Central heating? It was coal for us
THE darkening nights and colder weather bring back a host of memories and experiences linked with the onset of winter - yet one of my most vivid brings snorts of disbelief and even derision from the kids.
Aye, one mention of my childhood recollections of the dramas surrounding the maintainence of a real coal fire and I get that brief but perceptible disbelieving raise of the eyebrows.
I can almost hear the chatter going on in their heads. “Givowwer dad, we know you are an old gyet an all that – we know you have the techno-savvy of an early 19th-century Luddite who smashed up new-fangled machinery out of fear – but coal fires? Howay man! Where were ya brought up? Freakin’ Beamish Museum?”
Admittedly, it does seem Dickensian to the post-millennials – but to them a clamshell phone or a flatscreen telly with a geet big jutting out back, from merely 10 years or so ago, will seem objects of antique curiosity. To be fair, in today’s centrallyheated world, how could I ever expect them to understand the land of the coal fire?
For a start, how do you convey the experience of lying in bed and watching your breath fog in the freezing bedroom air, while entertaining yourself by trying to spot Scooby Doo show characters in the ice that is formed on the bedroom windows?
It is impossible to put across the heartfelt leap of joy as your mam has finally turfed your fatha’ out of bed to ‘gerrup an’ sort the fire oot.’
Without sounding like a sexist dinosaur, back in the day fire raising was a indeed a man’s job; it traced a direct route to our prehistoric cavedwelling days. As you lay clutching your long cold hot water bottle, you could chart ya da’s invisible progress from the bedroom to the living room by the succession of bangs, clatters, gerraways, givowwers and cusswords you were not allowed to use.
If your da was organised, he would have smugly set the fire in the hearth the previous evening.
In most families, this preparation was verging on an art form with many variations on the best way to do it. I recall me da preferred a layer of coal interspersed with scrunched up newspaper – always last neet’s Chronicle or ‘the Pink’ if it was a Sunday – no need for recycling then!
This was complemented by the addition of chopped-up bits of wood.
Mind you, this wood was not the cured and treated artisan kindling from sustainable Scandinavian forests so beloved of the trendy chattering classes for their Aga stoves in Jesmond.
Nah. This was a bottom set of drawers from aunt Edith’s old scullery – the blue paint was still vaguely visible as it burned in a very different shade of flame from wood it once covered.
This was probably caused all the poisonous chemicals and additives being released into our living-room atmosphere.
Next came the ‘tarry toot’ or scraps of old linoleum (aye , Edith’s scullery again!) which were cheaper and better than the posh paraffin firelighters they sold in the shops. Again it burned like a white phosphorous grenade and would probably be banned by modern-day UN weapons inspectors. Once dad pronounced the fire ‘a’had,’ he would ask us kids to get out of bed to supervise the ‘bleezin.’
This involved draping a whole newspaper page over the fireguard.
It must be pointed out safety was a poor second as the newspaper stuck to the guard and created a funnel of air up the chimney to liven up the fire – a sort of low-tech 70s Gateshead version of the afterburners on a Eurofighter jet.
We would happily watch the newspaper go through a variety of hues, from off white to sepia, to brown and then black as it began to smoulder.
This was when you were supposed to bring the adults back in but to us 70s kids, watching what happened next was like getting to the next level on Minecraft. The sudden spontaneous combustion of The Journal’s sports pages made our weekend!
Such activities today would rightly involve the police, social services and the national media.
However, to paraphrase LP Hartley’s much-used line; ‘The past is a foreign country, they light things differently there.’