Sunday 27th November
It is amazing that in just the last half-century how the way we heat our homes has changed. We must have moved into the house in Putney in 1955, and the whole economy was run on coal; everyone had coal fires which belched smoke and soot into the air. In the winter instead of Fog, London would be shrouded in Smog, a nasty mix of fog and soot and sulphurous gases; I cannot really remember this as we were in quite a leafy suburb and rarely ventured into the centre of town, but apparently in 1952 there was such a bad smog that it practically closed the city for five days and resulted in about twelve thousand deaths, mostly through exacerbated respiratory diseases. Clean air acts were passed which gradually changed things but it was economics and cheap gas that really made the difference.
Let me tell you about coal fires; firstly they are quite complicated to get going, though Aunt Maud did have a gas tap which fed straight into the coals and so got the fire roaring away in minutes. No such luxury at Putney, you had to empty out the grate of soot and ash from the previous fire, I was sometimes given the job of carrying this full tray out to the ash bin by the back door. Then it would be my mother’s job, though this later became mine, to build a lattice-work criss-cross of kindling, these were small sticks of wood about a foot long and half an inch square which you bought at the ironmongers, this would be built on a scrunched up page or two of newspaper and a few small coals placed on top. The paper was lit and you then had to watch it and hope that the wood caught light and that before the wood was finished that the coals had started smoking and your fire was lit (if the coal failed to light you had to start all over again). It was then constant attendance, as you had to carefully add coals, making sure you didn’t smother it too soon. Then there was banking up the fire with small coal and dust and opening out the vent so that air would be drawn through the coals and up the chimney, this produced the main fire for the evening. At weekends the fire would also be banked up before we went to bed and restarted from the few still warm coals in the morning. Hot water was heated by a back-boiler which took heat directly from your fire, we also had an electric immersion heater which could heat up the hot tank, though Grandma was rather miserly in actually switching this on. All too often you had to boil a kettle to get a decent wash.
And that was the only heating in the whole house; bedrooms were unheated, and we would have a hot water bottle to thaw out the very cold sheets, my mother also had a paraffin heater in the kitchen which smoked and smelled and again was a trial to control and we only used this on the bitterest of evenings.
In the late seventies we had night storage heaters installed, which were again almost impossible to regulate but at least they provided some background heating.
Nowadays everyone has central heating, usually gas, which thanks to North-Sea Gas used to be pretty cheap but is now beginning to run out. It is incredibly easy to control with thermostats on every radiator, and hot water on tap, and we are all now used to this luxury of warm houses. Except of course when it breaks down, and we are huddled in warm clothes and still shivering waiting for the boiler repair man to come. It happens rarely but when it does I am instantly back in that cold house in Putney waiting for the fire to draw through, and wondering whether to put another cardy on top of my pullover.