Forest Fire Rules at School
Memories of Paradise
Forest Fire Rules at School
Memories of Paradise
Submitted by Barbara Bishop
I was four or five years old- I hadn’t started school yet. It would have been in the late 1940s. So I don’t know how I learned the Forest Fire Rules, or even if that was what they were called- perhaps from my older brother Allan. What I do remember is this special day when they invited me to come to the school to recite the rules. I remember wearing a dress that was pretty. They thought it was cute that a tiny little girl could rattle them off. I do remember standing in front of the class and reciting them to the class.
Our community took fire very seriously. We had sharp, scary thunderstorms which would travel up and down the valley for several hours frightening us. I remember when a barn across the river was hit by lightning during one of those scary storms and burned. The crashing and flashing felt like it was right over our heads as we huddled in our living room with our parents in our pajamas that night. And the men of Paradise always hunted in the fall, often staying at camps in the woods, so they too had to be careful with fire. Having the children learn fire prevention rules was a wise addition to the curriculum. Start young.
What matters to me about this memory is that I expect the idea of my visit came from one of the Women’s Institute meetings. The Paradise School was so closely allied with “WI”. The women of the village provided books, a piano, supplies, special pieces of furniture, curtains, and their incredible organizing skills- like the Fire Prevention campaign. Our community was a closely-knit place, each group or family knit together by ties of blood relationships or common cause and activities. We learned together, socialized together, worked together. And ate many many dinners in the hall.
For years I remembered the rules, but age has dimmed that memory. I do remember “Don’t play with matches.” We were all intrigued by matches and nothing was more fun than lighting them. If we got caught it did not go well with us.
I loved how close we were in Paradise.
From the 1930s