My mum had tucked me into bed - “I’m too old for this now, Mum,” I had protested, but she liked to baby me a little even at the ripe old age of ten. Suddenly, through the open window, came a strange, acrid burning smell.
“Can you smell that? What’s that?” I asked, sniffing at the summer air.
“I can. Maybe it’s Dad?” she replied, then shouted out of the bedroom door. “Andrew? Are you burning something?”
“Nope, I’m in the garage,” came the distant reply.
Immediately my mum jumped up, fearing that something in the house had caught fire. I followed as she went from room to room, making sure that nothing had sparked up, no fuses blown, no candles placed too close to curtains, but after checking each and every room of the house, she went to the garage to find my dad.
“You smell that, right?” she said, as my dad held the garage door open just a crack.
“Yeah, it’s- it’s not coming from in here. Keep the door closed, I don’t want it getting into the house,” he replied. He left the garage through the door into the kitchen; he and my mum grabbed the keys to the front door, unlocked it and stepped onto the driveway, and looked to the north.
“Stay inside, Robyn,” said my dad, but I didn’t listen and followed them outside quietly.
Joined by other neighbours who too had smelled the acrid fumes and had ventured outside to investigate, we saw a plume of smoke billowing upwards into the sky, blowing from the north to the east and obscuring the half moon. The source of the smoke, whatever it was, was illuminated by an eerie, warm glow, flickering slightly in the night.
“It’s Briarley’s,” said Brian, who lived in the small house on the corner. “The carpet factory? It’s caught fire.”
“You don’t think it could be arson, could it?” said his wife, Charlotte, a kind woman who used to give us chocolate every day when we walked back from school.
“Mum,” I began, “what’s arse-on?”
“Arson is when someone sets fire to a building deliberately to burn it down,” she explained. “It’s illegal and you will get put in prison if you do it.”
“Why would someone want to burn down the carpet factory?”
“Probably an insurance job, if you ask me,” said Brian.
Whatever insurance was, it must be dangerous work if you can set buildings on fire doing it. I resolved to myself that I would never get an insurance job when I grew up.
One of the other neighbourhood children had left his house to see what all the ruckus was about now. His name was Leon, a brash and boisterous boy who was in my year at primary school. He was my main playmate outwith school, and he approached me to ask what was going on.
“Insurance work,” I replied, confidently. “They’re burning down the carpet factory to insure it, whatever that means.”
“Robyn,” said my dad, sternly. “I don’t want you leaving the close until the fire’s completely out, and the firemen have come round and told everyone it’s safe again. It’s really dangerous.”
I knew first-hand the dangers of fire. As a very young child, I burned three fingers on my right hand on a hot fireplace, and still kept the scars. Even as an adult, twenty-five years later, I can still feel that the skin on my right hand is slightly different, tougher, maybe, than the skin on my left. At the time, however, the dangers of fire seemed less important. The fire is over there, I thought, and we’re over here. It’s not like I’m going to set on fire and die if I set one foot over the line that marked the cul-de-sac we lived on from the street it connected to.
“But you never let me leave the close!” I protested.
“Now, more than ever, you have to promise us, Robyn. Don’t leave the close.” said my mum.
“I promise,” I lied.
