Thursday 17 May 2012

HOT NEWS: Penny Dolan


 
Today I am living in hope. The men are installing our new central heating boiler. The old one finally died more than a month ago, and although it may be May, the Yorkshire spring has been more than brisk.

I have had to get used to Being Cold. When I am cold something in me diminishes and all I can think about is Not Wanting To Be Cold, which has given me my the subject for this History Girls post.

One afternoon I saw a ghost. Admittedly, it was a ghost in my mind. I found myself wandering the house still wearing the coat from when I’d come back from shopping three hours before. The ghost that appeared in my mind was my own grandmother, who often wore her coat indoors. Suddenly, in my icy home, I understood why. She’d been keeping in the warmth.

Being comfortably warm is a modern experience, a luxury accomplished by merely the flick of a switch. It isn’t a sensation shared by everyone or everywhere, even now. Heat is, in truth, costly and hard to come by but Being Warm is central to the idea of people and community.

Our childhood images of early man – ignoring those “hunting a mammoth with spears and fiery torches” scenes – is likely to be a group of skin-clad people gathered around a blazing fire, both for safety and for heat.

The remains of ancient homes show they were built around the hearth-stone and the fire which would, if possible, be kept burning all the time. Fuel for the flames, whether wood, peat, dung or coal, was always needed to be collected. A possibly risky task when it took you away from your village alone.



The Orange Tree, a favourite tale for telling, describes how the young girl, having finished an unfair burden of tasks, sets off to gather firewood alone. She arrives late so all the fallen branches have been collected by others and must return to face her stepmother’s wrath. I find it hard to tell this section of the tale without, at the back of my mind, remembering the girls and women living in regions dominated by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

There is always the matter of to whom the fuel belongs. In England, Magna Carta records the right of estover, which gives a man the right to collect wood for his personal needs. The lord of the land could also allow dead wood to be collected on his land by, as the saying goes, hook or by crook, assumed to mean the reapers bill-hook or by shepherd’s crook.

The Roman centuries may have brought plumbing and heating, but an old way of keeping warm was to staying close to other people. In the past it was usual for several people to sleep together, whether in a round-house or a castle hall or a cottage or the servant’s bed-chamber, sometimes with guests or extra people hopping in alongside.

I imagine that some people might welcome a favoured dog or two, especially if it was a lord in his less-crowded bed, despite all its bedcovers and bed-curtains. Further down the social scale, a cow and donkey stabled at the lower end of the croft would give warmth to the humans, who slept at the higher end to protect themselves from stable end seepage.

Cold makes us value plenty of clothing, Although central heating now allows us to wander around wearing very little, we are often amazed by the layers of garments people wore in the past. I was certainly glad to pull on extra items.

My house is quite a large old-fashioned stone house, built in the 1920’s and over this last month it has sometimes been warmer outside than inside. There is, I am informed by him who knows a word for this phenomena: hysteresis: the thick stone makes the house hard to warm up when it is cold but also makes it slow to cool down when it is warm. We had just ended up in the wrong part of the equation. Was it one of the Mitford sisters who complained that English country houses were always, always freezing?

If so, no wonder we had centuries of night-clothes & night-caps, layers of undergowns and overgowns, petticoats and padded jackets. No wonder poorer people just slept in their already warm clothes. No wonder it was better to sleep sitting up beside the fire than in a chilly bed.

The hearth fires grew grander too. Once we were content with holes in the roof. Then we had chimneys. There is an impressive chimney in the warming room at Fountains Abbey, where you can stand in the fireplace and stare straight up towards the sky. Alas for the monks, the warmth of the warming room was the only hearth in the abbey and their brief time beside it was because it was their turn to be bled. I am not sure that knowing the huge chimney also warmed the important document room above would have felt consoling.

In late Tudor and Jacobean times, brick replaced stone, enabling those wonderful twisted creations outside, while inside the chimney-piece itself burgeoned into a prestigious structure that included heraldic beasts and mythical characters and coats of arms and so on: the chimney-piece as prestige.


 No matter how fine, the work of the home fires would never have let up. There was always the dust and the soot to cope with, from the blackened roof-ceiling of the hall-house to the invisible maids-of-all-drudgery who carried scuttles of coal and laid the Victorian’s fires. Not to mention those who earned from it, like the master-sweeps with their under-sized climbing boys. 


 
Learning how to light and keep a fire going has been an essential skill, seen as important and manly enough for Baden Powell to want it taught to cub scouts. Is it still, I wonder? Do children now know how to light fires – with the cub’s allowance of two matches? – or does “health and safety” triumph?



I will soon have a gently purring boiler but fire has always been a dangerous friend. Hearths need damping down at night. You had to watch what you left drying on fireguards. Women who sat too long and close to the fire ended up with shins scorched and mottled by the flames and worse. There was also the exciting trick of holding a large sheet of newspaper across the fireplace, creating a kind of suction that would “bleaze up” the fire - and blaze up the paper as well if held there a second too long.

Fire is something we know we should not take for granted, but here in the west, many of us take heat for granted. Heat gusts from open shop doorways, even in winter. Adverts parade people in thin or minimal clothing. All we have to do is flick a switch, and it’s instant.

 Until, like this last month - and maybe in times to come - it isn’t.


Penny Dolan.

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury) out in paperback now.


16 comments:

JO said...

It's interesting how we've come to take being warm enough for granted.

I'm not that ancient, but we only heated one room (with a fire) when I was a child, and we woke to ice on the inside of the windows in the winter. Expectations changed completely with modern central heating.

And the same goes for keeping cool in hot countries. Designers of old forts and palaces in India knew how to organise walls and passageways to make the most of any breeze and so keep the huge walls cool. Now - the rich have air conditioning.

Katherine Langrish said...

Yes, funny how we're having to insulate the thin walls of modern houses, whereas our ancestors built thick stone walls with rubble cores which kept a house cool in summer and helped contain the heat in winter. the hot brick wrapped in a cloth which you took to bed to warm your toes became a ceramic bottle with a screw top (I remember using them at my grandma's house when I was a child) and kept its warmth a lot better than a rubber hot water bottle!

Celia Rees said...

Fascinating post! When I was a child we didn't have central heating and only a few rooms had heating. I remember frost inside the window of my bedroom and icy cold winter days when venturing out of the room where the fire was done with extreme reluctance. We were much closer to our ancestors then. Whole house heating is a recent phenomenon.

Susan Price said...

Like Celia and Jo, I remember the single heated room, while the rest of the freezing house had icy windows. I love central heating! So glad to hear you can be warm again, Penny - but thank you for a wonderful post.

K. M. Grant said...

I'm pretty close to the ancestors. We do have central heating but it's on only in extremis, and sometimes not even then. I'd like to say I was trying to save the planet, which would be commendable, but in truth my paranoia about the bills just trumps my loathing of the cold. If you come to ours, bring two coats, hat and scarf. I supply hot water bottles and whisky.

Ann Turnbull said...

I too remember cold lino,icy windows and stone hot water bottles. I'm always cold, and recently packed my hot water bottle and an assortment of vests and cardigans for a holiday in Venice. (And yes, I did use the hot water bottle a few times, but not in chilly London in the ridiculously over-heated airport hotel bedroom.)

Sally Zigmond said...

Great post. I can still feel exactly what it was like to hug the fire with one's face and front over-heating and even burning but one's back icy cold. And when the door was opened--the shivers really started!

We are all so very spoiled.

michelle lovric said...

Like you, Penny, I lose the will to live (and write) when it is cold. In Venice, they used to walk around with little pots of smouldering coals to keep out the cold. This device was called a scaldino. There was another solution invented by Marina Quirini Benzona, a friend of Byron's and the eponymous blonde in the famous song La Biondina in Gondola. La Benzona was unwilling to sacrifice fashion for comfort even in Venice's venomous winter winds - she was famous for walking around in winter with slices of hot polenta between her breasts to keep her warm, by which means she acquired a nickname, ‘El Fumeto’, ‘The Steaming Lady’. Well, it's one solution if they dont fix your boiler?

Linda B-A said...

When I was a little girl we rented a huge, tumble-down farmhouse with rotting barns and holes in the ceilings. It was so cold in winter Jack Frost would leave his mark on the inside of all the windows. I kind of miss it... and the lighting of fires...

Jane Borodale said...

Nice post, Penny. It made me smile - we don't have central heating and in winter everything does just concentrate down to just keeping warm. I do love the ice patterns on the windows but sometimes our towels freeze in the bathroom, icicles etc. We do a lot of huddling, and never seem to get visitors in winter, if you don't count mice, that is. (Warm polenta might be an interesting experiment.) I do like passing the winter like this, it feels kind of basic, the only downside is that everywhere else feels rather hot.
PS. Would like to reassure Penny that children learn to light fires from scratch (with lint and strikes, not matches) if their primary does Forest School. Some old skills must NEVER die!

adele said...

Brilliant post Penny and I hope you're enjoying your new boiler. Long life to it. I'm also of the generation which remembers no central heating and it was HORRIBLE! I am astonished that in only 10 comments we have two people who don't have central heating today. Do you think this is the percentage in the whole population? Inneresting....I think I'd economize on almost everything else before losing my heating!! :) And I love the thought of polenta between the breasts!

Leslie Wilson said...

I've loved this post and all the comments. When I was a kid we lived in the Lake District, and there was no central heating and the house was always damp - in the winter, a kind of South American continent of damp spread down the wall. I suffered from endless catarrh, which just melted away when we moved to a house with central heating. My mother was horrified at British cavalier attitudes to heating, coming as she did from a country where, if you didn't have winter heating, you froze to death.The tiled stoves of European alpine houses heated the entire premises - nobody there thought an unheated bedroom was virtuous. My ancestors ate polenta, rather than carrying it in their bras, though. Love that, Michele!

Leslie Wilson said...

I've loved this post and all the comments. When I was a kid we lived in the Lake District, and there was no central heating and the house was always damp - in the winter, a kind of South American continent of damp spread down the wall. I suffered from endless catarrh, which just melted away when we moved to a house with central heating. My mother was horrified at British cavalier attitudes to heating, coming as she did from a country where, if you didn't have winter heating, you froze to death.The tiled stoves of European alpine houses heated the entire premises - nobody there thought an unheated bedroom was virtuous. My ancestors ate polenta, rather than carrying it in their bras, though. Love that, Michele!

Leslie Wilson said...

sorry, seem to have commented twice and can't delete it!

Caroline Lawrence said...

Way to turn adversity into a fascinating post, Penny! That's what's so great about being a writer. Everything is grist to our mill!

Unlike the rest of you, I grew up in Bakersfield California where the desert heat -- even in the shade -- often topped 100 degrees. My parents spent a few years in London and when they came home they used to sit in their car in the driveway, soaking up the oven-like heat. The neighbours thought they were barmy!

Deborah Watley said...

I do take heat for granted, Penny. I have a natural gas furnace that heats my whole house, along with several gas fireplaces that I can turn on and off with the flip of a switch. But, I live in South Dakota, US, where the winters are VERY cold. The Native Americans used wood (which could be quite scarce) and buffalo chips to fuel their fires. And, pioneers really didn't settle here until the railroads were built and brought coal, only about 140 years ago. And during one of those early pioneer years, when constant blizzards stranded the trains, a famous pioneer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, spent much of the winter twisting handfulls of grass into little logs. I am indeed spoiled and blessed.