by Chris Dolley
I moved one limb at a time, straddling the ridge, shifting my weight slowly from hand to knee, sliding the rods and brush ahead of me, feeling out the tiles for any sign of give.
I was not looking to win any prizes for speed or bravery. Even though the roof was dry and low-pitched, it was still a roof and the ground was still the ground.
How things change. When I was young I had no fear of heights. I’d swing from the tops of trees, oblivious to gravity, secure in the knowledge that if I fell, I was quick and agile enough to grab a passing branch.
I sometimes miss that single-perspective certainty of youth. If anyone then had asked the younger me if I realised how dangerous it was, I’d have replied, “of course I do.” But the relevance of the question would have eluded me. I wasn’t intending to fall so what was the point in asking? All I could envision was success.
But the older me had wisdom. And Wisdom had commissioned Imagination to produce a report on the dangers of walking on roofs. Apparently there were at least fifty ways to break a neck, more if you skimmed through the appendices.
Then I saw the first wasp – something Imagination had neglected to warn me about. It flew into a gap under one of the tiles in front of my left hand. I froze.
Another wasp appeared. And then another. Coming out from the tiles this time as well as going in.
A wasp nest!
Could I pass by quietly without disturbing them?
I edged forward, holding my breath, trying to glide over the tiles without making any noise.
Crunch. A tile shifted under the weight of my left hand and grated against its neighbour.
The next second there were wasps flying around my head and I was up and running. My fear of wasps pushing everything else aside, I made the elbow of the roof in under a second. I could feel the slight give in the ridge tiles, the scraping, crunchy sound they made as their edges rasped against each other. But what did that matter, I was being pursued by wasps!
I didn’t stop at the elbow, I leaned into the bend and jumped across the angle, momentum and fear carrying me across the entire thirty yards of roof to the wall of the main house.
Wisdom had left me sometime between the third and fourth wasp. And taken all fifty ways of breaking my neck with it. Leaving me blinkered again, one goal in mind – to escape. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d snapped a couple of rods together and pole-vaulted onto the main roof. I was in that determined a frame of mind.
“What are you doing!” shouted an incredulous Shelagh.
What was I doing? Hadn’t she ever seen a man run across a roof, pursued by a cloud of killer wasp mutant death hornets before?
“Wasps,” I said breathlessly as I looked back along the ridge, ducking every time I thought I heard a buzz. I couldn’t see any wasps. They must have given up.
Unlike me. I’d reached the footstool. The main roof was only a few feet away...
But would the footstool take my weight? The two steps looked strong enough but the plywood seat had a disconcertingly bowed and rotten appearance.
And the footstool wasn’t exactly stable – it wobbled when I gave it a prod. So I slid it back and forth along the ridge until I found something approaching a stable position. And then looked at it again. And looked at the ground – some thirty feet below. One mistake and Shelagh might find herself treated to an impromptu visual performance of It’s Raining Men.
But what choice did I have? The killer wasp mutant death hornets would need at least another ten minutes to quieten down. I had to press on.
I carefully shifted my weight onto the first step, then even more carefully onto the seat. Leaning forward I was almost able to stretch a knee onto the lower tiles of the main roof. I was a few inches short. Three or four wasps behind me and I might have made it.
I tried several more attempts, hoping that, somehow, either my legs would grow longer or the roof would drop. Neither happened.
A braver person might have tried a small jump, flexed the knees and pushed off against the footstool. But that would have meant placing an extra strain on the plywood, which might have responded resiliently like a springboard or fallen apart and deposited me on the patio.
Imagination favoured the patio scenario.
It was then that I noticed the skylight. It was only a few feet away from my outstretched hand. Someone could catch hold of a section of pole from there and pull me up. Couldn’t they?
They could. A minute later Shelagh’s disembodied hand appeared from the depths of the attic skylight – somewhat reminiscent of the Lady of the Lake, I thought – and I waved a pole towards it.
Within seconds I was half pulled, half crawling onto the lower section of the hip roof. Success!
I edged upwards towards the ridge, taking great care to spread my weight and not crack anything. And scanning the tiles ahead for any sign of wasps, hornets or nesting giant rocs.
Once on the ridge it was easier, the tiles were larger and cemented in. And then I was over and off the ridge and heading down towards the chimney on the far side.
It wasn’t too bad. If I didn’t look down or scream. And the view was superb. I could almost enjoy this, I thought, for one wild moment of abandon.
I wedged my feet against the base of the chimney and started to assemble the brush. One by one, I attached each section, screwing the rods together, and pushing the brush down the chimney. This was going very well.
And I couldn’t hear any screams to stop from Shelagh – so either everything was all right inside the lounge or she’d been buried by a cave-in.
Suddenly the brush refused to descend any further. I didn’t think I’d reached the fire so perhaps I’d found the obstruction? I started to work the brush back and forth, pushing, pulling, rotating...
And then...
Oh God! I hadn’t, had I?
I withdrew the rods as quick as I could. Pulling the pole up hand over fist until...
I had.
The last section of pole came up by itself. I’d unscrewed the brush. If the flue wasn’t blocked before, it certainly was now.
oOo
With fate’s usual impeccable timing the logs arrived as soon as I’d removed all possibility of using them in the lounge fire. But we did have the kitchen range ... and its fourteen radiators.
Not that we had much confidence in that system, we’d had an old range in England and that had had problems keeping six radiators lukewarm. This one looked of a similar ilk.
But we were nothing if not game. We had logs, we had paper, we had kindling. And soon we had a fire. We had no instructions with the range but there was a lever at the front with a large picture of a chicken on one side and a radiator on the other. Even my non-mechanically minded brain could work that one out so I pushed the lever to the radiator position.
Next we had to set the radiator pumps. There was a cupboard in the adjoining outhouse which gave access to the back of the range. It looked like the London Underground map in there. There were pipes everywhere, connecting, interconnecting, appearing, disappearing.
But at least I could identify two pumps. I switched one on. It whirred. I switched the other one on and pipes started juddering loudly in sympathy. I switched it off. Over the coming days we experimented with every combination of the two pumps at various speed settings until we found one that moved water through the system without an accompanying drum roll on the pipes.
But 3,000 square feet of house with nine-foot high ceilings was not going to be greatly affected by fourteen lukewarm radiators. Even with all the ones upstairs turned off we couldn’t raise the temperature significantly in those left.
We tried everything we could to boost the range. We riddled the firebox every few minutes, we had all the air vents set to maximum, we opened the doors of the range, we tried bellows. But still we couldn’t raise the temperature of the water in the boiler above 35°C. And by the time the pumps moved the water to the radiators – via what appeared to be close on ten miles of pipes – that tempe
rature dropped to the low twenties.
If we both clustered around the lounge radiator we could keep our hands warm – but little else.
So we gave up on the radiators and moved our lounge into the kitchen. If we couldn’t use the range to heat the radiators we could at least use it to heat the kitchen.
Couldn’t we?
I turned the range to chicken and we huddled around the oven in the evenings, sat back in our chairs with our feet resting on the hob. It wasn’t what you could call hot but it wasn’t cold either. With the oven doors open you could almost call it pleasant.
But a kitchen is not a lounge. Even with a settee and a couple of chairs pulled through it wasn’t the same. I’d had the lounge cabled for television, I’d set up the speakers for the stereo, all our tapes and records were there.
After a few nights of warmth in the kitchen listening to BBC Radio Four go in and out of phase we moved back to the lounge. We had to get that fire going.
oOo
So the next day we bought a flue hatch from a hardware shop in Aurignac and attacked the chimneybreast in our bedroom.
Once started upon a course of action you either give up or see it through to the end. We were not in a giving-up frame of mind. It was us or the fire.
We made a guess as to where we thought the brush might have lodged, drew a square on the wallpaper and then attacked it with an angle-grinder. After all, it would be handy to have access to the flue without having to climb onto the roof.
After an inch of soft plaster we found the brick flue. A few minutes later we were shining a torch into the blackness. Up and down we shone the light, where was the brush?
There!
It was a foot or so below the hatch. I reached in and pulled it out. Success!
It had lodged where the square brick flue of the bedroom met the smaller angled metal flue from the lounge. I couldn’t see any other obstruction and both flues looked clean – at least, as clean as any chimney can. Whatever was wrong with the fire, it wasn’t the chimney.
Which meant it had to be something else.
Which meant another close look at the fire.
Which meant another five minutes kneeling in front of the insert with my head stuck inside the firebox waiting for inspiration to strike.
Could I take it apart? Could I combine the six smaller flues into one larger one? And why was the air being directed up through the ash-layer? For that to work, the ash would have to be less fine.
Like coal.
Was the fire designed to burn coal?
oOo
And so began our search for coal. Which, amazingly, does not exist in South-West France.
“Charbon? Pourquoi?” we would be asked by incredulous shopkeepers. Apparently we were living in a log burning region. Wood was cheap and plentiful. Why would anyone want coal?
Further enquiry elicited the response that perhaps someone near Cazeres might stock it. Cazeres being mentioned in the kind of hushed tones that implied it was just the kind of place where anomalous acts such as the burning of coal might still be practised.
A trip to Cazeres was met with further incredulity. “Charbon? Pourquoi?”
It was in danger of becoming a catch-phrase.
After turning down charcoal – I think they thought we were planning a barbecue – we returned home, fuelless.
I still do not know what is wrong with our French.
We’d spend hours in preparation. Working out what we were going to say, looking up all the words in the dictionary, cobbling the sentences together. Trying to make sure they elucidated simple responses like oui or non. And when that was impossible we made a list of all the likely replies and made rough translations.
It was like writing a scene from a play. We had the whole conversation written down and scripted. And then brimming with confidence we’d pick up the phone or march into the office, out would come our first question and everyone would start ad libbing.
Even our simple questions that couldn’t possibly merit an answer other than yes or no somehow managed to breach a dam full of unexpected sentences.
It was as though we were standing over them with a gong trying to catch them out – yes and no suddenly disappeared from their vocabulary. In the end we had to show them the script and point to what they were supposed to say.
“Do you sell coal?”
“Charbon? Pourquoi?”
“No, not ’charbon, pourquoi?’ The only possible answer is yes or no. Look, I’ve written it down.”
“Non.”
“Yes I have. It’s here.”
“Charbon?”
“I know - Pourquoi?” And by that time I couldn’t think of a good reason for burning coal either.
I think the French are just naturally inquisitive. They want to know the full context of your enquiry before telling you that you can’t have it. Then they come up with a long list of what you really need and baffle you even more.
oOo
Time to call in the experts.
We’d seen a cheminée showroom on the outskirts of St. Gaudens. Perhaps they could help us. Or failing that, know where we could buy coal.
It was a large showroom, abounding with inserts, ranges and mock fireplaces of every description. Surely they had to have one like ours?
We checked them all, kneeling down and pushing our heads inside for a good look. What kind of flue did they have, what kind of grate, how did they arrange the ash box.
In hindsight we must have looked pretty strange, knelt down in front of fires and ovens with our heads inside, looking more like opportunist suicides than potential customers.
But we made some interesting discoveries. The first one being that our fire was not normal. All the shop’s inserts had the flue placed at the highest point of the fire-box. Ours wasn’t. Its highest point was at the front by the doors. Which might explain why the smoke was directed forwards and into the room.
And no other design had six small flues or that ridiculously small grate. They used every inch of the fire box – after all they were designed to burn logs, not twigs.
But most important of all we found a catalogue containing all the latest design research on cheminée technology. This was exactly what we wanted. It showed us how to install an insert. It had diagrams. It had words we could translate. Words unfettered by interlocking ’r’s or extraneous questions.
We didn’t bother to ask for coal after that. After all, charbon, pourquoi?
oOo
Back home, I studied the cheminée designs in greater detail.
Instead of using up the warm air in the lounge, they suggested taking cold air from outside and ducting that into the fire. Very sensible.
Didn’t we have a strange hole in the outside wall behind the fire?
We went outside to check.
We did.
Or, more accurately, we had. We’d noticed it the first day, couldn’t work out what it was, couldn’t think of a good reason for having it, came up with several good reasons for not having it. And blocked it up.
Could that be why the fire smoked?
More tests. Ash box in, hole unblocked, brick out; ash box out, left leg in...
Thirty minutes later we staggered into the sunlight like a pair of kippers. Clouds of smoke hung eerily inside the lounge, flies coughed on the window-sills.
But we had noticed a difference. With the hole unblocked we could successfully channel cold air from the outside directly into the lounge. The ash box cleverly prevented it from reaching the fire.
The more I looked at the design of the fire the more I came to the conclusion that I was looking at the log-burning equivalent of the toilet at the bottom of the stairs.
This was not a commercially available fire.
This was the product of a creative householder and his tool box.
A creative householder of rare genius. Someone who’d managed to bring all the ingredients of state-of-the-art cheminée design and make it his own. He’d taken cold air from t
he outside, fed it into the lounge, let it circulate for a while then exchanged it for smoke.
The only item he’d missed was the recuperator system to pump the smoke throughout the house.
Perhaps that was next year’s project?
The inventor of Meccano has a lot to answer for.
oOo
But the evenings were getting warmer. Or was it the fact that we’d discovered the joys of wearing two pairs of trousers? With my track suit bottoms over my jeans and two thick sweaters, it was almost pleasant.
In the latter weeks of March we remembered our ski clothes – even better. We would watch TV in our salopettes. Luckily no one ever rang the doorbell on those nights. I’m not sure what they’d have thought, having the door opened by a couple who looked as if they’d just stepped off a ski-lift.
But we were warm and gradually the nights were becoming warmer too.
And we were not going to spend another winter with that fire. It had to go. Which it did. A few months later with the help of a sledgehammer.
We now have a log-burner and have reintroduced the word warm into our winter vocabulary.
Pipes and Plombiers
“Cavagnac? Cavagnac! Le voleur de la Montagne!”
I don’t think the plumber liked our house’s previous owner.
“La grande merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! MERDE!”
We waited. I didn’t think there were any more merdes but there was a lot of muttering and, I suspect, some spitting, along with the mandatory arm waving and even more colourful expletives. From what we could understand our plumber would never have come to our house if he’d known who the previous owner had been.
Eventually we calmed him down long enough to hear about his friend’s house and how it had been a Cavagnac, the aforementioned ‘Thief of the Mountains’ and All-Pyrenean Grande Merde, who had caused the damage. Everything had had to be ripped out, and never – never – would he have anything to do with that man again.
There was another bout of merdes and spitting on the ground. Plus a ritual grinding of the spittle into our tarmac drive with the toe of his boot. This was a pretty impressive demonstration of Gallic dislike and I dreaded what would happen if our previous owner took this moment to return to his old house and pay the new tenants a visit.