Sometimes you ask, is this the country that I used to know? The answer is: no, it is better

In the past, everybody may have known their place, but that was no guarantee of happiness. By Malachi O’Doherty

Iwas born into a world in which the conception of a home without a coal fire simply did not exist. My mother used to say, “When you get to be my age, you’ll realise how much changes in this world”. I now am the age at which she would have said that. I am, indeed, almost the age at which she died. But one of the changes I could not have conceived of then was that I might live in a home without a fire. I even remember the time when the draw on the eyes in the living room shifted from the fire to the television, but even then the fire remained central to our lives.

It was a comfort, but also a hungry beast and an irritant, because we would quarrel over whose turn it was to go and get another shovel of coal from the shed. I don’t know why we never had a coal scuttle.

And the fire had implications. You might set your clothes alight if you stood too close to it. You might get chilblains if you warmed up too quickly.

Actually, when was the last time anyone had chilblains?

My life was governed, in part, throughout my childhood by a wariness of getting chilblains and now I don’t even know what they are. (Okay, rest easy. I’ve just Googled it).

We never thought that we were polluting the air. Of course, we were a large family and both of my parents and then every child in turn reaching 18 blew cigarette smoke out into the room and we didn’t think that was doing any harm either.

When my brother’s family lived for a time in a cottage in Donegal they, like many relations we visited there, had a range.

The local assurance about smoky ranges was succinct. Where the smoke goes the heat goes, too, so don’t worry about it.

Now things have changed. England is about to ban smoky fires, because they produce deadly fine particulate matter that kills people.

Inevitably, there is a media-inspired revolt against this, because some things are more important than air pollution and mass death and one of them is the cosy home fire.

I lived in Donegal for a time in the early 1980s. I had a room in a house. A former IRA man, who was wary of going back home to Strabane in case he’d be arrested, also lived there.

We would go down to the beach at Mount Charles on my wee Vespa scooter, gather driftwood and lash bags of it to the side of the scooter and bring them up to the house.

We were pleased with ourselves, because we were saving money and keeping fit and warm. We had no notion that we were polluting the air, doing something that would one day be illegal.

And, presumably, the laws on burning wood will extend to here eventually. A cynical voice suggests to me that our Assembly will be extremely wary of legislating to tell us how to use our wood-burning stoves for many years to come, the last project to concern itself with heating having proven such an embarrassment.

People do not like much change and perhaps older people are the more conservative and averse to it, because it is only in old age that the extent and rapidity of change becomes plain and irritating.

If you were 30 when the personal computer was invented, you grabbed hold of it and built your life around it. If you were 50, you probably didn’t.

I went back to India last year for the first time in 40 years. Half the population had been born since my last visit and I had a memory of the life and culture of the place and an insight into change that most people living there did not. And I thought, isn’t it a pity that people now gather water from the pump in plastic urns, rather than earthenware ones?

Isn’t it equally a pity that you never now see people making chapattis over little dung-cake burners improvised from old buckets?

They had a mode of transport called the tonga. It has disappeared. We had it ourselves. On postcards it was called the Irish jaunting car, a horse and trap. There comes a point at which you ask, is this really the country that I knew? And the answer doesn’t quite assuage the nostalgia, but it is no, it’s better and healthier and safer.

So, an old woman who wears her hat indoors, probably because her hair is so thin, is asked by a reporter on a news programme what she thinks of the plan to restrict “unskilled workers” from coming into the country and she approves.

She remembers an England in which only one language was heard on the bus, in which everyone was Christian and white.

There were standards then. Indeed, there were. You didn’t hear much then about child abuse and there was no sex before marriage. And as for homosexuals taking over, well, we wouldn’t have put up with it.

She knows things can’t go back to the way they were.

She couldn’t put up with having to use a toilet in the yard again, but she wishes young people today appreciated how well-off they are. She has also been estranged from popular culture by a technical revolution that she has not been able to adapt to. When she sees people around her absorbed by their smartphones, she has no idea what they are looking at and why they are poking them.

I kind of get her point. She has lost something.

That something includes corporal punishment in schools, hanging, marriages that could never be brought to an end no matter how brutal they were, darned socks and chilblains, not leaving the immersion heater on all day, the policeman on a bicycle, Richard Baker reading the news, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, bus conductors, a warm coal fire to come home to and five Woodbine for a shilling.

Back then, you knew where you stood.

Every cancer was a death sentence. You left school at 15 and could stay in the one job for 50 years.

There were butterflies in the garden in summer and a factory horn told you it was lunchtime. And the fire never went out.

You just shovelled out the ashes below and there was enough of a glow in the embers to blow fresh flames from.

And when you wanted hot water, you pulled out the damper to heat the back boiler.

And everybody knew their place. And everybody was happy. Weren’t they?