A woman who escaped a fireball explosion that wrecked her home said she was lucky to be alive.

Ms Antoinette Sheppard, 53, suffered only minor injuries, despite an explosion that wrecked her apartment at the rear of a house on Pembroke’s Railway Terrace West.

She said she had just got up to use the bathroom and returned to her bedroom when she heard four loud bangs just after 2.30am and felt a blast of heat.

Ms Sheppard, who escaped the blast and blaze with burns to her hands, arms and face, said: “I could have died — right now I could be down in the morgue.”

“I felt this singe all around me — I didn’t know I was on fire, I wasn’t conscious of it. My dress was on fire.”

But she said she escaped the worst of the blast because a solid wall separated her from the kitchen — where the blast seemed to originate.

“I wasn’t directly hit. If I had been, I would have looked like a mummy today,” she said. “But there was a cement wall between me and the flames.

“Had the flames hit me directly, I probably wouldn’t be here. That cement was between the kitchen and the bedroom saved me.”

Describing the immediate aftermath of the blast, Ms Sheppard said: “The fridge was totally blown, the door was blown and the stove was gone. The windows were gone — everything.

“The flames weren’t really over me — the headboard on my bed was burning and I felt singed by the heat.

“There is someone watching over me, for sure. It was very close.”

The blast was so strong it threw rubble into the yard next door and one of the blown-out windows bounced off the neighbours’ back door.

Ms Sheppard said she could hear her father, Carlton Mateen, 84, who lives in the upper apartment to the front of the house, shouting her name.

“I grabbed what I could and my father was coming down the top of the stairs outside. I said ‘I’m all right, I’m all right’,” she said. “He was upstairs — he was fine, not injured by the fire at all.”

Ms Sheppard added she and her father managed to squeeze out of the house through a crack in the rubble at the back of the house.

“I could see two police cars and the fire truck on the main road — a little bit later, the ambulance came and took me to the intensive care unit.

“I didn’t even know I was burned — I didn’t feel a thing.”

Ms Sheppard, a care giver, was treated in the intensive care unit at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, but has since been transferred to a general ward.

“They’ve been very good — but I’m looking forward to getting out of hospital,” said Ms Sheppard.

She said she hoped the family home could be rebuilt, despite the damage — but she said she would be reluctant to move back into her old apartment.

“I will be moving in with relatives — in time, it will get repaired. They’re working on that. But I don’t think I will want to go back there,” she said.

The blast happened in the early hours of Sunday, April 13.

A probe into the cause of the blast by fire service experts is continuing.