The change to daylight saving is a good time to check smoke alarms.
We were asleep in a rented holiday apartment. At three in the morning a racket erupted, a maddening ringing.
Few people, I suspect, are at their cleverest when violently woken in the middle of the night. Both of us reached for our phones beside the bed. It took several efforts to silence them to realise they were already silent. The noise was coming from the ceiling.
I stood on the bed but couldn’t quite reach the alarm. I fetched a chair, stood that on the bed, tried to stand on it and fell.
And still the noise rang out. I heaved the bed aside, shoved a table in its place, climbed on to it and by standing on tiptoe just managed to reach the alarm.
With stretched fingertips and no little swearing, I unscrewed it from its housing and the noise stopped. The relief was intense, a great sweet flood of pleasure.
(Note to those considering a career in torture: forget the thumbscrews, the cigarette butts, the fancy fingernail work. Noise is ample. Older readers may recall the CIA driving Panama’s General Noriega out of some neutral embassy by playing heavy metal at him. He emerged within hours, hands up, weeping.)
We rearranged the furniture and got back into bed, though with nerves too jangled to go straight back to sleep.
And it was only then that we wondered whether perhaps it had been a fire alarm and we ought to evacuate. But several minutes had passed and we could smell no smoke.
So we assumed the world was crying wolf, as it has done all my life, and we were right. Thus we proved everyone’s almost-instinct almost true – that it will never happen to me.
Now, with the clocks going forward, the authorities are urging us to check our smoke alarms.
None of my previous houses had them, but this one came with half a dozen.
A couple have gone off over the years without warning and have been taken down and not replaced. One was super sensitive to toast and had to go. The rest I haven’t checked in years.
I have known only one person who died in a house fire, and he was a mad, sad character, who, I am certain, set the fire himself.
So the odds against it happening to any of us are pretty good. But why don’t I bother to make the odds better still, as the authorities suggest?
Is it some feeble resistance to excessive caution, a sense that a fearful life is no life?
Because for all our care, something will get us eventually. No quantity of washing between the toes and looking twice while eating dietary fibre and wearing a cycle helmet will shelter us from everything. Perhaps. I don’t know. Lazy, smug and dumb may be the truth of it.
All the schools I taught at staged fire drills. Kids loved them for the chaos. Teachers resented them for the interruption. Deputy principals adored them for the strutting sense of power.
But they were failures. The attendance registers were always inaccurate, and hypothetical kids were incinerated. The one purpose the drills served was to gratify a legal requirement. In the event of an actual fire, those nearby would have run away. The rest, it wouldn’t have mattered.
In the 1980s I went to teach at a boarding school in Canada. As a resident tutor, I was given a room on the top floor of the boarding house where I was supposedly overseeing a mixed bag of 16-year-olds. These included three charming Mexicans who worked hard at maintaining their national reputation for not working hard.
The place was run by a former naval officer who loved nothing more than a fire drill. He’d sound the alarm at three bells – 5am to the rest of us.
The first time it happened, it took me a while to register. But in due course I rose, flung a towel around my waist and stumbled down the stairs.
“Ah, there you are, Mr Bennett.” I looked to see the whole boarding house gathered at the foot of the stairs and looking up at me. “Your floor all cleared, Mr Bennett, doors and windows shut?”
I nodded. The housemaster checked his watch. “Right, you hairy dogs, one minute 48. We can and will do better. Dismissed.”
I started back towards my room only to meet three groggy Mexicans on their way down. I put a finger to my lips and shooed them back upstairs.