They fled the fire barefoot into the night. In the early hours of a September morning Darren Mikkelsen discovered the balcony of his young family’s flat in southwest London was ablaze. “We had no time to even put on shoes,” says his wife, Danielle, a teacher. They had to get out so fast, she left behind the wedding rings she had taken off hours before while bathing their baby.
The couple escaped with their two young sons, Theo, then 12, who was wearing only a T-shirt and underpants, and Jesse, just eight months, who was in his baby sleeping bag. Outside they watched speechless as the block of 23 flats went up in flames.
“I saw a huge cloud of thick black smoke and this
