A rural report from the eye of Storm Eunice
When you are young, power cuts are fun. I have happy 1970s boarding-school memories of messing around with candles when Edward Heath’s disputes with the trade unions plunged us into darkness.
Even today, I feel a ghost of the old pleasure. When Storm Eunice hit us in Sussex on Friday morning, I was quite excited. When our power cut out, I was about half-way through my Saturday column for this paper and completed it with the residue left in my laptop. As well as no electricity, I had no mobile signal and no internet, but through my landline I was able to reach the Telegraph’s Comment desk to discuss how to transmit my piece. Since all power for miles around was out, I could not cadge anyone else’s connection.
The only solution was the most old-fashioned: dictation. The brilliant Madeline Grant is an accomplished young writer with better things to do, but she patiently typed up my fulminations against President Putin and the weakness of the West.
For me, dictating was nostalgic. Before fax machines in the 1980s, phoning over copy (always reversing the telephone charges) was the main method for journalists out on a story.
Those scenes in old films of reporters fighting for a telephone box were authentic. The temperature in our house was dropping fast, but my triumph over minor adversity gave me a warm glow.
Dinner was hot – no interruption of our bottled gas – and our log fire and candles made one room snug. Our last view from our bedroom window before an early night was memorably lovely. The utter absence of unnatural light enabled us to marvel at the perfected brightness of the Moon.
Escape from modernity is
enjoyable, however, only if you can get back to it when you want to. We could not. The power was still off the next morning. I began to consider the facts.
They were not good – roads blocked, roofs smashed by trees, shops closed, unable to operate without computerised tills, freezers melting.
The Moore family were ill placed. Our son and daughter-in-law, she anyway suffering from flu, had to contend with an Aga growing tepid and two small children without baths or hot food. My sister’s two autistic nephews and their carer all had Covid, so she and her partner had to isolate in their very cold, very old house, mobile-less.
My mother was worst placed. She is a former polio victim who is about to be 90, lives alone and is immobile. Helped by extremely kind neighbours, she survived the first night well, but began to get cold the next day. Because of her infirmity, she cannot light or tend a log fire.
The main worry was her stairlift. It has a back-up which can make a limited number of journeys in a power-cut, but not enough to survive a prolonged one. I supervised her journey up to bed lest the lift fail, leaving my mother in the air. It was cold, but at least I could give her a hot-water bottle. Thank God for non-electric Agas.
By Sunday, the situation began to
feel like the plagues of Egypt. All power was still off. My wife had caught the local flu and was sick in the night. My mother woke to find she had no water of any kind, hot or cold. The whole town of Battle was in the same situation, we heard. Without power, the water pumping station was not working properly.
Visiting my mother in the morning, I was touched to find the kind neighbours with her, accompanied by the local farmer, James. He was installing his generator to help her, passing the wire through the letter-box, carefully putting it under carpets so she couldn’t trip. Its tankful powered two lights, the fridge and one blow heater for several hours. But it could not revive the stairlift, which is hardwired.
I returned in the early evening to give my mother her supper and get her up to bed. Her village still had no power, and the stairlift had finally given up. It would have been nice to stay downstairs, but her electrically operated chair for the disabled which can keep the sitter comfortable by adopting different positions was, naturally, dead.
We decided to climb the stairs. Since my mother’s legs cannot support her, I was all but carrying her. It was slow and painful work, stair-tread by stair-tread. The whole process, from the bottom of the stairlift to getting her safely tucked up in bed, took well over an hour.
As I write, 4,400 homes in Sussex are still without power. I have just left after giving my mother breakfast, still upstairs. She and I agreed that she should stay put, partly because she might fall coming down, mainly because of the ordeal of getting up the stairs again later. There is no solution until the power returns. A carer is with her, and my brother is nobly coming from London later. My poor sister has now tested positive for Covid.
My mother has gamely overcome many adversities in life, but even she is a bit shaken. We all feel slightly embarrassed. After all, the absence of electricity was something familiar to most people 70 years ago.
Yet it has become so embedded in daily life that we can barely live without it for more than 24 hours. The authorities need to acknowledge this, and find quicker ways of restoring heat and light.