I'd said to my children just a couple of weeks ago 'we are due for a proper fire you know'. This was due to the many near fires we had experienced and by the grace of God hadn't quite happened. Well I am well known for my predictions, saying things that happen soon after and my children had complained telling me not to say anything like that.
So picture this, middle of the night, pitch dark, not a sound on the horizon and out of the blue my father opens the door to my bedroom and in a breathless voice says 'we've got a fire'!! I sat up and said a fire??
My father being known for getting up in the middle of the night and making breakfast or getting dressed and thinking we are going out, to suddenly be told by him there is a fire you might have been tempted to just roll over and say go back to bed its the middle of the night! But on this occasion the panic in his voice and the speed in which he had charged into my room I just knew he wasn't joking.
I jumped out of bed rushed to get the phone, turned off the electric to my fathers side of the house, woke the children and heading into his part of the house, only to be greeted with thick acrid smoke and flames bellowing up around the kitchen.
My father had managed to get the fire extinguisher off the wall and was spraying the cooker hood and cooker with the foam. After a few minutes the fire seemed to be out and we then realised that we were breathing in the terrible smoke so I flung open the doors, windows and we all went outside to breath in the cold fresh air.
The smell was unimaginable, thick grey and smelling of burning plastic. We grabbed torches to try and examine the damage but it was too dark and too much smoke to really see. My son took the cooker hood off the wall and to our horror we found that the wiring to it had been put in the chimney. As he took the hood down a wall of water flooded out from the chimney all over us. The water had been leaking through the chimney and resting on the top of the cooker hood. On further examination we noticed the wiring had a join in it with tape around and was laying in the water!
I am just thankful that I do all the cooking for my father and he never ever used the cooker hood in his kitchen. Now you might be thinking that you read one of my previous blogs saying you must have a smoke alarm. Well we have got one and it has batteries in it and we check it and it works but on this occasion it didn't go off not even when we took it into the smoke to see if it would go off!!! So it looks like we need to get another one.
The only reason my father woke up was because the lid to the cooker hood opened and hit the wall otherwise I may not have been here to write this blog! Our Guardian Angel was with us on that night.
The next day we washed and cleaned and washed and cleaned but still the kitchen has loads of soot stains all over it. I think it will have to be re decorated. We have an electrician coming to sort out the wiring and a builder coming to take the chimney down and mend the roof so all is good.
Still we live to see another day and the smoke and fire damage will pass and it will be just another memory. Just don't forget to check your smoke alarms and maybe check they go off with a bit of smoke too!!
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