Makyla Brown

Hallmark June 1983. In the Baptist Chapel Sunday School report 19 children passed the South West Bucks Sunday School Union Scripture Exam. Makyla Brown was one of the 7 children who attained high enough marks to also receive a book prize.

Hallmark November 1990 Clem Brown Meets. Makyla Brown

As we all know, women drive buses, fly airplanes, care for the sick, and become captains of industry. I must confess, however, that I did not know that fire brigades were anything else but an all-male preserve. After all, fire-fighting seems a rough, tough and frightening aspect of life's mistakes and tragedies.

Now I take a different view for I have met the first woman firefighter to see action in Bucks. She lives among us in Loosley Hill; she is positive and practical, and she is only 19.

Makyla Brown has been here all her life. Educated at Lacey Green and High Wycombe she soon showed a taste for technical matters as evidenced by her first job at Airways Aero, part of British Airways. Then, while at Wycombe Air Park she was attracted by firefighting and applied to Princes Risborough with acceptance and training following in March 89.

Does she sound like a tough one? Adventurous, maybe, and a practical attitude is evident. "But I was never a tomboy", Makyla insists. "True, I didn't play with dolls. Mechanical things were more my line".

A taste for racy pastimes persists for Makyla is a hovercraft enthusiast and keeps an Osprey (about the size of a car) ready for national races and is looking forward to international competitions in Germany, France and elsewhere.

At Princes Risborough the personnel are largely ‘retained', which means that in certain hours they will be called out from home to tackle emergencies. In practice Makyla keeps a bleeper within earshot. If it had sounded while I was talking to her she would have been out of the house and into her car within a few seconds. And if it had, it might have been like that costly conflagration at Princes Risborough when the thatched-roof shop in Bell Street was sent up in flames by an exploding car which was stopped outside. Makyla was there, and it was her first fire.

Indeed, since her training she has responded to upwards of a hundred calls. Yes, they may concern trapped cats, old ladies in lifts, or those strange folk who get their heads stuck between railings (or does one see that only on television?). All these little dramas happen, of course, but so do frightening and terrible infernos. Fortunately, the experts have the tools for every emergency.

Firefighter Brown No. 300 has a daytime job with a fire protection company (that's hardly a surprise) which deals with extinguishers and alarms. After that is done she places her bleeper where it can beckon her to the station.

So, the watch continues. I liked Makyla's final comment: "I would do it even if I was not paid. It gets the adrenalin going!"