Halloween nightmare as family's house hit by fire

A PLYMOUTH mother has spoken of the moment she and her daughters escaped with just the nightclothes on their back after their house was devastated by fire on Halloween.

- OLIVIER VERGNAULT

Deanne Morgan, her daughters, Faith, five, and Darcy, three, and her partner, Mike Clemens, were all asleep in their maisonette on Durnford Street in the Stonehouse area of the city, when the smoke alarm went off in the middle of the night.

The 27-year-old and her partner grabbed the girls in a hurry and rushed out, running past the living room and kitchen, where a fire took hold.

All four of them managed to escape the burning home and tried to rouse neighbours and get them out too, but not all responded. Three fire engines from stations in the city rushed to the scene in the small hours of October 31 and brought the fire under control.

Deanne, a sales and marketing manager for a local building merchant, said the house fire could not have happened at a worse time. “I lost my dad three days before Christmas last year,” the shaken-up mum said. “He had an auto-immune disease and they were doing tests on him. I had a call at 2am that day to say they had called an ambulance for him after he stopped breathing. Dad [Stephen Morgan] was a well-known man in Plymouth. His funeral was so well attended, I’ve never seen anything like it. He was only 54.