Last updated 12:38, Friday, 02 May 2008

MANY years ago, on the advice of a fireman friend, Hextol Towers became one of the first properties in the North Tyne to be fitted with smoke alarms.

We had one in the kitchen, and another at the top of the stairs and felt ridiculously safe, although it has to be said the fact they were provided free had something to do with their installation.

True, the one in the kitchen blared incessantly every time Mrs Hextol burnt the toast or cooked Yorkshire puddings, and I had to go into gaucho mode as I whirled a pot towel round my head bolas style to disperse the fumes.

The alarms were so shrill and so sensitive I had visions of corpses rising from the village cemetery to come lurching through the village to knock on the front door, demanding that we keep the noise down.

Then in the early hours of a Friday, both alarms went off for real...

Their banshee wail roused me from a most satisfactory dream about winning the football pools, and I did three hysterical laps of the bedroom trying to locate glasses, underpants and telephone to dial 999 when I realised I was the only one stirring.

Mrs Hextol, who normally wakes up if a sparrow tiptoes over the roof, was out to the wide, only a frown puckering her forehead, so I dashed into the boys’ rooms, to find them all awake, but disinclined to leave their pits.

Shaking my head in disbelief, I reached for the phone to call the fire bobbies – and then realised their services would not be required.

There was no smoke and no flames – only the fumes from the paint on the night storage heaters we had had installed earlier that day, activating the alarms as they heated up for the first time.

As it happened, it probably would have been cheaper to have burned a pile of £5 notes every day than having electric storage heating, but that’s another story .

However, the slothfulness of my family was a good indication of how everyone tends to disregard all manner of alarms these days.

I have lost count of the times I have stuffed my fingers in my ears as either shop or office alarm, or a car alarm, has wailed on for hour after hour in the night, rather than investigating what was going on.

I roundly cursed a neighbour whose car alarm shrieked on so long that his battery went flat – and then realised to my chagrin the next morning it has been my own car making the racket, as I had failed to close one of the windows.

We still have those original smoke alarms, still as sensitive as ever, as Mrs Hextol demonstrated only on Sunday when she burnt the tetties.

However, there is one member of the family who hates those alarms with a passion.

It’s the Hextol Hound, a Alsatian of such impeccable breeding that she can trace her Teutonic ancestry almost as far back as the Royal Family.

That being said, she is perhaps the most craven of her breed ever to draw breath, and a positive disgrace to the Fatherland.

She runs away from rabbits, and lets puppies bully her, but what really upsets her is a smoke alarm going off.

She’s getting on in years, and becoming increasingly decrepit as arthritis takes an ever more secure hold on her hindquarters.

She has to be lifted into the car because she can no longer jump in, and certainly cannot manage the stairs to the bedrooms.

That is, of course, unless the smoke alarm goes off, and she’s up there cowering beside the bed quicker than Bobby Thompson on dried egg.

One day last year she caused major consternation when we had friends staying from Down South.

An unearthly shriek at 3am sent us scattering from our beds, to find the lady visitor quivering at the top of the stairs.

It seems her bedroom door had creaked open in the night, and then she had heard heavy breathing and felt hot breath in her ear.

Hoping her husband was feeling frisky, she put out her hand – and instead of his manly frame, came across the hairy form of the quivering dog.

However, the alarm had not gone off, and it took some little while to discern that the cause of her extreme distress was the intermittent bleep given off by the alarm to indicate the battery was running low!