'Firemen were heroes - I thought I could do that'

Darran Gough has been in the fire service for four decades

"Opening up that cardboard box... it was the realisation of a dream."

Darran Gough said he was obsessed with the fire service as a young boy in the 1980s, growing up at Shiplake, on the River Thames, where his father was a lock keeper.

In nearby Henley-on-Thames, his mother would regularly "run like mad" with her son in his pushchair to see the fire engines turn out when the siren sounded, he told Radio Oxford.

But tragedy shattered his idyllic childhood when his father, Peter, died while working on a weir during a flood in 1982.

Work had been carried out on Sonning Bridge, just upstream from Shiplake lock, and some scaffolding planks had become caught up in the weir, said Mr Gough, who was 16 at the time.

"He got catapulted off the weir by one of the planks and that was it, we lost him," he said.

Mr Gough said it took five weeks to find his father's body.

"They found him on my birthday," he said. "Best present I could have had though because birthdays meant a lot to dad and he came back for mine."

Over the next four years, Mr Gough studied photography at college and would take pictures for local newspapers of the firefighters in action.

"Seeing the firemen – there weren't women in the service then – firemen were heroes.

"The more I watched them, I thought 'I could do that job'."

He said it took him "two or three" attempts to get in to the retained crew in Henley.

"But opening up that cardboard box [containing his uniform] on 1 May 1986 - I couldn't really show too much emotion because it was down the fire station and it was drill night so everybody was doing stuff.

"I had to curb my enthusiasm just a little bit, but it was the realisation of a dream."

Four decades on, he is now entering what he said was his final year in the fire service.

Mr Gough has put pen to paper and written a book documenting his experiences, titled Muck, Grime and Sweat.