I Saved My Family from a House Fire

It was November, and it had been just a handful of weeks since I’d moved up to senior school. I was only eleven and wouldn’t be twelve until the following June. I had spent the recent long summer holidays, carefree, happy, and, for the last time, playing with my old friends. But my twin brother and I were both ecstatic to have left junior school far behind us.

We’d been unhappy and many times, treated differently from the other children; even ostracised by the teachers with their small-town unconscious biases. My twin, who’d only been about eight at the time, was slapped hard across the face by a teacher who later denied it, despite the entire class having witnessed it. My mother had stormed into school to confront her. Nothing was ever done. And my teacher: she put me down and denied any of the talents that I’d been eager to show her, or craft.

My brother and I were just kids, and good kids too. But it was the seventies, and our unmarried parents, poverty, social structure, and my father being an immigrant Italian, somehow caused the adults in the suburb of our parochial market town to repel us with their blinkered prejudices.

Starting a new school felt like a fresh start, and I had lucked out (it was wonderful to have something new) when a friend let me borrow her embroidered cotton bag for school. She’d always been hurtful to me in junior school, and I hated it that she’d followed me to the same senior school; plus, she wouldn’t stop being a bitch to me, but I weakly and unwittingly allowed it. The loan of her sweet bag stitched with colourful flowers helped erase those nasty verbal whips of hers.

On that late afternoon, I’d cleared up after dinner with my allotted chores and got to work on completing my homework; I also managed to finally cover the rest of my schoolbooks with some offcuts of leftover wallpaper. I placed my books neatly into the tote bag and rested it against the old-fashioned armchair that sat next to the back boiler’s hearth, all ready for the morning.

With only one school bus run, I had to make sure I left home on time; Mum, dominant and strict, made us clear up and wash the dishes before we did anything else. And so, I felt content that my bag was ready for me to grab in the morning. I’d made sure it sat far enough away from the hot stove, which was housing an orderly pile of red burning coals.

Later that evening, I quickly fell asleep, and the hours passed into the depths of the night. A vivid consciousness started to flicker through my slumber; colours of blues and purples fell across my dream state eyes. I became aware that I’d felt internally alerted in the struggle to breathe in my next breath. I experienced a sense of imminent suffocation that I didn’t understand. My mind, vexed, wondered, ‘Is this part of a dream?’

I tried again to inhale slivers of air through my nose. ‘Why isn’t it working?’ I tried again to find oxygen, but there was nothing there for me to breathe in. Just a wall. And lots of colours.

An urgency washed over me. I knew I needed to open my eyes. I knew that I needed to wake up; I had to wake up. The air had stopped working, and I needed to find out why.

I forced myself to wake up with determination, and during that transition from sleep to wakefulness, I had to push past a dense metaphoric door. As I became conscious, I couldn’t make anything out. Normally, light shone through my thin curtains, but there was nothing. ‘Was it too dark outside?’

Positioning my arm behind me, back against the wall, I slowly slid my hand carefully across the wall, moving it up to where I knew the small square light switch sat.

I pressed the flat switch down, and as the ceiling light instantly pushed out its diligent wattage, my room was illuminated with ghostly distortions. The light barely cut through the haze. My mind, discombobulated, as I tried to take in the scene, I witnessed thick grey smoke filling the entirety of my bedroom, from ceiling to floor, and wall to wall.

Somehow, it was gentle, as it expanded and coiled into moving shapes. Quietly, but fiercely, it had taken my room hostage. The acrid smell, bitter, stung my eyes. I choked. It drifted up and out, obscuring any visibility, as I continued to struggle to breathe. I choked again.

The shock of this uninvited toxic entity froze me for a moment. I forced myself to wake up more and rapidly take in the reality of this smoky monster, which had entangled itself within every part of my room. Unspoken panic turned into adrenaline that flooded my veins as I jumped up from my bed and stumbled out onto the landing. I cautiously looked out for any red flames, but there were just more billows of smoke. I stood at the top of the stairs, scanning the bottom for any fire.

No flames, just foul-smelling smog. I slowly crept down each step, one by one, into the hall, turning towards the living room door. Mum had left it ajar. I was now able to follow the smoke back to here, the living room; this room must be the culprit.

I hesitated, scared of what I might see, and peered around the edge of the door, and there, at the far end of the room, next to the hearth, the armchair sat stoically ablaze. Its fabric and stuffing, mostly gone, the inner metal framework, ashamedly naked and glowing. The room was filled with dark, pungent smoke.

There, on the floor, next to the dilapidated chair, my friend’s school bag was reduced to scorched fragments. The books had all perished. My stomach turned, and dismay wrapped itself tightly around me. I couldn’t see Solomon, our yellow Labrador; he normally sat at the bottom of the stairs in the corner of the hall.

Thinking of everybody upstairs asleep, I spun around and bolted back up the stairs. I needed to save the others in case the fire spread, and what about the smoke and asphyxiation! How long had it been? The fire had been going for a time. My mother’s door was shut and locked. She always locked her door, hiding herself away from us kids. And Timmy — my eighteen-year-old brother — his door was firmly shut. He didn’t care about anyone or anything.

That must have been why the smoke had reached me first, as my door was the only one upstairs that had been open.

I shook my twin awake.

I called out to Timmy and begged him to open up. He ignored me. He still didn’t care, even in a fire. It took a lot of shouting for him to realise I wasn’t joking.

My mother heard my cries and took over. The rest of the night slipped out of my memory from the shock, as the adrenaline left me, my mind turned into mush. Solomon had crept into a corner of the cold front room — a room in which we hardly ever used because of its unwelcoming temperature. Thankfully, he was okay.

The fire crew established that Mum had left the stove door open, and subsequently, an ember had spat itself out at some distance and landed onto my bag. The intensity of the heat from the coal had set it alight, spreading up onto the armchair.

____________

Mum hadn’t learnt from another one of our traumatic house fires when I was three; she had left candles burning on the mantlepiece as she went off to bed. She never seemed to sense danger. I don’t recall any details of how terrible that fire was, but it was bad. After the fire crew saved the day, we infants sat huddled together as the fireman made us cocoa.

_____________

The following morning, I woke anxious and exhausted. The house was a mess; the armchair had been thrown into the garden by the fire crew. All the walls were stained from the smoke residue, leaving black soot everywhere, and the air was thick with the ashen smell that miserably clung to everything.

The odour lingered in my nostrils for a long time.

Too traumatised to go to school, my mother explained the situation to the school office. As a single low-income parent, she was offered support, and the school was to send a bunch of sixth-form students to come and help with the clean-up and painting of the smoke-damaged walls.

Deep shame covered me from head to foot; I was already hiding my ‘free school dinner’ tickets from classmates. And even worse, our school bus drop-off was just across the green from my house. That was a daily reminder of how I felt so different. The poverty and starkness of our prefab home, the kitchen, just a basic necessity. Dirty wallpaper where Solomon slept, and old carpets and floorboards, adorned with old fashioned second furniture.

Our house was always kept clean; my twin and I had to make sure of that with our cleaning rota. But to have students inside the house! That felt worse than almost suffocating to death; even if it was a miracle that I hadn’t died after all that time that the smoke filled my room.

The group of sixth formers were, in the end, polite, friendly, and worked hard, scrubbing and painting away the trauma of that evening. Slowly but surely, over time, the sulphurous smell began to dissipate.

A day later, I walked the short route to my friend’s house in anticipation of the difficult conversation that lay ahead of me. Every step I took, I thought over how much I wanted to be able to magically place that bag anywhere else — but next to the armchair.

Nervously knocking on her door, a lump stuck in my throat. My friend’s mother appeared, towering above me. Now this was going to be harder than just telling my friend, but I had to let her know what happened. And I cared about what happened; it was her brand-new bag after all.

My words trembled out as I relayed the details and why my friend’s bag was no more. Her cold blue eyes stared at me unemotionally, and her face dropped into a scowl. I searched for her compassion but only witnessed tight-lipped anger, woven into the burrows of her face.

I didn’t understand her reaction.

Perhaps I hadn’t explained it properly? Perhaps she didn’t believe me, or perhaps she did, and didn’t care? And perhaps that’s why I started to find new friends and see my ‘friend’ for what she truly was: unkind.

Looking back, I can see how I never saw myself as a hero in this story, even though I had saved four adults and a beloved pet dog from asphyxiation. At the time, I only felt the ashes of shame, regret, and rejection.

I can now end this story, as it should have been said:

I was the child and an eleven-year-old hero at that. My mother should have closed the door of the back burner, as well as blown out those candles. And she should have stood there beside me when I had to explain to my friend’s mother. And of course, offered to buy a replacement.

These house fires (we had three all in all) have left me over-cautious, not just with ovens, heaters, irons, and plugs, but also with friendships.

But more importantly, as I write this out, I do wonder if there was something divine that had woken me up because it only takes a few minutes to suffocate from toxic smoke. The smoke that filled my room that night had been there a lot longer than that.

A miracle, or resilience. You decide.

© Chantal Weiss 2026. All Rights Reserved