7. R&R-Heating

There is nothing clever about being cold. Unfortunately for a minority of people (us Anglo-Saxons/aka “idiots”), there does seem to be some ancestral “driver” which says there is. My personal experience only goes back three generations, but it does reveal this bizarre phenomenon where having your toes go black with frostbite, or your willy “drops-off” due to exposure, is seen as some badge of manhood. It doesn’t matter if you get cold due to “circumstances beyond your control” (i.e. you allowed things to get out of control), you should still have the capacity to do something about it. For God’s sake why did early man have to struggle for millennia before some bright spark invented fire, or later clothes or central-heating, if you ignore these and other options and think “I’ll just struggle through this and I’ll miraculously get warm by doing nothing”- you won’t.

Which of course brings me to the private school of my youth. Although I didn’t fully understand at the time specialized in producing soldiers for the British army (other armed services tolerated). Other private schools focused on producing civil-servants, or politicians, or academics or whatever “better than thou” super-culture within the establishment. My father, a squadron-leader, saw no problem with this so I and my brother were subject to this “cruel-and-unusual” regime we thought was normal – it wasn’t.

A part of this regime was inspired by ancient Sparta. The theory I suppose was to brutalize children at an early stage by subjecting kids to brutalizing behaviours; bullying, excessive work-loads, endless physical sports, and above all-else the tyranny of the cold bath. It wasn’t that you could chose between hot showers or cold ones, no, the only option was a communal icy-cold bath, just what you need after avoiding a rugby-ball in the sleet for the previous hour-and-a-half. It wasn’t that they hadn’t got the money for them, after all they had raised over a million for a new chapel to celebrate the glories of God (editor, what the “f…” be they?), no it was all intentional. Get your teeth knocked-out on the playing-field then thank God for the experience, literally. The scary thing is that it worked, producing a string of senior officers and a head of the British army, though obviously not for me and my brother.

As an aside I remember fagging at this private school, another activity designed to control and break the spirit of all those kids who dared to oppose the regime. For those of you who don’t know what fagging is it is the older boys, or prefects as they were known, being allowed to get the younger ones to do their chores for them. Cleaning shoes, making snacks, delivering messages etc, all seen as normal by the teachers and positively encouraged. Even in my day this was seen as a dubious activity, prone to sexual and other abuse. However, in my school the head teacher (or “master”) announced to all-and-sundry that there was no fagging at his school as any prefect could tell a younger boy to do something, not just a designated one. How did this go down with me and my brother? – badly as you can imagine. In no small part this prompted my life-long contempt of unearned authority.

Returning to heating, I want to remind readers what things were like for many of us in our childhoods. Go back in time to the sixties, where technological optimism was all around, and nothing seemed impossible. Within this zeitgeist my father and mother bought a new house built up a picturesque lane in the middle of agricultural Essex (I promise not to go on about Essex here). It was built for us to a commercial plan, with many copies still in existence today. It followed current architectural thinking of the day, and the only difference to the standard cookie-cutter design was Dad swopping the integrated garage for an office/study as the plot had its own driveway for a car.

He was also forward-looking (about sixty years too early) technologically, and believed electricity would be too cheap to monitor, and power everything including heating. This he argued was due to the arrival of nuclear power “too cheap to monitor”, supporting integrated heat-pumps and refrigeration, and would become the norm. He was so confident that this was installed at our new home, alongside a small genuine fireplace for cosiness (these days it is often done via a wide-screen video). We moved-in and everything went OK until the Winter-of-Sixty-Three, when it all went “pear-shaped”.

For those of us in the UK who are “of a certain age” (i.e. old-farts) the Winter-of-Sixty-Three has become an ancestral memory. The country froze solid for three months with snow-drifts up to five-metres deep. These drifts completely shut the lane we were situated on, so no cars or delivery vehicles in-or-out. But far worse for us was that this was when our integrated under-floor central-heating system completely disintegrated and stopped working for good, the pipes froze so no hot water, there was no coal for the fire as this was supposed to be for decorative purposes only, leaving the only source of heating being a one-bar-electric-fire which obviously only worked when the local-grid was occasionally working. This was my exposure to persistent biting-cold all due to entirely foreseeable circumstances that should have been foreseen.

We had to adopt the following survival-strategy; firstly, many layers of clothes were worn at all times, including when we went to bed. Secondly, the home was segmented into areas we existed in at different times during the day. Most of the day was spent by the three of us (Mum, my brother and me – Dad was away with the air-force) huddling around this one-bar electric-fire, with blankets around our shoulders, praying the electricity would stay-on, which often it didn’t. Lastly at night we would rush to our frozen bedrooms where we dived under the covers, still fully clothed, but the cold still penetrated-through to our bones. 

Occasionally we had to sprint to the toilet for relief, but shitting when its below zero is a skill no-one should have to learn. When the electricity was on Mum would rush to the kitchen to heat-up soup and bring it back to us in front of the fire. That was our life for three-months. Did it make a man of me? Of course not. Instead, it taught me never to get yourself in this position in the first place, and avoid the cold by planning for it. This is nothing new. Do the Innuit allow themselves to get cold because they forgot about harsh winters? No, and neither should we.

Then a brilliant th