! she kept sobbing.

She heard sirens and the fire engine arrived. The firemen ran to fix up hoses. One of them led her away, crying and shaking, back to Sheila’s house, but she wouldn’t go inside. It seemed a long time before they broke the door down, and by then flames and smoke were coming out of the upstairs windows. They trained the hoses in through the hall: everything in the house would be wet.

When the flames finally died down she wanted to run over and see, but Sheila held her back. She saw one fireman shaking his head as another one went in to search the house. There was a horrible smell of wet ash and soot. The street was filling up as people came out of their houses to see what was going on, and an ambulance came screeching up the street. Two neighbours stood by Sheila’s doorstep, talking.

The baby was in there, you know.

Poor little soul. Terrible way to die. Mary’ll never get over it.

The street went quiet as the fireman came out again; his big body and padded jacket seemed to fill up the doorway. His leather gauntlets looked huge and clumsy, but he was holding a tiny blackened body with great gentleness. He looked up and shouted, Get some medical help over here! He’s alive!

Chapter 2

Lost boy

My earliest memory: I’m lying on my back, surrounded by chaos – people, noise, banging and loud voices – and lights are flashing past overhead. Surely I can’t be remembering that first traumatic journey, being rushed on a trolley along hospital corridors? More likely it’s a memory I’ve put together from many experiences, because I was in and out of hospital for about four years. Most of those trips were planned ones, because I had to have a long series of reconstructive operations. But some of them may have been emergencies, when I fell and split the delicate new skin grafts over and over again.

I was in hospital for a long time to start with. When I was admitted no one expected me to live: my skin and clothes had blackened and fused together. I was charred from head to toe, but the worst damage was on my left side, which had been nearest to the fire. It took some time before my condition was stable enough for me to survive the operating theatre, where the surgeons began to try to salvage what they could of my burned limbs. I had amputations on both feet – all my toes and part of each foot for about a quarter of its length. All the fingers on my left hand were taken off. I had 75 per cent burns on my legs and body, so I’ve got huge scars everywhere, including my face and what remains of my left ear. It’s thanks to the amazing skill of the doctors and nurses of St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford that I’m here at all.

I suppose my mother must have visited me, but she had two other children at home and another on the way, so travelling to and fro wouldn’t have been easy. For any baby, separation from its mother is traumatic, but I guess that probably paled into insignificance beside the intense pain I was always suffering. Once I was discharged, I was taken home in a pushchair, which was where I spent most of the next four years. I couldn’t learn to walk like other children, because I had no feet, and I was always bandaged to protect my healing skin.

We lived in King Cross, Halifax, in a terraced council house with three bedrooms – Mum and Dad and whichever baby was newest shared one room, and the rest of us shared the others. We were a big family: there were three children when the fire happened in 1960 (Annette, John and me), and Susan was born a couple of months later. Tony was born in 1961, when I was two, June in 1962, David in 1963 and James in 1964. Then there was a gap of seven years before our last brother, Adrian, was born in 1971. Mum struggled to cope, but she was always pregnant or nursing a new baby, and she couldn’t keep an eye on everything at once. With all those children in the house and the rough and tumble of family life, even when I was sitting in my pushchair it was easy for me to get bumped – and every knock meant that the skin would split and bleed, and I’d be back to the Burns Clinic for new dressings.

The operations were the worst part of it: I screamed whenever they took me back into the hospital, because I knew I would wake up in even more pain. The one thing I wanted when I was little was for the pain to go away; as soon as I was old enough to have some idea of the future, I was looking forward to the time when I wouldn’t be hurting. Someone must have told me that one day I would get better. But it was a long time coming.

By the time Mum was pregnant with James, when I was four, she couldn’t cope any more: seven active children plus one with a disability was too much. She sent me to live with my Grandma and Grandad.

It was bliss. Even at four years old, I was able to appreciate the difference between their home and ours. For a start, it was quiet: at home there was always a baby screaming. For another thing, I had my Grandma’s undivided attention. Mum was always too busy to bring me things or play with me, so I relied on Annette if I wanted a drink or something to eat. Grandma talked to me, played with me, and read to me. Their house wasn’t grand. Just like home, it was a terrace-house with steps down to a tiny yard with an outside toilet.

Grandad was a man of few words, but I wasn’t afraid of him. He never said it, but somehow I always knew he loved me. He worked in the coal yard, and he used to come home at night as black as if he’d been down the pit, wearing a leather jacket which protected his clothes from the heavy coal sacks he hauled around on his shoulder all day. He had a special chair – the only armchair in the house – and no one else ever sat there. Grandma always sat on a hard chair by the table.

When I was four, the operations came to an end, and about a year later I started learning to walk. I was so proud to be getting upright at last. What I wanted more than anything else was to be able to run around like my brothers and sisters, and join in their games. First I had to be fitted with a pair of special boots, adapted to stay on my feet with a metal brace that went round my ankle. They were cruelly uncomfortable, and the metal bit into my skin, but I would put up with anything if it meant I could start walking. In the physiotherapy room at the hospital there were two parallel metal bars, and a nurse would prop me up between them so I could support most of my weight on my arms. The metal was cold and hurt the tender skin of my hands, and of course I couldn’t grip properly with my fingerless left hand. But gradually I started taking more and more of my weight on my feet, and shifting one foot at a time in the heavy boots. The nurse knelt at the other end of the bars to catch me and turn me round. I can remember her voice, cajoling and encouraging me: That’s right, Peter! Come towards me. Good boy! One more step, now. You can do it.

I went on having monthly appointments at the Outpatients Department of the Burns Unit until I was ten, and I used to dread them. I was constantly being refitted for new boots, and I hated the doctors touching my feet. Something about the healing process meant that the skin was extremely sensitive, and it was terribly painful when they peeled off the protective gauze which covered the misshapen stumps where my feet should have been. Still, much as I hated them, those boots did the trick, and I learned to walk fairly normally. People are often amazed when they find out the extent of the damage to my feet, and wonder how I manage to balance without toes.

I’m always amused when I hear athletes talking about going through the pain barrier. I’ll never be an athlete, but I knew all about that when I was five. I was determined to learn to walk, and I had to strengthen the wasted muscles in my legs by practising as much as I could. I practised in the hospital and I practised at home, feeling my way round the furniture in Grandma’s house like a toddler, and taking a few steps unsupported between a table and a chair.

Sometimes Mum and Dad used to come and visit. The adults would all sit round the table smoking and drinking tea, while I played on the floor by their feet. It was safe to do that there, because there weren’t any other children to trip over me. But as I healed and grew stronger, the babies at home were growing up, too. Mum and Dad had finally got to the top of the housing list, and their big family had qualified them for a new house with more bedrooms. On one of their visits they told Grandma and Grandad they thought they could manage to have me back.

I loved my grandparents, and I’ll always be grateful to them for taking me in, but I wanted to go home, too. I didn’t have any friends because I’d always been confined to the house or my pushchair, and I longed to be able to play out in the street with the other kids. I went home for a weekend at first (which was probably a trial run for my Mum as much as for me), and when that went all right, I went for a week or so, and eventually I moved back home.