Memoirs of the Heart

I woke to my mother shaking me and saying my name over and over.  I groggily opened my eyes to see my mother stood over me.

There is a fire, you have to get up.

I sat up rubbing my eyes. A fire?

Yes a fire. It’s in the kitchen, you need to get up quickly, we need to leave the house.

I burst into tears and let my mother get me out of bed. She put my dressing gown on me and took me by the hand. As we raced down the stairs I started to panic about my dad, sister and our pets. My mother quickly assured me everyone was outside and waiting. We were the last.

I stood in the back garden crying. My sister wrapped her arms around me as we watched the firemen doing their job. An ambulance arrived and we had to go to hospital to be checked for smoke inhalation. Everyone was talking in hushed voices and kept glancing in my direction. Why did they keep looking at me?

We got to the hospital and I was given an object that looked like it had an empty toilet roll tube attached to it. The doctor told me to put my mouth around the tube and blow as hard as I could for as long as I could. I barely managed to blow into the tube more than a couple of seconds. The doctor asked me to try again – I did, same result. As the doctor removed the tube from my mouth I noticed the colour of it. It was black.

Why is the tube black? I asked.

The black is from your mouth.

How did the black get in my mouth?

You breathed in a lot of smoke while you were sleeping.

As I sat breathing oxygen from a mask that was put on my face, I watched my family complete the same test. I noticed one thing; their tubes had a touch of black on them. Mine was covered.

We stayed with family for a couple of weeks while my father tried to sort out the house. Luckily, the fire had been contained in the kitchen and there was only cosmetic damage to other parts of the house. The cause of the fire was found. Our dishwasher had an electrical fault, when the water touched it the fire started. There had been a bad batch of machines but ours had been the worst outcome.

My father had set the dishwasher before going to bed. At some point in the early hours of the morning the fire had started. My sister got up early for school and had discovered the fire. She woke my parents and as my dad called emergency services, my sister got our pets out and my mother had come to get me. There was one problem. I couldn’t be woken.

My bedroom was directly above the kitchen. The airing cupboard was in my room which was fed by the heat from the boiler which was in the kitchen. The smoke had a direct route into my bedroom and as the fire grew below me, I had inhaled the smoke at an alarming rate. My mother had difficulty waking me because I was dying.

5 more minutes. The report came back. 5 more minutes and I would never have woken up that day. I had inhaled enough smoke to kill me, but somehow I had survived. It had taken my mother 10 minutes to wake me.

5 more minutes and I would have died.

I was 8 years old.