The theme for our U3A creative writing class is Higih Spirits

It was a cold winter night, not long after we had moved to the house we now live in. My husband Philip was off at a conference - lasting several days. The children and I decided that to surprise him, we would paint the dreadful walls in the living room with just plain white paint - to cover up the striped wall paper that we all hated.

I got out the ladders and chairs, bought the paint and brushes, and we all had a go at it - Stephanie was about 14, Jonathan 13, and Andrea 9. It took us many hours, and for much of the time I very much thought we were making the situation worse rather than better. But finally, Friday night came and we sat back and enjoyed the clean plain walls with much delight.

We decided to have a celebration, so we put up the Christmas decorations and got out all the candles in the house - perhaps 10 of them, and lit them all. The dreary much dreaded living room took on a warm glow and we really were very proud of our joint efforts.

I then decided I would have a much needed long soak in the bathtub, and left the children to get on with whatever they fancied doing.

When I have a bath, I like to take my time over it - and I run the water in the tub as high as it will go without overflowing and as hot as I can stand it.  I had just got into the tub and was started to unwind, when I heard a knock on the front door. “The children will go and see who it is,” I thought, not worried, as it was only just after seven in the evening.

I waited awhile, but then the knock came again, much more insistent this time.

“Those darn children probably can’t hear it,” I thought, and with great unwillingness, hoisted myself out of the bath, put on my dressing gown and shoes, and went to the front door. There was nobody there. I could hear the children laughing in the kitchen, so knew there was no problem with them.

I was just about to go back up to my bath when I decided to have a quick check in the living room. As I opened the door, I was met with a sight that was very frightening. The small table near the couch was aflame - and I mean really on fire. The highly polished table had marquetry designs on it and was the one that had been given to my father when he left his work at the State Penitentiary in Bismarck before I was born. We had asked my brother-in-law to  disassemble it and send it to us after my father died, being one of the very few pieces of furniture from my original home that I would have with me in my new home. The entire top with its geometric pattern was covered with flames going perhaps a foot in the air. Also on the table was what had been a fat candle - which had been taken off its candle holder for some reason and placed on the table.

When I lived in New York part of our training as student dietitians was to give lectures to the catering staff. I remembered giving a lecture to the cooks on how to put out a small fire - and although I had never tried it, the book said that a bunch of newspapers would do the trick if the fire was fairly small. I picked up the week’s collection of newspapers and placed them on top of the table, and just like magic it all went out.

Then I shouted for the children to come back into the room and tell me what had happened. They had been making cookies in the kitchen - ones that needed the use of a rolling pin, but Jonathan did admit that he had taken the candle out of its holder and put it on the table, and had forgotten to put it back.

I shook him, and shouted at him, until we both had tears rolling down our faces. “Didn’t you think that the table might catch fire?”

“No,” he said.

“But you left the room with the candles still burning. You should have known better.”

But with tears in his eyes for what he saw was my unjust criticism he said, “You started a fire too. Don’t you remember?”

Years before, when he had been unhappy at primary school, I had brought him the quarter mile uphill home each lunch time, and fixed him his favourite fish and chips. One day I put the oil on to heat, and then took a heavy bedspread out to put on the clothes line at the back. It kept falling off, and I had completely lost track of how much time I had taken when I finally got it pegged up. When I reentered the kitchen, the chip pan was aflame and the walls of the kitchen were black with smoke.  I managed to put the fire out, and without too much trouble we scrubbed the walls and made the place look and smell almost like normal.

So I hugged Jonathan and said I was sorry. I said I guessed that the two of us were both pretty much alike - and didn’t always think things out thoroughly enough. And as nothing had been permanently damaged, it didn’t really matter.

We repainted the bits of wall that had soot marks on them, and hid the remains of the burnt table in the attic, and never told my husband what had happened.  I was very surprised when my Christmas present that year was a new wooden table.

So what, you say, does any of this have to do with spirits?

Well, I thought long and hard about what had happened, and the only thing that I could come up with was that when I heard the pounding on the door (which was really the children making heavy work of the rolling pin) I interpreted the noise as someone knocking - and I was sufficiently worried by the knocking to get out of the bath and go downstairs. My thought is that it was a spirit (guardian angel - or whatever) who guided my thought process and forced me to discover the fire before it passed into the couch, curtains and the rest of the room, as it would no doubt have done by the time I had finished my bath. So I feel we owe our lives to a High Spirit who was watching over us much more carefully than I was watching over my children.