In some play—is it Barefoot in the Park?— everybody comes onstage out of breath because the action takes place in a fifth-floor walkup. I empathize with them. I used to live in fifth-floor walkup myself. What’s more, I managed to have a flood there.

Really, it was all the fault of my husband’s psychiatrist friend. We started our married life in an apartment that had been mine when I was single. “You know, it’s not a good idea to live in your wife’s apartment,” the friend said. “It’s better to start fresh.” Well, he was the expert, wasn’t he? The guy who was trained to understand how the mind worked? And since it never occurred to either of us dopes to ask why, if he knew so much about how to make a marriage work, he was divorced himself, we took his advice.

The problem was that my lease had several months to run and we couldn’t get out of it. All the landlord would offer was to let us move into a different apartment he owned and continue the same lease. Naturally, this other apartment cost so much more than the old one that it strained our newly-hatched marriage. Besides, it was a fifth-floor walkup.

Certainly, the new apartment had advantages. The bedroom and the living areas were truly spacious, though the kitchen was so small that when I set up the ironing board, there was only enough space for me to stand next to it. There was a balcony which gave both of us vertigo. There were in-house laundry facilities for the tenants, which would have been a great convenience if they hadn’t been in the basement and inadequate to the demand. After a month or so, I found that the only time I could capture a washing machine was extremely early in the morning. Eventually I developed a system: I would get up at six and take the laundry down to wash. Then I’d go back up and get dressed. I went down again to put the laundry into the dryer. Up again for breakfast and a quick tidy. Down again to collect the dry laundry, bring it up to the apartment, and go off to work. By the time I developed this routine, though, I was pregnant, which added an extra dimension: When I got upstairs after the final trip, I threw up, then went to work!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The apartment was a lot more modern than my old one and even had a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. What the kitchen also had, but which I didn’t notice, was a fire extinguishing system, the head of which was in the ceiling over the stove.

When we’d recovered from moving all our possessions up the four flights of stairs—and even in those days we had a large collection of books—my husband and I started to kasher the kitchen.

Scrubbing the stove free of the previous tenant’s grunge was the main job. With heavy-duty rubber gloves, I laid on cleanser (this was before the days of cream cleansers), Mr. Muscle, steel wool, lots of hot water and elbow grease, and was aided by a very strong stomach. I dismantled everything that would unscrew and soaked it in the sink—grates, burner heads, oven racks, you name it—and attacked what was left: the range top, down inside underneath the burners, and inside the oven. I slathered on the kind of oven cleaning preparations you need goggles and protective clothing for.

Finally the stove was declared clean. Then we had to kasher it. For the oven, the method we used was to put in the oven racks, turn it up as high as it would go, and leave it for about an hour, with a final touch-up with a blowtorch. We knew better than some friends of ours who wanted to do a really thorough job on the oven in their new apartment. To burn it out as they thought it should be done, they built a coal fire in the oven—how they even managed to get a hold of the coal is still a mystery—and then went to bed. In the middle of the night, they were woken by a horrible rending, groaning noise, and in the morning they went out and bought a new stove.

So we just left the oven going. At the same time, we turned on the top burners full blast and left the grates in the flames to get as close to red-hot as we could make them, moving them at intervals to be sure each section was well grilled.

The kitchen got pretty warm during all of this. After an hour, the soft metal plug in the fire extinguisher head over the stove melted. A monsoon of water gushed over the stove and drowned the flames while my husband and I climbed onto chairs frantically trying to turn the thing off. Despite college degrees on both sides, we couldn’t get the water to stop. There is no shutoff in a fire extinguisher head.

My husband ran around grabbing whatever looked promising to build a coffer-dam in the kitchen doorway. After long experience helping a fellow-student who lived in a basement apartment at the foot of a hill, my husband was an expert. With some cinder blocks he found on the balcony, he made a low wall across the kitchen entrance and stuffed clothing in the cracks. He used the first clothing he found. Mine. The water kept pouring out.

I ran downstairs to a neighbor. “How do you turn off the fire extinguisher?” I gasped. She didn’t know. But she did tell me there was a caretaker. I set off to find him, somewhere in the bowels of the apartment complex. There were four apartment buildings around a central court and I must have been through all their basements six times before I finally found that caretaker.

“The fire extinguisher’s gone off in my apartment!” I panted. “Come turn it off!”

He gave me a look of utter helplessness. “I’m new,” he said. “I don’t know how.”

In the end, he turned off the main cold water supply for the entire complex. Together we staggered up the stairs to my apartment. On the way, the downstairs neighbor met me. “The water’s dripping through my ceiling,” she said distractedly.

I apologized madly and explained that I was about to join my husband bailing the water into the kitchen sink.

“I know!” she said, brightening. “I’ll call the fire department. Maybe they can pump it out.” And by the time I had started to wade into the kitchen, she was back. “I said it was an emergency, but no fire,” she announced. And from the street far below, we heard the faint wail of fire engines growing louder.

Moments later we heard booted feet pounding up the stairs. As the firemen rounded the last turn, we saw them in full rig: fire helmets, waterproof coats, fire axes held high—though sagging a little because this was, after all, a fifth-floor walkup.

“Where’s the fire?” the first fireman demanded breathlessly. I looked at my downstairs neighbor. “There isn’t one,” I said. “I told them,” my neighbor defended herself, “an emergency, but no fire.”

The fireman looked lost. “Well, what did you call us for, then?” he asked.

I pointed at the kitchen floor, still inches deep in water. “We have a flood,” I said. “Can you pump it out?”

He stared at the inland sea. He stared at me and slowly shook his head from side to side.

“You mean you only put the water in, you don’t take it out,” I said. I wanted to get this perfectly clear.

The fireman nodded.

“Thank you,” I said politely. I waved my hand gently. “Goodbye.”

Axes drooping, the huddle of firemen turned and straggled down the stairs. My husband and I each took a saucepan and went back to bailing. My neighbor went home to watch our flood dribble through her ceiling some more. One of the firemen stopped to warn her not to use her electricity until everything had dried out.

“How long?” she asked.

“Two or three days,” he said, and followed the others.

Eventually we lowered the water level to the point where I could use a mop. We dismantled the coffer-dam. I examined what remained of my clothes and, though I did try to salvage them, they never recovered from the experience and finally went into the trash.

The caretaker was remarkably understanding. He said he’d learned a lot about the buildings from us. After a while, he found the shutoff for the extinguisher system and turned everybody’s water back on. He came up and put a new metal plug in our extinguisher head.

Our floor dried out, the lady’s apartment downstairs dried out, and life settled down after that. We put the stove back together and after some discussion decided the oven and burners had been going long enough to be declared usable—as long as I didn’t leave the flames on high for too long. The neighbors were all pleasant, and it was a nice apartment.

Years have passed, and we’ve called many places home since those sweet bygone days. But even now, deep down, embarrassment still floods through me whenever I hear the ominous expression “fire extinguisher.”

Henye Meyer is a freelance writer living in Manchester, England.

(Make sure to consult a professional to kasher your oven. Because of the possible damage to gas lines and oven thermostats, kashering an oven yourself can be very dangerous. —OK Labs)