No Smoke Without Fire

I never believed my father when he said Uncle Terry burned down his own house.

Who in their right mind would do such a thing? I’ve read about people setting fire to their homes to escape debt and defraud insurance companies, but my uncle wasn’t desperate for money. My father said he was never the same after Aunty Jean died. 

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My father wasn’t a practical sort of man and relied on Uncle Terry to fix and mend things for him. I used to go round and watch him work on his various D.I.Y. projects in his tool shed. Uncle Terry could turn his hand to most crafts and I learned a lot of useful skills on my Saturday afternoon visits, however after Aunty Jean passed away, he lost interest in his hobbies. He spent increasing amounts of time alone in his house and discouraged any interaction. I was too inexperienced to fully comprehend his grim stoicism, and after my weekly visits dwindled; I made friends my age and developed new pursuits.

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Uncle Terry wasn’t a hoarder by nature. However, his attempt to remove memories of their marriage had rendered the top floor of his house unusable. There were crates and parcels filling all three rooms. Item by item, he’d wrapped up his wife’s possessions in newspaper, packed them in cardboard boxes and stashed them in the attic. 

He was bereft and couldn’t bear to be reminded of their life together, however the truth is, he couldn’t be parted from anything.

My father suggested, if his brother wasn’t happy living under her shadow, then he should move elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Terry relocating without his precious collection of boxes. What difference would it make if he moved house and carried the archived boxes with him? He’d be looking for a similar size dwelling and therefore he’d be back to where he started, living with boxes of memories. What my father lacked in practical skills, he made up for in brutal pragmatism. He said Uncle Terry should get rid of the lot and move into a bungalow. 

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I know Arson happens less often nowadays; the insurance companies are much more wary of deliberate attempts to destroy property. If they suspect foul play, they won’t pay out and this has discouraged the wilful practice. The fact is, fire precautions and building regulations weren’t as strict thirty years ago. I recall Uncle Terry always had a cigarette between his lips as he generated piles of sawdust in his outside shed. It was my job to sweep up the debris. However, he never enforced the chore, and I wonder how close he came to setting his retreat alight. He often had a row of smouldering cigarette butts perched above his wicker basket of off-cuts. A slight breeze and gravity could conspire to create a residential inferno.

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There was always a vague hint of charred toast inside Aunty Jean’s kitchen. I’m not saying she was an awful cook, but any slight distraction caused her to abandon her culinary duties. My father joked she used the smoke detector as an oven timer and would only check the progress of a meal when the wretched thing was screaming for attention. That’s harsh. We all enjoyed delicious meals there occasionally. The problem was that she had more disasters than successes. An invitation for a Sunday roast was often like attending a funeral at a crematorium with a blocked chimney. Our final Christmas lunch together before Aunty Jean’s demise was an emergency nut roast accompanied by all the festive trimmings; cranberry sauce, sprouts, and pigs in blankets. She’d overfilled the turkey’s breasts with her walnut stuffing and the bird had exploded inside the oven. My father shook his head, remarking that the crap had well and truly hit the fan. The vegetarian option was a last resort, however, it proved a memorable alternative, if only for the wrong reasons.

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As a youngster, I remember warning my aunt and uncle about the dangers of smoking cigarettes. They nodded with interest as I gave them the benefit of my experience and continued chuffing on their Marlboros, despite my concern for their welfare. They were both committed nicotine addicts, nurtured in an era that thought smoking Chesterfields were a perfectly healthy habit. During one visit, I was so worried about the effects of tobacco that I opened a couple of boxes and removed the brown wrinkled strands from the paper tubes and refilled them with bits of tissue paper. Uncle Terry discovered my handiwork and, pretending not to notice, lit one of my sabotaged cigarettes. The whole thing caught ablaze, and the assembled crowd hooted with laughter as I skulked off with a face glowing like a boiled tomato.

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My Aunt and uncle worked well as a team and I remember witnessing them wallpapering and decorating their home. The funny thing is that although they cared about their home and endeavoured to maintain it, there were always unfinished projects. They attempted several ambitious schemes to update the house and always hit a snag, for example rising damp scuppered their plan to clad the dining room in wood panelling; that failed to reach a happy conclusion. The upstairs bathroom had plumbing issues; it rumbled and gurgled alarmingly and forever required attention. The daunting list of household issues was endless, and they just smiled and laughed about it, surrounded by clouds of tobacco smoke.

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The closest my uncle got to a disaster was during the autumn after they admitted Aunty Jean to the hospice. He spent all his free time visiting her during her last week in palliative care. She was on heavy painkillers for the last fortnight, and it was obvious he was suffering in silence. My father said they were inseparable, and he knew his brother was hurting. Uncle Terry, for all his strengths, wasn’t handy in the kitchen and started to look gaunt and unkempt in his wife’s absence. My mother noticed the change and insisted on preparing food for her brother-in-law. It was a grey November day and an overcast afternoon when the tool shed roof caught on fire. Uncle Terry had been gathering leaves and, contrary to my father’s advice, he’d lit the six feet high pile of dry seasonal debris. At first, it had trouble catching alight, so he’d poured on half a gallon of his lawnmower’s fuel. By the time we arrived, the red and blue flashing emergency service vehicles had done their best to combat the fire, but the tool shed didn’t survive. Its bitumen roof was the first thing to catch alight as the fire grew in force. Uncle Terry had failed to extinguish the blaze with his domestic sprinkler and called for help. His alarmed neighbours alerted the authorities, and they arrived to find poor Uncle Terry aghast, clutching his melted hosepipe and covered in blobs of burning roofing fabric. He was lucky not to be fined, considering the proximity of the fire to the neighbour’s house and the potential destruction he might have caused. My father said it was a shame he didn’t have a smoke detector outside and suggested he fit one outside and inside. 

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Grief takes many forms. I’m not saying that the garden fire influenced Uncle Terry or gave him any perverse ideas, but it’s a strange coincidence that the awful destruction of his house occurred within weeks of Aunty Jean’s demise.

   When we arrived the morning after the inferno, he was sitting on the front doorstep clutching the unopened present I’d sent him for Christmas. He smiled when we arrived and I glimpsed a tear on his eyelash. He knew I meant well. However, the batteries I’d sent for his smoke detector had arrived a day too late. It was all he could do to hug me. He’d not lost everything. I was still there for him.

The End