Bromley Cross family look to future after devastating fire

Ed Siddall from Bromley Cross was at work when he got the call from a neighbour to say there had been a fire at his house on August 3 last year.

Luckily his two-year-old son Eric was at nursery, but his partner Emma Schofield had to jump out of a window, after neighbours alerted her to the fire.

Ed said: “I rushed down to see it and my house was in flames.

“It was lucky Eric and Emma weren’t in.

“Someone from work gave me a lift and she said I didn’t say anything when I got out of the car.

• ALSO READ: Bromley Cross house fire leaves family with nothing

“I was just very shocked and remember thinking ‘what on earth are we going to do next’.”

The fire was caused after the dishwasher set on fire in the kitchen, and Ed said he was shocked to find out that it was more than 20 years old, after being gifted it.

Ed said: “There were a few people passing by at the time and they noticed that there was a fire.

“They started bashing the doors down to try and alert anyone inside, and that’s what alerted Emma to the fire.

“The whole of the house was absolutely destroyed except for the front room.

“The front room door was shut, and the room was perfect.

“But when you walked in the hall and the kitchen everything was gone.

“We boarded all the doors up and a quite a few friends helped.”

The couple were able to stay at Ed’s dads for a few months and spent some time at the Last Drop Village Hotel & Spa.

Ed said: “We found a rental accommodation where we stayed from the end of August until March this year.

“It took a while to buy everything and get set.

“It has also taken a while for what has happened to sink in.

Ed and Emma with their son Eric (Image: Public)

“Because everything was so rushed, we didn’t have time to think about what was going on.

“It has been a bit of a whirl wind.

“Now it has happened it seems like it has flown by.”

Ed says that when they were speaking to neighbours, a lot of them did not have smoke alarms or insurance, and he wants to emphasise the importance of having both.

He said: “You never know when it’s going to happen.

“It’s just amazing that we are back, and we are over the moon that we can carry on with the rest of our lives now.

“Before, we were just moving about, and we couldn’t buy anything because we didn’t want to settle and move again.”

Ed also says that they couldn’t have got through it without the generosity of the community.

He said: “We had lots of people helping us out.

“One of our neighbours set the GoFundMe up, which raised more than £4k in two weeks.

“We also had lots of different people bringing us toys and clothes.

“One lady was bringing us everything we needed to get set up in our rental house to make it feel a bit more homely.

“If it didn’t happen, we would have never seen how nice people can be.”

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