MORNING SERIAL

THE fire needed tending all day long and real experts, like my Dada, could prolong its life by having the coal burn twice; the second time as coke, or by banking up the fire with powdered ‘small coal’, seeming to smother the flames altogether, until the red glow slowly ate its way through the black blanket to breathe again. In the evenings we all gathered about the fireplace, legs outstretched, basking in the warmth, guarding against anyone blocking our view of the flames and ‘taking all the heat’. Spending time alone in one’s room was too uncomfortable a prospect to contemplate outside summertime, and so we spent our time together around the fire. Staring into the flames I saw pictures being moulded, then dissolved in the hypnotic warmth, a miniature geography of black continents slowly inundated by red seas, until bedtime was called.

Diversion was added when we eventually took possession of a rented black and white ‘Rediffusion’ television, a man calling at the door each week to take payment for it. It had a clunky Bakelite dial to change the channel, not on the TV itself but screwed into the windowsill, and there were letters around the dial instead of numbers, with far more letters than there were actual channels available.

Turning the dial from ‘D’ to ‘H’ produced nothing but snow on the screen and a loud hissing sound; even so I tried it now and again, just in case. I immersed myself in children’s TV programmes, starting out with Andy Pandy, Bill and Ben and Trumpton but soon graduating to much more grown up stuff like the stories of Noggin the Nog, each one with a hint of menace. I took in glimpses of a wider world, of other countries: Casey Jones, ‘steamin’ and a rollin’’ across a dusty America; The Flashing Blade and the chateaux of France; Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in the Outback of Australia and Flipper, the dolphin swimming in the seas off a perpetually sunny Florida. It never occurred to me that these were places that could be visited. They were simply story lands.