In the spring of 1982, a 17-year-old woman called Josephine Reynolds pitched up for an interview to join the Norfolk fire and rescue service. A 40-minute interrogation by two senior fire officers – both men, obviously – followed, including such bog standard questions as: “Do you really think you’ve got the physical strength to handle this type of work?” and: “Why should we invest in you when later on in life you might have different priorities?” Reynolds was typically forthright. “Well, sir,” she replied, “if you train me correctly, then that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“That’s what the 80s were like,” Reynolds, now 52 and still “an adventurer by nature”, tells me. “OK, so they were trying to open up the service to women, but at the same time I was very much a woman going into a man’s world. They weren’t going to change for me. One chap in Norwich said: ‘I can’t speak to you, my wife doesn’t want me to.’ There was no sense of it being an equal place. Basically, the guys still ruled the roost.”

After 15 months of gruelling training, some of it by an instructor rumoured to make trainees lick the drill yard clean, Reynolds became Britain’s first full-time female firefighter. She went on breakfast TV with Adam Ant and ended up carrying Chris Tarrant off the set when he asked if she was really strong enough to do “what is, essentially, a man’s job”. At 21, she became the first woman to qualify to drive a fire engine, something not even Dany Cotton, this year appointed the first female commissioner of London fire brigade, has achieved. All this in a time when there were no firefighters, only firemen. Even now, the picture remains static: 95% of England’s fire service is male.

“Things probably haven’t changed at all,” Reynolds admits. “I checked out Norfolk fire service’s new intake the other day and it’s 100% men. I look at the photograph of them and think: ‘What woman in her right mind would put herself through joining that?’” Well, her for a start. Reynolds laughs. “She’d certainly have to be a tough one.”

In Fire Woman, a memoir blazing as much with 80s pop music as fires, Reynolds recounts her five years in the service (after which she went to the Amazon jungle with a former legionnaire). The daily vomiting from physical exertion. Training in men’s uniforms because women’s didn’t exist. The isolation of the early days when her “additional X chromosome” meant constantly feeling “an invisible barrier of loneliness”. The ladies toilet that had to be installed at Thetford fire station when she started. The callouts to horrific road accidents, forest fires and suicides, and the time she pursued a monkey on the run. And the grief: the people she lost, including her first love, a retained firefighter, who drowned in a river.

“It was a busy station at Thetford so we had plenty of callouts,” she recalls. “We spent a lot of time at road accidents, at least one a week, often more. And there was a suicide a week in the woods.” In the book, she writes about how little the emotional impact and daily trauma of the job was discussed back at the station. “It wasn’t that kind of environment,” she acknowledges, “yet we would almost have a sixth sense. We were able to take care of each other without saying too much, whether it was about a wink or just giving someone a cigarette. There’s a real emotional responsibility that comes with the job. I loved it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reynolds with her crew at Norfolk fire service.

How on earth did she do it? “I’m quite bloody-minded,” she laughs. “I’m a nice person but I don’t take shit from anyone. Once I started I was determined not to fail. I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be the weakest link.’ And there was definitely an element of ‘Fuck you, boys, a girl can do this.’ I just kept going and pushed myself as hard, if not harder, than most of the guys.”

Interestingly, Reynolds’ story ended up being more about camaraderie than sexism. “When I got to my station in Thetford I couldn’t have asked for a more incredible group of guys,” she tells me. “Apart from one or two, they just let me get on with it and were the same to me as they were to anyone else. I think I was lucky being in Norfolk, where everyone had seen me working and knew me. If I had gone to London, Manchester or another metropolitan area, my story would have been very different.”

So did she end up feeling like a woman among men or a firefighter among firefighters? “A firefighter among firefighters,” Reynolds says. “But I was always myself as a firefighter, which meant being a woman, whether that meant crying over a boyfriend, or my tampon falling out of my pocket on the pump [the fire engine]. The guys would laugh, but they were so proud of me. It goes to show that if we are given a chance, we are strong enough. If a woman really wants to do something, nothing will stop her.”

Fire Woman is published by Michael O’Mara Books, priced at £9.99. To buy it for £8.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. P&P charges may apply.