farcical, but even more ludicrous is the story of the woman who collected the money at the toll gate in Dulwich. The woman herself was formidable and well-known to anyone then living in the Dulwich area.
          The journey from Crystal Palace to Peckham, and thence to the City and the East End, took many firemen and their appliances down College Road, a private road owned and administered by Dulwich College, where one of the only toll gates remaining in operation in this country still stands. The charge then was 6d for a motor vehicle.
          One night, early in the Blitz, some firemen from Penge had been called to the docks. By the time they reached Crystal Palace, the East End was well alight. The appliance and its crew, with a trailer pump bouncing along behind, tore down College Road until they reached the toll gate. As they approached, the woman, unused to much traffic at that time of night and under those circumstances, rushed out waving her arms to signal them to stop. The appliance stopped and one of the men got down to ask her what the matter was.
          'It's sixpence to take that thing through here,' she said.
          'What do you mean?' asked the fireman. 'I 'aven't got sixpence, and any way we're in a 'urry, look,' and he pointed to the sky in the east.
          'I don't care where you're going or how much of a hurry you're in, it costs sixpence to take that thing through here, and you're not going through until you give me sixpence.'
          By this time some of the others had got down from the appliance and were muttering and complaining among themselves.
          'Come on, 'e ain't got sixpence. Can't you just let us through?'
          But the woman folded her arms and would not be moved.
          In the end, when all the firemen had been through their pockets and managed to scrape together enough change to make sixpence, she relented, with the gracious concession, 'I don't know what you're complaining about. You can take that thing for nothing.....,' pointing at the trailer pump, hidden in the darkness. Such an attitude certainly belies the popular image of pulling together, mutual encouragement and support, but who knows, perhaps the woman had her own reasons and logic for behaving as she did.
          I was lucky in getting to know two of the men who were stationed at Penge Fire Station during the war. Penge's ground covered a square mile, like the City of London. One day, the man who had been the sixteen-year-old messenger, took me on a tour of the area, pointing out where all the sub-stations had been. There were five of them. Two were in garages. The premises are still garages, only now more streamlined and sophisticated than the wooden huts and hand-pumped petrol pumps of 1939. Two were at the back of public houses. The public houses are still there, but their names are different and the grounds on which the appliances stood and the men drilled are reduced in size, swallowed up by building and development nearby.
          The fifth sub-station was in a coach-house near the entrance to a local park. The park is still there, but the coach-house is gone, absorbed by the park and the gardens that back on to it. I had been given a drawing and a detailed ground plan of the firemen's quarters in the coach-house. It took a long time to try to imagine what it was like more than fifty years ago. Peering over a garden fence I noticed a woman watching me from an upstairs window. I wondered if she had ever heard bells, a distant echo of those nightly dramas. Probably not. A plum tree now grows where the appliances stood.
          In the end I found a heavy unit, as often happens, in quite an unexpected situation. Its owner kindly allowed me to ring the bell and even took me for a ride across London, from the headquarters of the LFCDA at Lambeth to the Stock Exchange in the City. It was a wet day and a cold ride and my mind was more on trying to avoid the fumes that blew back from the engine than on conjuring up the past. A cab-driver, with inimitable humour, overtook us shouting, 'You're a bit too late, mate.' Then someone rang the bell and with that sound came the memory of the Penge fireman and his dark nights, hurtling towards the horrors the like of which I can never really know.
          Fire engines, even painted war-time grey, are beautiful and impressive things. Their preservation is important as a key to the past, but their history is passive. For me it is only through the memories and stories of the men who built and used them, whose history they shared, that we can truly appreciate what they were.