A normal Monday morning. I had taken my 14-year-old daughter, Lydia, to school and walked our three terriers along the river in the beautiful winter sunshine.
Back home, I kicked off my muddy boots, then retired to my office to work on my latest novel.
The mundane worries of the day jostled for attention as I logged on. What should we have for dinner? Did I have enough cash to pay the cleaner? Who would put the Ocado delivery away later? Then - every writer’s nightmare - the wretched screen spluttered .
Devastation: Novelist Daisy Goodwin surveys the remains of her daughter Lydia’s bedroom
Insurance assessors say the fire may have started in Lydia’s bedroom and was possibly caused by a dressing-table mirror beaming a shard of strong sunlight onto her curtains. Daisy and Lydia are pictured
A charred teddy bear (left) lies covered in soot after the blaze. Daisy (right) said she had been able to salvage some treasured possessions
Cursing Apple and all its works, I decamped to the local library, put my phone on silent and immersed myself in research for an hour.
What made me look at my phone? I’ve no idea, but suddenly there were 15 missed calls - mostly from my husband - and another was coming through, buzzing with urgency.
‘Miss Goodwin, this is Ocado. We cannot deliver your order because the road is blocked by fire engines.’ In the background I could hear sirens.
My breath snatching in my throat, I scrolled through the breaking news on my phone’s homepage. There was a picture of a house on fire. It looked like my house.
There were eight fire engines in the street. A friend texted me: ‘Huge fire in Edith Road. Hope it’s got nothing to do with you...’
But it had. Oh God, it had.
I rang my husband. ‘Did you take Lydia to school this morning? Thank God. She’s safe then,’ he spluttered. A pause and I could hear that he was struggling to speak.
Just half an hour after she left the house, the fire laid waste to her home, incinerated daughter Lydia’s room and the rooms upstairs, and left the rest of the house uninhabitable
‘The house is on fire. The top two floors are burning. I can see flames coming out of the roof. Don’t come home, it will break your heart.’
He wasn’t wrong. This is the house we have lived in for 12 years. We bought it as a dingy rental property and made it into a home we loved.
My kitchen is . . . was . . . the place where my real life happened - cooking, chatting, watching films, surrounded by dogs sprawled on sofas.
All our friends knew not to ring the front doorbell but to come to the basement door, where the fun was.
Upstairs was what used to be called a parlour floor, where I kept my collection of old children’s books and lustreware jugs.
Above that was my bedroom, a place of refuge.
When we moved in I asked my mother, the interior decorator Jocasta Innes, to help me do the room and she chose the apricot colour for the walls and the purple curtains.
I kept my favourite smiling picture of her on the shelf next to my side of the bed.
She died of cancer 18 months ago, but I always felt her presence in that room.
On the floor above were my daughters’ rooms. Lydia’s was practically an art installation - every surface covered in her pictures and photos.
In the middle of the room was the four-poster bed she had begged me for, and on the bed was the patchwork quilt I made for her.
Next door was 23-year-old Ottilie’s room. She had just moved back in, as she is doing a screenwriting course.
On the top floor was our spare bedroom and the room in which I used to write. It held all the stuff I couldn’t bear to throw away, like my 25-year-old wedding dress. I also kept all my old photos and albums up there.
I want to describe what I had because it’s all gone now.
The fire burnt out upper rooms in the house but the rest of the home was left uninhabitable. Water damage can be seen in the main living room
Saved: Marcus Wilford (left), the husband of author Daisy Goodwin (right), with the dogs that were rescued
The fire, which started in Lydia’s bedroom, was possibly caused, says the insurance assessor, by a dressing-table mirror beaming a shard of strong sunlight onto her curtains.
It sounds so implausible, doesn’t it? But just half an hour after I left the house, that fire laid waste to my home, incinerated Lydia’s room and the rooms upstairs, and left the rest of the house uninhabitable.
It took the fire brigade at least two hours to get the blaze under control, and that much water causes almost as much damage as the fire itself.
Of course, after my husband’s call, I tore home.
I took one look at the fire engines and squads of firemen and fled. All I wanted was to scoop up my girls, hug and squeeze them.
I took a taxi to my younger daughter’s school and waited outside. She came out smiling.
‘I’ve got some bad news,’ I said, and watched her face crumple. My older daughter was at college but later she came to our ‘crisis HQ’ hotel room with some Nurofen Plus.
‘You’ll need this, Mum,’ were her first words. And then we all fell on each other, hugging, kissing and holding on.
They were incredible: they had lost everything but their first thought was for me. Desperately they tried to jolly the mood, to make me smile.
I kept telling myself that it could have been so much worse. I called my heroic cleaner, who was alone in the house when the fire broke out.
She told me she’d heard the smoke alarm go off and found smoke pouring down the stairs. She tried to put the fire out with a jug of water, then grabbed our dogs and rang 999.
A few things did survive the fierce blaze including Daisy's favourite picture of her daughter Lydia as a little girl
Dasiy said the fire fighters had told her that reflected sunlight was a surprisingly common cause of fires
The blaze had spread - well - like a house on fire. It’s a phrase I have often used without realising what it really meant, but now I do.
Two hours earlier I’d been looking at my wardrobe and thinking, I should clear some of this out. Well, now I won’t have to. It’s all gone.
The next day I went back to the house. There was a huge crane outside. Scaffolders were on the steps.
Inside, my eyes began to smart from the smoke. My house that used to smell of bread and roses, with an undertone of terrier, now smelt like a wet bonfire. My feet crackled on plasterboard and debris.
A drop of water hit my nose from a broken ceiling. An antique chandelier, bought on our honeymoon, hung crookedly from a charred beam. The fire definitely started in Lydia’s room — everything in there was incinerated. Even her metal four-poster had melted. The quilt was a pile of ashes.
The fire ripped through the house causing extensive damage, including in the stairway
I love Lydia more than anything, but as I stood in that blackened shell - and before the insurance assessor explained about the mirror and the curtains - the bad part of me wanted to blame her for what happened.
Could she have overloaded the circuit with hair curlers, iPhone chargers and laptop cords? I made myself wait 24 hours before I asked her if she’d curled her hair that day.
She burst into tears. I wasn’t sure if they were tears of guilt or innocence, but then I found the curling tongs on the floor of my wrecked bathroom, which made me feel pretty bad.
According to the fire brigade, reflected sunlight is a surprisingly common cause of fires.
‘Don’t beat yourself up about it,’ the assessor said. ‘It was an accident. You were just unlucky.’
But I do blame myself. If I’d stayed at home that day, I might have smelt smoke before the fire took hold.
My husband wakes at 4am with similar thoughts running through his head.
I have always thought of myself as a lucky person but in the past 18 months I’ve lost my mother, the company I used to run and now my home.
Yet I still think of myself as fortunate: my family is safe. And a few things did survive: my favourite picture of Lydia as a little girl, found underneath a charred teddy bear, a copy of David Copperfield that my grandmother gave me and the smiling picture of my mother.
And although that wretched laptop has melted, I realised I had sent the latest draft of my novel to a friend in an email.
There are other silver linings. My friends and family have been extraordinarily generous. Even people I hardly know have been so thoughtful, from offering to lend me empty flats to finding the best cleaner for clothes that stink of smoke.
Then there is the kindness of strangers, from the man in the café who didn’t charge me for coffee because I was crying, to the manager of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington who saw the fire on the news and offered me a lovely, huge room so we could all be together.
London Fire Brigade damp down Daisy Goodwin's home following the fire yesterday afternoon
Lydia’s friends have raided their wardrobes and given her a pile of clothes. So many people, even the ones that know them, have offered to look after our dogs.
But it may take a year to get the house back to normal.
Forget those insurance ads where smiling people with headsets take the drama out of a crisis.
When I rang our insurers (NatWest, in case you were wondering) as soon as I arrived at the fire, they put me on hold for 20 minutes.
It may be months before our claim is processed and money is slipping through my fingers at an alarming rate. The credit card is maxed out.
Yet I have to remind myself that it could be so much worse. My darling husband and daughters are alive and well, the dogs are still wagging their tails. And so long as I have them, well, I may not have a house but I certainly have a home.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2918869/Author-devastated-2-5million-Kensington-townhouse-burns-down.html
