JACKIE Webb believes in miracles. She knows they exist because she should have been in the Top Storey Club on that May night.

She had been going there as an impressionable 18-year-old with a few girlfriends each Monday evening since it had opened a few months before. "I loved it there," she recalls. "It was very smoky, atmospheric, quite jazzy and we loved the kind of music they played."

But May 1 was Jackie's 19th birthday and she and a friend had decided to go for a meal at a town centre Indian restaurant.

And she escaped the carnage that took place only a few hundred yards away.

Rickety

She was Jackie Lomax then, working in Greedy's photographer's in St Georges Road, and living at home in Staton Avenue, Tonge Moor. "The Top Storey wasn't big -- it was basically just this room with tables, but we thought it was great," remembers the 58-year-old grandmother, whose home is now in Sandford Close, Harwood.

"We never missed a Monday. We'd go there around 9pm to 9.30pm, up the rickety wooden staircase, into the main club room.

"We knew the club manager, Bill Bohannon, and his wife, Sheila, just to nod to, and there were plenty of regulars. We'd usually leave around midnight."

"When we left the restaurant to go home, I could hear a bit of a commotion in the town centre, but thought nothing of it.

"It wasn't until the next day that I heard about the fire. I was just so shocked. I couldn't believe that all those people had died, and I could so easily have been there.

"In the end, none of my friends had gone either. So we were all saved."