by Gene Kemp
‘But what about that smell?’ Julia started, the minute Aunt Annie’s door was closed. Mum, following her up the basement stairs, gave her a sharp dig in the back.
‘It was obviously outside,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gone now anyhow. Listen, let’s just keep quiet about it. I think Loll’s getting over that fire thing so the less said at this stage the better.’
Dad was making his way upstairs to put Lawrence back in bed and Julia was following, with her mother. But at the part where the stairs widened out, on the first landing, she suddenly stopped dead.
‘Come on, Julia, for Heaven’s sake. I’m tired. What are you doing?’
‘I don’t like going past here at night, Mum. This is the creepy part.’
‘Darling, it’s not a bit “creepy”. You love Aunt Annie’s old rocking horse don’t you? And it’s just the place for it on this landing, much better than where it used to be, in that poky back room.’ But she’d noticed that Julia never sat on the old black horse now, or threaded ribbons through its mane like she used to.
‘I get a funny cold feeling when I go past this bit,’ she said in an embarrassed rush, grabbing at her mother’s hand. ‘You can say I’m silly, Mum, but I do. And I wish we could go back to Sweet Briars like you promised. I don’t want to stay here for a whole year, I just don’t!’ And she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.
Gradually, though, Julia stopped complaining about living at Aunt Annie’s. Nearly all the children in the square went to her school and they fell over themselves to be friendly when they knew she was the great-niece of old Annie Birdsall. She’d been on telly last year, on Look North. It was her eightieth birthday and they’d had her talking about her house in Baillie Square. Her grandfather had bought it when it was brand new and the Birdsall family had lived in it ever since.
Lawrence loved school. It was nearly all play for the infants and at twelve o’clock Mum took him home for dinner and a little sleep. On his very first Friday he got a book out of the story box called Our Friend the Fireman.
Mum frowned when she saw it. She really thought Loll was getting over his fascination with fires but that night she realized she was wrong. There was a sudden terrific smell of burning in the house as she stood in the kitchen, drying the bedtime mugs before going upstairs. All the windows were closed and there’d definitely been no sirens in the street. This time she ran down to Aunt Annie’s flat first. The old lady was nodding in her chair, making gentle snoring noises. No fumes down here though, no smoke, no smell, no Loll. Mrs Bostock tore up through the house, flinging all the doors open as she went. Her husband was already asleep in the large front bedroom. Julia was asleep, too. There was nothing burning in the back attic though she kicked aside all the empty boxes they’d stored in there, just to make sure, and Lawrence’s room was in perfect order for once. She’d given it a good clean-up while he’d been playing in the square that afternoon, with Julia and her new friends.
Even so, she tugged the wobbly old wardrobe away from the wall and looked behind it, pulled out drawers, and ripped back a bit of the carpet in case the floorboards were smouldering, the smell in the room was so overpowering. Nothing. But when she turned Lawrence’s covers back, to check that he was safe under his usual mound, she found the bed empty. It was just like the first time.
Instinct told her that he’d somehow slipped past and gone down to see Aunt Annie again. The big attraction was her sweet tin and all her old-fashioned picture books. Since the move Mr and Mrs Bostock hadn’t had much time for reading to Lawrence, but Great-aunt Annie had all the time in the world. She loved children. Julia got a bit irritated when she repeated all the old Baillie Square stories, and she didn’t much like being told to ‘say your prayers’ every night. Loll didn’t mind though. He said little prayers with Auntie Annie, after his story and his sweet.
When Mrs Bostock got down to the basement again she was out of breath. There were fifty-six stairs between Loll’s door and Aunt Annie’s and she’d run down every one of them. There he was, sitting on his aunt’s knee, with the little ginger cat on his knee, and they were all looking at nursery rhymes.
‘Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady’s chamber …’
‘That lady, Auntie, that lady,’ he was jabbering excitedly. ‘That one in the funny hat …’
When she saw Mrs Bostock Great-aunt Annie looked slightly guilty. ‘I’m sorry, chuck,’ she said, ‘but he just came down, all on his own, and I thought one little story wouldn’t hurt, to settle him like.’
‘It was a lady brought me,’ Lawrence said sleepily, yawning and sticking a thumb in his mouth.
‘It’s a funny hat isn’t it, Loll? Just like a pair of frilly knickers put on upside down.’ Great-aunt Annie giggled. ‘Everyone used to wear them caps in the old days, everyone in service.’
‘What’s that she’s got?’ Lawrence was as well practised as Julia in spinning out bedtime and he’d turned back to Goosey Goosey Gander.
‘It’s a candlestick, chuck. In the olden days, when there was no electricity …’
‘Goodnight, Aunt Annie,’ Mrs Bostock said firmly, shooing Loll up the stairs. She didn’t want him falling asleep thinking about candles and striking matches.
That night she put a spare mattress on Julia’s floor and he slept on it. The strong scorching, burning smell had evaporated as quickly as it had come but unless there was a fire in the town there was obviously some problem with the electrics in this old house, and that was dangerous. In the morning she’d ask Mrs Watkins over at the vicarage for the name of an electrician. The wiring ought to be inspected for faults.
When Loll was asleep she went downstairs one last time to check round. As she climbed back upstairs the great black horse loomed up at her out of the darkness, stopping her in her tracks. There was a kind of coldness on this landing, but it was probably an ill-fitting window, or a damp wall. Even so, she shivered slightly as she stood there, thinking how Julia had grabbed at her hand.
The night it happened Mum and Dad were out at a special dinner in the Town Hall. Aunt Annie was ‘babysitting’, not that she had anything to do. Julia always put herself to bed and she got Loll organized too. They weren’t babies.
At half past ten, just before she had her milky drink, Great-aunt Annie came all the way up to the top of the house to say goodnight to them both. Julia was amazed. Surely she couldn’t manage the steep attic stairs on those stumpy little legs of hers?
But she did. Julia heard ‘Goodnight, chuck,’ and Loll’s door being pulled shut. Then there was a kind of heavy thud. She was puzzled. Great-aunt Annie was quite fat but it wasn’t the repeated thudding of someone lumbering down bare wooden stairs, just one big thud, then silence.
She forgot all about it in the embarrassment of the goodnight kiss. The old lady waddled across the room and thrust a slightly prickly cheek up against Julia’s. ‘Night night, chuck. Have you said your prayers?’ She hadn’t, of course, but if she confessed Aunt Annie might kneel down and start praying there and then.
‘Goodnight, Auntie,’ she said sleepily and ducked smartly under the covers, just in case another kiss was on its way.
The church clock woke her, St Christopher’s on the other side of the square, striking one. She sat up in bed and looked through the window. In the broad cobbled lane that ran along the backs of the houses there were spaces for people’s cars but theirs was empty. Her parents must still be at the Town Hall.
She was trying to get back to sleep when she smelt the burning. She sat up again, pushed the window open and sniffed. It was a definite city smell, car fumes and factories and dogs, not fresh like the country. But there was no smell of fire. This smell was coming from inside the house, like the other times.
She ran into her parents’ bedroom and switched on the light. Nothing amiss in here, just Mum’s jeans hung neatly over a chair and Dad’s clothes in a heap on the floor. He
was messy like Loll. She and Mum were the two tidy ones.
Loll. Mum thought he was over his fire thing, but Julia wasn’t so sure and she began to climb the attic stairs. Every single Friday he brought the Fireman book home from school. They all knew it off by heart. He was stuck on two things, that book and Goosey Goosey Gander in Aunt Annie’s collection. His favourite picture was the girl in the knicker hat looking into dusty corners with her candlestick. ‘My lady!’ he shouted, whenever they got to that page.
When she reached the top of the stairs Julia stopped stone dead. Mum always left Loll’s door open at night but Aunt Annie had closed it and now it wouldn’t open again. She wrenched at the handle and pushed and kicked and yelled, but something heavy had fallen against the door from the inside. She hurled herself at it bodily, making it move a fraction of an inch, and through the crack smoke came curling, thick grey smoke that got thicker and darker by the second. ‘Loll!’ she screamed, then ‘Lawrence!’ And through the crack she heard his voice, tight and high with terror, ‘Julia!’
The nearest phone was in their kitchen. She almost fell down the attic steps then started on the main stairs. They were splintery and cold to her bare feet. As she reached the rocking horse landing she drew a deep breath. She’d never, ever, come as far down as this so late at night and, as she hurled herself past, the cold rushed out at her, just as if she’d opened a freezer cabinet. The flaring wooden nostrils of the great black wooden charger breathed winter, turning the inside air to ice.
As she picked up the kitchen phone she thought of that strange thud, just before Aunt Annie’s whiskery goodnight kiss. Now she knew what it was. The electricians were going to start rewiring next week and they’d been humping all the furniture about in the attics. Aunt Annie must have banged too hard when she shut the door. That wobbly old wardrobe must have fallen against it.
Julie heard herself telling the man on the other end of the phone that the fire was at 19 Baillie Square and would they please hurry. A child was trapped and she couldn’t get the door open, and her aunt was old and her mum and dad still at the Town Hall. Her cool calm voice didn’t sound a bit like her normal one. She felt separated from that cool-headed grown-up Julia by a thick wall of glass.
‘Julia!’ Loll’s shrill scream of terror rang again in her ears.
‘They’ll be with you in a minute, love,’ the man on the phone said calmly, but a minute might be too late. She scrabbled under the sink, found Dad’s big hammer and made her way back upstairs. She’d once seen someone smash a door in with a hammer on TV. If she could make a big enough hole in one of the panels she could climb through and pull Loll out. He was only little.
She’d just reached the rocking horse landing when she heard a voice in the hall. ‘Auntie Annie’s gone to sleep,’ it said blearily. ‘You read it to me, Julia, I want to see my lady.’ She spun round and almost fell back down the stairs. Lawrence was standing on the black and white tiles, his eyes still gummed up as if he’d been roused from a very deep sleep, the old nursery rhyme book thrust out hopefully towards her.
She’d not even reached him when there was a great hammering on the front door. ‘’Scuse me, love,’ three firemen shoved past and pelted up the stairs. Outside they could see three more, uncoiling a flat white hose, and a ladder was being unfolded in gleaming sections and propped against the house. Loll dropped his book and crept out on to the front doorstep, his eyes shining. ‘Now then, back inside, little feller, you’ll catch your death out here,’ and a policeman was sweeping him up in his arms and carrying him into the kitchen.
Quite suddenly, Mum and Dad were there too. Mum had her arms round Julia, telling her she was a brave, sensible girl who deserved a medal. Dad, who’d been down to check on Aunt Annie and found her peacefully asleep, was asking the fireman what was happening upstairs. Mum had forbidden him to go rushing about, because of his illness.
‘Panic over,’ someone said a few minutes later, coming downstairs. ‘Sorry about all the water, sir. It always makes the biggest mess.’ His hands and face were black and he’d left big splodgy footprints all over the bare boards. ‘The blaze is out anyhow. It was in the eaves cupboard, just a load of old newspapers. Must have been there for years, from the look of them.’
‘How did it happen, though?’ Mum said. She wanted to cuddle Loll but he seemed quite happy with the policeman.
‘Old wiring, from the look of it. It all needs ripping out, I’d say. Half the house fires we get are electrical. Good job there was nobody sleeping in that room. An old wardrobe had fallen against the door. It could have been a death trap.’
‘But someone does sleep in there. Loll, our little boy …’
‘He’d gone down to see Aunt Annie as usual,’ Julia said firmly. ‘He wasn’t there when the fire started.’
But he was. She’d heard him screaming on the other side of the door. How on earth had he escaped from that blazing attic? She’d not seen him slip past.
‘It was the lady,’ Lawrence said sleepily, finding Goosey Gander in his book, to show the policeman. ‘She took me to see Aunt Annie, she takes me lots of nights. But Auntie was asleep,’ he added reproachfully, ‘and I’ve not had my sweet.’
Dad was sitting on a kitchen stool with Julia on his knee. Now the fire was out and Loll was safe she’d started to shiver. ‘Your feet are cold,’ her father said, chafing them with his big comforting hands. ‘No wonder, walking up and down those stairs. I really must give the carpet people another ring, you’ve got some nasty splinters. And I’m getting another electrical firm in tomorrow, Mary. Harrisons should never have left the attic in that state. I feel like suing them.’
‘This little chap’s as warm as toast,’ the policeman said suddenly. ‘His feet aren’t cold, and I can’t see any splinters. Funny that, when he’s been running up and down the bare boards,’ and he handed him back to his mother. It was true, Loll’s feet felt like two tiny hot water bottles all pink and clean from his bath, not grimy and grey like Julia’s. It was just as if someone had scooped him up from his bed, before the fire took hold, and carried him gently down to safety, so gently he’d hardly woken up.
As the last of the firemen shut the front door something rolled into a corner. Julia, who was wide awake now and looking forward to milk and biscuits before she went back to bed, bent down and picked it up. ‘Where’s this come from?’ she said, taking the old bent candlestick and putting it on the kitchen table. Her mother shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. Perhaps Aunt Annie put it out for St Christopher’s jumble sale last week. I could polish that up. It’s brass.’
Before the new electricians did the rewiring the attics were cleared out completely. Lawrence slept with Julia and although he’d loved his tiny room under the roof he didn’t argue. It was all black now and it had a horrid burny smell still. The lady didn’t like it either. She never came to see him any more, or carried him down to Aunt Annie.
The fireman had dumped the old newspapers in the middle of the floor and hosed them down. Dad, anxious to rescue what he could, went through the remains very carefully. Old papers fascinated him, and these were all local.
One rainy Sunday afternoon he looked up from the kitchen table, where he’d been piecing them together, and handed something to Mum. ‘Read that,’ he said, and his voice was strangely excited. Mum fished in her handbag for her glasses but Julia was already staring at the old yellow newspaper. At the top it said in Gothic capitals ‘Darnley-in-Makerfield Examiner, 27th March, 1888,’ and underneath she read the headline.
Coroner Warns about the Dangers of Reading in Bed
Sir Austen Greenald, Coroner for North West Lancashire, warned yesterday of the dangers of lighted candles in confined spaces. He was presiding at the inquest on Jane Heslop, chambermaid of 19 Baillie Square, Darnley, who had been found dead at the house on 19th February. The court listened to his summing up in which he conjectured that the deceased, described by her employer, Mr Albert Birdsall, as ‘a most dutiful an
d honest girl, and one anxious to extend her education’ must have been reading late at night and, exhausted by her day’s labours, fallen asleep, letting her lighted candle drop to the ground. Bedding, drapery and matting were all consumed and it is thought that the deceased, overcome by smoke before she could reach door or window, died of suffocation.
‘19th February,’ Dad said quietly. ‘That was the day we went to the Town Hall.’
‘Oh yes,’ Aunt Annie said when they showed her the newspaper. ‘Poor little Janey Heslop. She was a right marvel she was, my mam told me all about her – up every morning at four, carrying hot water cans, blackleading all the grates, washing them tiles down. No wonder she fell asleep at her books, poor little mite, she were only fourteen. My dad gave her a proper funeral apparently, horses and all. She hadn’t got no family. They put her little coffin up on the first landing, so folk could come and pay their respects. There wasn’t room in the hall, it’s that narrow. Oh aye, my mam told me all about little Janey Heslop. They never let servants sleep in them attics after. Then my father had the gas put in.’
The Bostocks stayed on at Aunt Annie’s and Julia got to like living in Baillie Square. She got to like her new friends and her new school. She even got to like the house. They had a deep red carpet laid on the stairs and that awful cold feeling by the rocking horse never came again. Great-aunt Annie said it was because poor Janey was at peace now, she’d just had to ‘stay on for a bit’, till Loll was safe. They’d said a little prayer for Janey one night, after his story and his sweet, because she didn’t come to see him any more and he missed her.
Six months after the fire Julia got a medal and a special certificate from something called The Royal Humane Society, because she’d been so brave on the night it happened. Loll was a bit jealous: soldiers had medals and this one was very big and shiny.
Still, he’d got his candlestick and that was shiny too now. Mum put it on his bookshelf with all his very special things and when he got frightened in the dark he switched his light on and looked at it for a minute. It reminded him of the lady.