8. R&R-Self-Awareness
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, are 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). Competing 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 cruel behaviours; bullying, excessive work-loads, endless physical sports, and above all-else the tyranny of the cold-bath. It wasn’t that you could choose 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 it did not work for me nor my brother.
As an aside, why is it that senior-officers in the British-army, together with ex/army expert-commentators, all have rosy-cheeks of varying strength? My brain immediately links these to the German mensur-scars of the 19th century. Are these equivalents, each bestowing a visible proof-of-competence? It would be a shame if younger soldiers coming-though miss-out on all those G&T’s, as their dedication to fitness and the gym would forever preclude this badge-of-honour.
Lastly, 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 technologically (about sixty years too early), and believed electricity would become 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 all 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 for months 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 where we lived, 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 anticipated.
We had to adopt the following survival-strategy; firstly, we wore many layers of clothes 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-right-through to our bones.
Occasionally we had to sprint to the toilet for relief, but shitting when its sub-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.
Talking about cold-related skills no-one should have to learn, let’s focus on lighting coal-fires. After the thaw Mum was able to get coal delivered and I was inducted into the guild of firelighters. At that time this was a very large organization, and our neighbours were hard-core members who taught me the skills even more than my mother did. Here goes. First you have to clear-out the ash and occasional stone left in the fireplace from the night before, which was messy and boring. Then the “exciting” bit of building the fire prior to lighting. Get it right and a blazing-fire will quickly be established to warm you in the cold of a freezing morning. Get it wrong and you will be stuck with an uncooperative mound of coal that will ignore all attempts to set it alight.
The first thing is to lay-down a layer of very combustible material at the bottom of the grate. Our neighbours used yesterdays rolled-up newspapers to achieve this, but Mum “cheated” with firelighters whose paraffin odour I can still vividly remember across all these years (which was also probably a “driver” of my life-long love of intoxicants – don’t try sniffing firelighters – not good!). Onwards. On top of this layer, you then carefully place kindling-wood, making sure the pile retains lots of empty space while still able to support the weight of the coal. Lastly the coal itself, with each lump being assessed for weight and size. It’s difficult to explain how to do this, so I won’t, but this is where most fires fail as when the bottom layers burn-away, there is a strong possibility that the weight of the coal causes a pancake-like collapse of the whole pile that extinguishes everything, and you have to start again.
Once coal-ignition has been achieved you can then see-to refilling the coal-scuttle, which of course meant going outside to the coal-bunker where coal fresh from the mine was stored. This was “raw” coal – huge lumps of it, some of which were the size of a football or even bigger. The solution? You have to whack it with a hammer to bring the unit size down to that of a large baked-potato, but no smaller than that. Actually, this was part of the procedure I quite enjoyed; five minutes of frenzied bashing where you could imagine your enemy’s skulls being pulverized; a therapeutic activity I can fully endorse. If you ever get the chance to do this, do, as you will thoroughly enjoy it. Then fill the coal-scuttle, go back inside and place it by the side of the fire with a little shovel next to it so you can transfer a lump at a time onto the fire as needed. Job done.
One coal-fire was not enough to warm the room, let-alone the house. The solution was to buy paraffin-heaters. These are a solution from the last century, and were/are at least as dangerous as coal-fires. However, they do the job, and the delightful paraffin smell (to me) coupled with the flame being projected onto the ceiling created a kind of sister-like-cosiness of the coal-fire. Both had ways of killing you = take your choice. With the coal-fire it could spew-out burning embers onto your carpet in the middle of the night and set-fire to the house, or the paraffin-heater could be knocked over with a similar deadly-effect.
I suppose things were-as-they-were and all this became part of our lives. While others had central-heating systems that worked, we had a previous technology that also worked, but not as well. The benefit of a coal-fire is that it forces everyone together, just like what must have happened with our cave-dwelling ancestors. What could be cosier than everyone sitting down at the cave entrance in front of a blazing-fire for an evening meal of stewed mammoth-testicles washed-down with fetid-rainwater, while dressed in lice-ridden animal-skins? It just goes to show we don’t have-it-all these days.
Oh God, I’ve just realized I’m having a full-blown nostalgia-attack. These are similar to panic-attacks, but are potentially a far more serious medical condition. If this happens to you action must be taken immediately. As in panic-attacks, the thing to do is calm your body-and-mind down. As the easiest way to do this is to find a paper bag and start breathing in-and-out of it as naturally as possible.
As the carbon-dioxide in your blood-stream rises it instigates a change of consciousness that will eventually lead to these pernicious thoughts dissipating. Within minutes you should be back to normal (for you), and you can continue your life as before. Which once I finish with the paper-bag leads me to go to my central-heating control-panel and crank-up the temperature to twenty-seven degrees-centigrade, an ideal setting for Scotland in late-winter.