on the scene at the grenfell tower fire lastjune , working through the night to save as many people as they could. now nine of them have decided to run the london marathon, in full firefighters kit and breathing apparatus sets, to raise money for the victims and their families. sophie raworth, a keen marathon runner herself, went to meet them. how is that possible? at that time of night, the roads were clear so literally two to three minutes before we got there. we could see it was well alight and we, yeah, just tried to get people out basically. it was something that, in my 23 years of service, i hadn't seen before, but we had a job to do. 71 people died that night. the fire crews, who repeatedly queued up to go into the burning tower, managed to save the lives of 65 others. it was quite chaotic.

we were there... 13 hours, i think, overall. 13, 1a hours. on a fire, even on a big job, you can get relieved, like, four or five hours later. another crew will come and relieve you from another station, but we didn't want to go anyway. we wouldn't have left anyway. the enormity of it only hit us, well hit me personally after, when i was sort of... a few days later when i'd seen what had happened. i didn't come to terms with it, i suppose just in shock initially. it's affected everyone. i mean, it's a major disaster in the centre of london in 2017. it's going to affect a large amount of people. you wouldn't be human if it didn't affect you in any way. what kind of response did you get from the community afterwards? it was quite overwhelming, the thanks and applause we got was quite something else really. so the fact that they did appreciate us was sort of difficult to deal

with because we don't really get that day—to—day. what happened that night affected them all so deeply that nine of the grenfell tower firefighters are now training to run the london marathon to raise money for the victims and their families, and they are not making it easy for themselves. so you're going to run 26.2 miles with this on. oh, my god! how much does this weigh? 30. 30 kilos? that's like carrying a small kid. not even a small kid, that's like carrying a nine—year—old child on your back. it all means extra training, running around the fire station in between shifts. the money raised will be split between three charities, one to help firefighters and two others at the heart of the grenfell community. we are not doing it for any sort of personal gain. we just want the story to be about them, and try and raise as much money for them as possible. now it's time for meet the author.

two children are inseparable. theyire tom apart by an accident; late in life they meet again. then we're taken into a parallel world, where they meet in middle—age and have a passionate affair. then another, in which they marry young but confront unhappiness. they are ivy and abe, and in elizabeth enfield's novel, each of these stories reveals a part of their character as if all of us aren'tjust who we are here and now, but are always carrying with us the weight of the oldest question of all — what if? welcome. in this book, we are reminded that life and your fate can change in the blink of an eye.

do you think of that as being reassuring or alarming? i think it's both but i think it's one of those tantalising thoughts that people have a lot, that sort of "what if i'd done this" and "what if i'd done that," and i think the thought is very alarming, especially if you've based your whole life or you've lived your whole life dependent on one route you've gone down. but i actually think the exploration of it, which i've tried to do in the book, is less alarming because i think that life... there are a lot of themes to the book, notjust the issue of the relationship between the two people, but i think life has a habit of turning out as it's going to turn out, and those paths not taken have a sort of way of rejoining almost, so that you can look back and think, "if i hadn't done, that my life might have been very different," but very often it's not. it's similar. that is the reassuring answer, but what's interesting about ivy and abe of course — the couple we follow and then go backwards with in this book —

is that it's not so much what they have done, decisions they've made, it's about things that have happened that are beyond their control, an accident for example when they are children, that throws them apart. a lot of it is accidental, so they're not to blame, or it is not something they have done that's produced good or bad, it's just stuff that happened. i've tried to work in... there's something else in that, that there are two things in the book that abe's life... so the two people have different things going on in their lives and abe's life, as you said, is there's an accident which happens in each of his parallel lives and it always has a different effect. so it's a completely random accident. whenever it happens, the effect of that accident plays out differently. and against that, i wanted something that was more sort of set in the stars, if you like. so ivy has something which is — when i was writing it, i was thinking what can she have that's just almost immutable, that's not going to suffer the same random effects,

so she has something in her genes which also plays out, which i don't want to give too much away, but that was my thing of what can you have in your life that is absolutely set that you can't affect, and that seemed to me like it's something you're born with, your cards are marked, your genetic card is marked, and that's going to play out no matter what happens really in the rest of the world, the way that it will. we don't want to give too much away but we can say that we see them operating in parallel worlds. i mean they're children, then they meet when they are much, much older, elderly really. then there are two other episodes when they're in midlife, and we see these things almost acting simultaneously. it is inevitable when this book is reviewed that people will look back to that film sliding doors and say, "oh, that's the kind of thing we are talking about here." people will remember that movie.

as you say, ivy and abe meet again and again, and it's like sliding doors but not in that it's not that same time that might have gone differently, it is at different times of their lives. they are children, they're in their 70s, in their 60s, in their 50s, 40s, 30s. we go right through, and within those chapters we have a little bit of background and a bit of information so we know what that particular life to date, how it's been slightly different than it was to another version. you are writing a fascinating story because it's absorbing, you know, what will happen in this circumstance and how does it compare with what's happened before or what's to come. were you conscious at all, when you were writing the story and as the novel developed, that you wanted to say something about the nature of life oi’ oui’ own experiences, or how we look at our emotional lives, or were you just saying i want to tell a good story? both.

ithink... you know, one of the premises of this novel was i gathered a lot of stories of, a, people who'd had relationships that they had thought maybe if i'd met someone at another time it might have played out differently. so the circumstances of their life at that particular time had affected a particular relationship. and, b, that almost everyone i suppose, especially as they reach the end of their lives, and the stance at the end of ivy and abe's lives has a sort of slight... not really a yearning but a wistfulness. and i don't mean a deep sad wistfulness but a slight nostalgic "i wonder what might have happened..." a natural curiosity. yes, a natural curiosity. "what if i hadn't done that?" i think generally people think, "i'm glad that i didn't because my life has turned out fine."

i'm interested in the names, ivy and abe. both very simple and almost very intimate. you know, my friends, ivy and abe. you can think of them. there's nothing artificial about them. it's the kind of question readers always want to know. how did you come to ivy and abe? well, i started actually, and there are traces of this this still in the book, i started with robert and eleanor because i wanted names that i could change and give a variation of. and then when i finished the book, i decided it was too confusing and ijust wanted names that were easily recognisable, not unusual, not "how do you spell that," but also unusual so that each time you met them it was obvious it was them. it wasn't another tom, dick or harry, or sarah or kate. it was like, "oh, it's ivy." then actually on the page, they look... they look nice together. they look sort of right. i like the way that words look on a page. i love the way they look on the cover of the book. you talk about the cover, it's interesting because you've got

the names on scrabble tiles and a heart on another tile. it's a lovely idea because we all know how infuriating and how wonderful that game is according to how the tiles fall. exactly. it's a lovely analogy for the story really. exactly and you can, you know, if you were playing scrabble, they might land anywhere on the board, they might repeat themselves on the board so it is a great sort of metaphor for what the book is about. i come back to the idea of alternative lives, which were always waiting out there for us and we could have taken. how did the idea come to you? it came... i mean, i'd love to say there was a eureka moment but there wasn't. it came... i sort of am constantly collecting people's stories so from reading the paper, from listening to the radio, listening to television, talking to people, and i sort of ended up with this collection

of stories which was the sort of theme running through them all was, you know, is there a right person or a right time. you've written a lot of short stories so your mind, in a way, you know, for some years, has been used to that idea of taking a lovely little episode and constructing a beautifully chiselled story, and this book, it seems to me, has a lot of that skill in it. you've put a lot of these things together and say, hang on a minute, there's a big mosaic here which hangs together. it was lovely to write from that point of view because it did feel much more like initially i'm writing a series of short stories but there is a thread of a lifetime and of similar circumstances which runs through them all. but i was almost able to let the characters live their life at a particular moment without worrying about the before or after, and then thinking about that afterwards. elisabeth enfield, author of ivy & abe, thanks very much.

thank you. good evening, it is the turn of scotla nd good evening, it is the turn of scotland and northern ireland to have the frost tonight, for england and wales we have a spell of fairly wet weather pushing across the countries and with it strong and gusty winds. as they clears and temperatures drop there will be an ice risk round tomorrow. let us look at tonight. rain spreading eastwards, some heavy bursts, particularly over the hills and west, gale force gusts of wind round the coast of that rain, confined to east anglia by dawn, clearer skies in its wake, there will be rain, sleet snow and hail in the north and west. in between clearer skies. some icy conditions round for friday morning rush hour. it could be slippery in places. rain hail and sleet pushing across england and

wales during the morning, into east anglia and south—east. then sunny spells a and a few sleet and snow showers continuing, but many are set, dry and bright by overall a colder feeling day than today. hello, i'm philippa thomas, this is outside source. syria accuses the us—led coalition of war crimes, after a series of attacks kill 100 pro—government fighters. the un's calling for a ceasefire — russia says it's not going to happen. we would like to see a ceasefire but with the terrorists are not sure they are in agreement to what is proposed —— are not sure. trying to avert another us government shutdown — with the deadline just hours away, can the politicians reach a budget deal? twitter posts its first ever quarterly profit — sending its share value surging.

take a look at that smile, because itjust made history. this 18—month—old boy with down‘s syndrome is the new face