A burning question

We were woken in the middle of the night by our daughter, saying: "There's a house on fire up the road!" We immediately demanded to know where, whose house, etc. and she couldn't remember, just said, "Why are you shouting at me?" Anyway, everyone leapt out of bed and went to the bathroom window to see the source of the drama and confusion. It was a friend's house - they live in another one just behind it - and so the first feeling was one of relief, knowing that they weren't in it. The second feeling was one of dismay - there were no flashing red lights to indicate that a fire engine was on the scene yet.

There is something surreal about the sound of a house burning - roof sheeting exploding and the acrid smell of electrical wiring burning, the crackling sounds of different textured furniture, ceilings and rafters as the flames ignite and consume them - sinister in the extreme. It's not like any other fire you hear. The barbecue fire is tame and friendly, promising good food later on; a bush fire is swift and moves on as fast as the wind will take it, leaving silence in its wake. But a burning house remains where it is, the fire intensifying as it consumes everything its greedy fingers can reach, sucking windows in to feed its need for oxygen and billowing the sounds of its feeding frenzy out into the air with plumes of orange smoke.

It's not a sound you relish - it's the sound of the destruction of the things that someone has collected and cherished over a lifetime, of a place where children have been raised and taken their first steps, milestones celebrated and life has been lived. In just a few hours, nothing is left of that place or its memories.

At last the fire engine arrived, followed by two more a little later, and we went back to bed, secure in the knowledge that someone else was going to take care of things for us. How little we appreciate our emergency services. It was later established that they had been sent to an address in Fish Hoek and not Kommetjie, which I suppose can be ascribed to predictive text and human error in not reading to the end of the address. At least we are not maligning the poor firemen for inefficiency.

Nobody was hurt in this incident, for which everyone is thankful. But it leaves lots of questions to be answered, not least of which is: What would you consider to be the most important thing to save in such a situation?