Where can I wash my hands

Every Tuesday, Aunty Phyllis came for the day and got me ‘back on track’ with the washing, ironing, cleaning and shopping. After the evening meal, Henry and I would go out to the little church at Coopers Plains for the weekly Bible Study and Prayer meeting leaving our ‘littlelies’ to the loving care of Aunty Phyllis ‘with her towels’. One Tuesday night, Sybil Baskerville burst into the church saying, “There’s a big fire in the joinery behind your home at Wooloowin; Howard and Ron have gone over to help!” We had driven out in the Holden which Dad had just given us and I had not had opportunity to get familiar with the new gears on the steering column and other new-fangled items. Henry immediately said that he would stay at the meeting and pray and that left me to drive by myself an unknown ‘new’ car across the City and back to Wooloowin hardly knowing what awaited me there. The fire was enormous. The joinery behind our home was totally alight with flames everywhere reaching, it seemed, right up to the sky. And a huge crowd of spectators had gathered. I parked the Holden where I could but it was almost impossible to get through the dense crowd. A policeman came up after seeing my increasingly desperate jostlings and told me not to try to get anywhere closer. “But, that’s my home”, I said, “And my children are in that house!” With that, he manoeuvred me through the crowd and I saw my home with, it seemed, two huge and gigantic flaming hands cupped around and over the back of it. Somehow I found little Peter and Thomas each being lovingly cared for by complete strangers; each with his Teddy- bear under one arm and a large cardboard text which had hung over their respective beds firmly grasped under the other. Peter’s text ran “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” and Tommy’s said, “Kept by the Power of God.” Later, when the crisis had passed and the firemen were damping down the smouldering embers and the crowd had dispersed, I found Howard and Ron and Aunty Phyllis together with Margaret and Helen who were each clutching one of my handbags thinking that they contained my valuables. We were let back into the house. The back wall was scorched and all the paint blistered and the back windows were cracked. David and Aunty Phyllis, at great risk, had entered the bird cage at the beginning of the fire with a sheet and had rescued the birds, carrying them up to the bathroom where, in a great state of shock the budgies, released from the sheet, flew up to the rail on top of the curtain that enclosed the bath and began to ‘poop’ everywhere. Next day an Insurance Assessor, complete in a three – piece suit, with felt hat and a furled umbrella came to assess the damage. When he had finished, he asked for the bathroom. I had forgotten that the birds and their droppings and the filthy sheet were still there. All that I heard as he entered the bathroom were his querulous words, “Where can I wash my hands?”