2006 30 January, Clareshare, The real Fire!

The real Fire!!!!!!!!
31 January 2006

We wrote our own account in two editions of Clareshare (given below) to entertain those who had read the BBC’s highly artistic account of our fire that can be found on:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/4661860.stm

1. The Mere Truth

This is just to reassure those of you who have read of our exciting [if hyped] adventures on BBC Online or elsewhere!
We are all alive and well!
Here is what really happened.....

At 11 pm everyone arose for Matins and praised the Lord, heading back to bed sometime after 12.15, having adored the Most High and interceded for the needs of the world - as usual.

At 4.30 am the light-sleeping Sr J awoke [I am economising with names, having amiably fended off several representatives of the press]. Enlightened by Divine Inspiration and quite possibly assisted by her Guardian Angel, she detected a very faint whiff of smoke ascending the dormitory stairs.
She went down to the main cloister which was filled with wreathes of smoke. She could hear a banging and cracking noise and called out, wondering if some other member of the community was already on the scene and dealing with it.

There was no answer!

She followed the sound and perceived flames half a metre high at the foot of the stairs to a craft workroom called Assisi. The banisters on the passage above were also burning generously. Sr J made her way rapidly across the house and awoke Sr D [our Vicaress] and Sr Y. They returned to the scene and Sr D sent Sr J to ring for the fire brigade and wake Dear Mother, she herself grabbed the main keys and went to open the Front and Enclosure gates to admit the fire engine.

Meanwhile Sr Y, acting on instructions received while still asleep, had arrived wearing sandals. She dashed into the Infirmary and began filling buckets with water, and set to dousing the flames, working up the stairwell. Sr J rejoined her and ferried buckets. The fire gave in and died!

The Fire Brigade - beautiful people and a great credit to their service - then arrived in big hats. They were gently piqued that we had put the fire out and reproved us tenderly for doing so.

Sr Y had by this time departed with the Infirmarian, Sr A, to have a reviving cup of black coffee and breathe some air. When the good gentlemen discovered this they summoned her back to the scene of her heroic labours and gave her oxygen. Then they summoned an ambulance, which fussed over her in a very kindly manner! She was fine, even before they started.

The police now invited themselves along to grace the occasion, and established that it was not arson [the arsonist would have needed to combine the skills of an Houdini with a very eclectic taste in scenes for pyromania!!] In the interim the good firemen hacked out the sections of the stairs and the burnt areas above for analysis. They do not know what started it, nor we, but the BBC, unassisted by fact, decided it was a candle. Everyone knows that Nuns, in all the best movies, spend their lives wandering about with candles!

Apart from the five sisters mentioned above, the rest of this holy family continued to sleep the sleep of the just in the cells of the main dormitories, at the other end of the house. It is very hard to wake a Poor Clare at the best of times [like when the bell goes!] So we were not 'driven from our convent' to quote the fine literary phrase of the BBC, and as we all sleep in night habits and night veils even the visible crew were elegantly dressed throughout. Except possibly Sr J, who had on, over her night habit, a jumble sale jacket advertising the National Geographic, quite a decent piece of catholic literature....

We spent the morning in garden overalls clearing the wreckage in Assisi and trying to wash smoke-blackened walls with varying success. At lunch we regaled ourselves with an audio tape of Anthony Buckeridge's ‘Jennings and the Fire’......

Now, and not so lightly!
Thank you for your union in prayer.
This was pure Gilbert and Sullivan with a dash of Lenny Henry. But it could have been otherwise!

The landing was burning and the Assisi doorway was already on fire. The fire started on the top of a trolley on the landing, which contained glass for tiffany style lanterns and varnishes. Eighteen inches away were fifty rolls of scrap wall paper and the rolls of wrapping plastic for shop articles. Assisi, beyond, was full of stacks of paper, other dry goods, paraffin and chemical solvents etc. In ten more minutes, perhaps less, it would have been an inferno. Nobody sleeps at that end of the house. There was nobody in the infirmary below. The Lord looked after us in a big way. We do not know the cause - and we may never do so. But we can thank God for his protection!

FOOTNOTE Dear Nick, Greg, Paul, Ver and any other professional journalists amongst our beloved Claresharers, this is not a press handout, it is a strictly private communication for the Clare family only. Please join us in giving thanks; we are just off to sing the Te Deum before the Lord at Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. The Feast of St Hyacinth. 30th January 2006
Our fire got going and got settled in the dawn of the feast of St Hyacinth
St Hyacinth was a Franciscan who lived indolently in her tertiary monastery for a long time before it dawned on her, somewhere around 1620, that religious life required a bit of get up and go, after which she did penance full time. Well, whatever else, we have not had St Hyacinth’s problems.
After the early morning fire [described in our previous issue!] we spent the day cleaning, with interesting results, one of which was that the sisters were black from top to toe.
At nine in the evening, Sr Damian (then our Vicaress), who had got up at dawn with the fire brigade, went to the laundry to deposit the soot blackened overalls. Under her bemused and slightly incredulous eyes eyes, flames shot gracefully up the side of the main boiler. Her reflexes may not have been as fast as they were at 4.30. but they were adequate. She got Sr Beatrix [once again] and Sr Beatrix turned the boiler off! God obviously had a plan, because neither Sr Damian nor anyone else would be in the presence of the boiler at that hour. And the boiler is under the main dormitory.

31st January
We had no difficulty in keeping warm in this brisk Welsh spring [a pessimist might say it is winter!]. On the previous day we had worked from the left side of the fire and cleaned the workrooms. Now we set ourselves to the right side: the garret [attic, penthouse, roof space]. The peculiarities of the fire now began to come home.
As we said: the rolls of wallpaper, eighteen inches from the main fire, were untouched. The polyurathane window above was not heat damaged. Sisters were not slow to point out that a quite undamaged icon of Our Lady of Vladimir stood in the window alcove. I proffer no view on this; but Sr Amata, an ex-alumni of Goldsmith’s College, told us at recreation, of a fire in the library there, which stopped abruptly at the section headed Religion....
Leaving the paper and the icon be, the smoke and the heat had spread out either side, into Assisi and the garret. The heat in the garret had been so intense, even twenty feet from the fire, that the plastic insulation wadding over the pipes, had melted. The contents of the garret: Christmas decorations, drapes, etc., were a complete write-off. The main Choir crib in the cupboard under the stairs which had been burning, was however, untouched!
One has to remember that the intrepid Sr Yolanda stood on the stairs, unharmed, flinging buckets of water at this fire which was melting plastic twenty feet away. And the water descended through the infirmary passage ceiling to the floor below, without any of it getting through the stair cupboard to the Crib underneath! If you like nice, domestic miracles, please enjoy this one!
Mother stopped us to have recreation in the infirmary. [The infirmary, choir and guest quarters, are parts of the house heated by the boiler that had not gone up in flames!] This was our first get-together to compare notes.
As we said in our previous Clareshare: The main body of the community were left to sleep in peace during the fire. And it became immediately obvious that if we had something really big, we would have a real problem, because everybody would be trying to rescue everyone else. Most people wanted to rescue Sr Ruth. At least she would have been findable. She would have undoubtedly rushed to rescue the databases for our annals and the annals of Notting Hill. Sr Elizabeth and Sr Amata had in point of fact, woken earlier than everyone else. Having checked that Sr Ruth was still sleeping, Sr Amata had come to the happily mistaken conclusion that the smoke was emerging from Sr Juliana’s cell - the door was open and the light was on - due to the speed with which she had descended upon detecting the smoke. Finding Sr Juliana in her National Geographic jacket, entire and on her feet, she hugged her, exclaiming movingly, “Thank God you are OK”
Sr Elizabeth, who [with Sr Damian] is the vigilatrix [the person who goes round the monastery at the end of the day and checks that everything is locked up and safe for the night] immediately wanted to blame herself for not going round twice! We were able to reassure her. We all know, if anything had been burning, she would have detected it. One of her key phrases is: “I can smell something burning!”
The last person to pass Assisi stairs was Sr Beatrix, before Matins, at 11 p.m. Like Sr Elizabeth, she is very conscientious, and would have undoubtedly smelt burning, if anything had been. Sr Beatrix had also been part of the 4.30. Brigade, calmly producing plans of the electrics, water mains, etc., for the Emergency Services.
We still don’t know the cause of the fire. It would not be an issue [and we all know it] if any of us had accidentally started it. That sort of thing could happen to anyone. As a matter of fact, some ten or so years ago it happened to an angel and a saint. Sr Judith of holy memory, being an unpractical angel [she was a librarian by profession!] gathered up the hot ashes from the infirmary incinerator and deposited them in a cardboard wastepaper basket, also in a workroom full of paper, and under a shelf on which stood paraffin, petrol based solvents, resin and ethyl methyl ketone!!! Fortunately we put it out before they blew up! The only that happened to her was that, on the feast of St Nicholas, the Saint sang a song in her honour!

The bottom line - back to the present
In the tidy up, Sr Ruth and Sr Amata were piling up boxes on the top of two makeshift shelves in St Maxims. The arrangement is somewhat unstable. Sr Ruth observed, cautiously, “We hadn’t better put too much weight on the top; the whole lot might come down if we had an earthquake....!”

Keep your little sisters in your prayers. If, amongst other things, the house catches fire, twice in twenty four hours, and we are, almost miraculously, saved from incineration, we naturally feel that God is trying to say something to us!
We have prepared ourselves by renewing our covenant as a community and our prayer is: “Speak Lord, your handmaids are listening... paint the door sunshine yellow!”
We also have a prayer, and we have been at it since November, based on Zechariah 2.5: “I will be a wall of fire round about,” says the Lord, “and I will be a glory within her.” One of our composers even made a song: “Burn brightly, ring of fire....” We did not expect to be saved, in the words of the poet, “From fire by fire.” But we await the Lord’s next move with interest. Over to you, Eternal Word.