Fire Alert

The last few days have been somewhat hectic. I am trying to cope with high summer temperatures, an insane amount of work and general business, and suddenly a forest fire literally on my doorstep.

There is something devastating about fire. I had an early shock when I was about seven years old when I decided to start a fire in the garden, and we hid it out of the wind behind a hayrick. You can no doubt guess the rest. I couldn’t understand how things got that way.

Much later I was in Sheffield. It’s a town I quite like, and I was staying in the Hillsborough district. That night on tv I was called in to watch as a fire destroyed the football stadium. It took less than ten seconds for a couple of flames to turn into a vicious inferno.

Where I live in the Algarve are rather a lot of gum trees, and they burn furiously. We also have acres of bamboo.

After a lifetime coping with fires of one sort of another the brain reacts rather fast to certain signals. In this part of the world you get warnings through three basic sets of nerves.

I looked out the window. There was just a faint crack of sound, but wait a minute, is that a very faint drift of smoke? I shot onto the patio. I could immediately smell smoke, and there was a definite sound of cracks like gunshots to the west. That sound is very bad news. It means the bamboos along the river are on fire and the noise is the expanding hot air bursting the bamboo tubes.

This is the fourth or fifth time I have been attacked by flames in this part of the world. Once a fire started up in the Monchique hills, and was blown, over the course of a week or two, fifty miles towards Spain. Then the wind changed direction, and as if we hadn’t had enough, the fire came all the way back again.

We had about a month of smoke collecting in the air. I took a photograph from the edge of my swimming pool back up towards the house and the hill beyond with what looks like dark thunderclouds in the sky. Not so, that black is smoke.

I dont propose to walk you through all my fire fighting experiences, which sadly are more than one would normally like, but on monday, which was an exceptionally hot day, there was that telltale crack, a telltale whisper of smoke in the nostrils, and it was clear that we were in line for another attack from the elements.

It looked as though the wind was gradually edging the flames onto the other side of the riverbed (dry now as it is a ribeira and not a rio. Ribeiras are seasonal streams.

Unfortunately a hill in the way shifted the force of the wind more to the west which meant the wretched fire was heading straight at me.

My neighbours came up to look, and the flames were leaping at a rate of knots in our direction, but with no bombeiros (firefighters, despite the fact that the word means pumpers) in sight.

Sadly, the edge of my garden is a riot of bamboo. It is now a riot of charred embers.

I managed to get the washing in, but forgot to cover the swimming pool. Those of you who know about these things will know that bits of charred bark and leaves fly off all over the place when fires are on the rampage, and generally land where most inconvenient.

Perhaps I shouldn’t mention this but I was at a party once hosted by my next door neighbours when I lived right on the western edge of London. They had the usual bonfire, and all the bits that generally go with bonfires. Bob made an unfortunate suggestion that we might as well burn a whole lot of paperwork that he had collected.

Let me duly explain that what comes next is definitely not a good idea, but here goes.

Instead of gently adding the paper to the fire we naturally threw it on in small doses. (We were trying to be careful. Honestly!)

The trouble is, we had all probably had too much to drink, and the way the paper reacted to the upthrust of heat from the bonfire meant that most of each bunch of pages split up en route and were forced upwards by the blast of heat. It was quite hypnotic watching the papers fly over the centre of the fire and suddenly rush at a manic pace up into the sky.

Since I lived next door, you will presumably be pleased to hear that I had to spend quite some time the next day clearing up the papers which had come down all over my garden. God knows how far and wide the rest went. And under such circumstances the paper doesn’t get burnt, so…. I’ll let you work out that one.

But back to my garden in Portugal. It is now covered in something vaguely like soot, plus charred bark, leaves, and god knows what else. And cleaning out the swimming pool has been a nightmare.

No human casualties, but look at all that work!