Open Writing

“I can see a face in the fire,” my mother would say on mid-winter nights.

Dad, hidden behind the News Chronicle, did not respond.

“Eh, it’s Winston Churchill!” Mother would point excitedly, leaning forwards. “See, there’s his nose. And that’s his big forehead.”

“Winston Churchill doesn’t have a big forehead,” Dad would say, still not looking up from the daily edition.

“It’s old Churchill to a T,” Mother insisted. “Do look.”

At last Dad peered round the edge of the newspaper, to be stirred instantly into action.

“Just in time! That fire needs some more coal on. Another few minutes and we’d have been staring at cold coke.”

Out he would go into the night, lugging the brass scuttle. Out to what everyone in our village knew as the ‘coil oil’.

A hand shovel clattered into nutty slack, ringing sharply on the frosty air.

Then in would come Dad, commenting on the weather, right arm dragged long by the heavy scuttle.

If the scuttle was over-full, a thin trail of black dust followed his feet through the kitchen across the living room carpet.

That carpet, by the way, was turned once a year during spring cleaning, so that feet did not form permanent tracks across it. Round the edges of the carpet there were strips of linoleum. In those days wall-to-wall carpeting was only for the very rich.

“Oh dear!” Mother would groan, as coal shuttered onto the dying fire. “That’s made it go sad. Take the grate off the front.”

In the quiet days before television, fires were a permanent source of interest and conversation. Second only to the weather.

“Do you think that fire needs poking?”

“Bank it up, then there’ll be a blaze for when we’re ready to sit down.”

“There’s something wrong with the weather. That fire hasn’t burned right all day!”

“This coal isn’t good enough to burn in the garden, never mind in the house.”

You could easily pick out the mining families in our village. They got concessionary coal. It didn’t come in sacks, like paid-in-full coal. It was dumped in a pile at the front gate.

Occasionally a load was left at our front gate, courtesy of a neighbour whose coil oil was already full to bursting with concessionary fuel.

I shifted it from gate to coal shed in a wheelbarrow. Load after weary load.

“Make sure you wash the flags down when you’re done,” Mother ordered. “Folk will think you dad’s packed in his job and gone down the pit.”

Dad had a ‘clean’ job. At a chemical works making sulphuric acid. His work clothes were often full of holes as a result of acid splashes.

A fire burned in our living room every day of the year to heat a back boiler, our only source of hot water. On the hottest summer’s day Dad would be stoking up a fierce blaze so that we had enough water for a good bath to help us cool down.

We burned coal every day of the year apart from New Year’s Eve. Then it was an oak log which burned long and slow with a sweet smell.

“That will keep the witches away for another year,” Mother said.

She said it with a smile, but there was a lingering belief in witches in rural communities before television turned us into one sophisticated global village.

My mother’s mother burned a witch log at the turn of the year. So did her mother and her mother and her…. Right back to Medieval times.

The village in which I now live is smokeless. By edict of an environmentally aware council. We bask in the warmth of a gas fire.

Very convenient, a gas fire. Though there’s not much else you can say about it.

Turn it on. Turn it up. Turn it down. Turn it off.

Is that why we spend so much time watching television soaps? Because we no longer have coal fires to talk about?