TWO youngsters and their mother were lifted to safety from an upstairs bedroom window while fire raged in their terraced house in the early hours of today.

The family was asleep upstairs in the rented house on Perth Street, Burnley, when Jackie Mee, 31, woke up at 1.30am choking on thick smoke.

Her son Jay, nine, had also woken up coughing and they woke daughter Kirby, three, and Jackie's brother-in-law Eddie Gallagher.

Jackie said: "The stairs were full of smoke and so Eddie climbed out of the back bedroom window on to a four-inch wide dividing wall in the back yard.

"I then handed Kirby to him and he got her to safety and then I handed Jay out and finally got out myself. If the window at the back had not opened there would have been no way we could have got out alive. If my brother-in-law had not been there I could not have managed to get the children out myself." Sub Officer John Davies praised the family's action. He said: "If they had tried to go downstairs they would have walked into thick smoke and the back door was locked. We later found the key in the living room so they would have ended up going back upstairs to get out."

Jackie's older son Peter, 16, was staying overnight at a friend's house.

Firefighters rescued the pet poodle Fenton who was caught in the fire downstairs. He was given oxygen by firefighters and it brought him round.

Jackie, who spent the rest of the night with her sister Beverley on Paisley Street, said: "The fire has wrecked the living room of the house and destroyed everything in it including my collection of 30 pot dolls.

"We have lost all our clothes and I am going to go to the social security offices to see if they can help and to the council to see if they can offer a house.

"We can't stay living with my sister because she has six children of her own in a three house."

Firefighters broke the front door down to get into the fire which had started in a chair. The cause of the blaze is still being investigated but it is not suspicious.

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