Precious vase survives fire
IT was a little damaged, a little cracked, but in Malcolm’s Taylor’s eyes, it was worth its weight in gold.
A vase the Middlemarch man gave to his late wife as a first anniversary present was one of the few things to survive the fire that destroyed his Mt Stoker home on Tuesday.
As he sifted through the ashes yesterday, he said he felt ‘‘numb’’.
‘‘I’m just trying to sort out where to go from here.’’
He was still at a loss as to how the fire started.
He had been working in a shed with a blowtorch, on a rifle magazine, which was in a vice.
He turned off the blowtorch, headed inside for five minutes, and then went back out to see fire on the floor of the shed.
‘‘I put that out with the fire extinguisher, looked up and there was a fire in the ceiling.’’
Within about 15 minutes, the fire had spread to his house and the entire building was engulfed within about another 10 minutes, he said.
‘‘All the windows were exploding; it was a pretty good blaze.’’
He grabbed three drawers from the house, along with a couple of wedding photos.
‘‘It was lucky that I had some time to get a few bits and pieces out.’’
Yesterday he thought there was nothing else left to salvage in the ruins of the house, until he found the vase.
‘‘It’s the vase I brought my wife for our very first wedding anniversary, 31 years ago.’’
He was staying with a neighbour while he worked out a more permanent solution.
The Middlemarch Rural Women NZ branch had also raised some money to help him out, he said.
‘‘The community’s been good.’’
Crews from Middlemarch and Outram attended the fire, along with tankers from Wakari and Naseby, which were called because of a lack of access to water at the property.