Phyllis Day is 87 years old and has Alzheimer’s and hearing problems. That Thursday night in Wigston, England, she was sleeping without her hearing aids while the fire spread from the back of her house. She heard nothing. Not the alarms, nor the shouts.
Her neighbors did see the flames. They ran to the door and began knocking, unaware that the person answering them through the doorbell camera was Suzanne Wright, Phyllis’s daughter, connected from her own home eight kilometers away. Wright gave them the code to a lockbox by the back gate. Pav Sarpal, 28, and Stephan Smart, 44, entered through thick smoke without knowing what they would find upstairs.
They found Phyllis asleep, looking at them as if they were going to rob her. They woke her calmly, explained what was happening, and got her out of bed just in time. Firefighters believe an electrical fault in the kitchen started the fire, which left the ground floor charred. Phyllis now lives with her daughter. Wright keeps repeating just one phrase: she believes they should be knighted.
