AN ELDERLY woman told today how a 'Good Samaritan' teenager who offered to help her to safety as two cars blazed outside her terrace home stole £120 from her pension book.

Police are investigating after the cars were burned out in Chatburn Street, Blackburn. The fire was so fierce that heat scorched the front doors of three houses.

Margaret Tormay, 72, said she and her husband Robert, 75, whose Vauxhall Nova was wrecked in the incident, were alerted to the blaze by a bright orange glow inside their house. "I was terrified. We just didn't know what was going to happen.

"Then two teenage girls came over the back wall -- I don't know how they got over, it's so high -- and they told us to keep away from the front of the house.

"Robert had gone out of the back and one of the girls was helping me, but I wondered at the time what the other one was doing because she was hanging about the lounge." A few hours later Mrs Tormay discovered that £120 was missing from the pension book which she kept in the room.

The Tormays' Nova and a Honda Civic which was parked next to it were burned out in the blaze, which police are treating as suspicious. The two girls are believed to be in their late teens.

Next-door neighbours Mark Jackson, 33, Paula ,26, and children Jade, nine, and Devon, 11 months, also fled as heat and smoke hit their home.

Leading firefighter Tony Walmsley, of Blackburn fire brigade, said that it was spectacular blaze and they had to douse down the fronts of three houses to stop the fire spreading.

His crew also managed to tape a leaking gas main outside the Tormays' house until experts from Transco arrived to make the area safe.

Mrs Tormay said: "It was a lovely little car and got us around without giving us any trouble at all. It was terrifying."