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A house fire tore through our kitchen and left half our roof gone on the Saturday of Easter Weekend. The men who came to rebuild it are the reason my husband is still with me. I know how that sounds. Not because they saved him from the fire. They arrived two days later. They saved him from something we never realised was happening. George had a few cuts and burns from trying to get out, but he was alive. He was talking. The fire was out. By the time those men first set foot on our property, everybody we knew was saying the same thing. Thank goodness. The worst is behind you. We were all wrong. The close call hadn't happened yet. They came on the Monday morning after the fire died down, without being asked. Four men I'd never met, standing on my driveway at 7 in the morning with their tools, looking at the blackened remains of what used to be our kitchen. Nobody sent for them. Nobody paid them. To this day, not one of them will take so much as petrol money. They stayed for a whole week. They stripped out the ruined kitchen. Repaired the walls. Rewired what the fire had damaged. And slowly, they started putting our house back together. And on that Thursday, one of them, a man older than my husband, sat down across from George and asked him a question nobody had thought to ask in three years. That question is the reason he's still with me today. The fire started just after nine. I was forty minutes away, at my daughter's, with a cup of tea going cold in my hand. George had stayed home with Bess, our old collie. My phone rang just after half past nine. It was Derek from next door. Weird I thought, as he was the last name I would expect to see on my phone. "Sheila, there's smoke coming from your kitchen." I rang George immediately. He answered on the second ring and I could hear crackling behind him. "I'm alright," he said. "There's been a fire in the kitchen. I must’ve left the stove on when warming my dinner. I'm getting Bess out now. She has taken herself under the k
