by Mike Pannett
‘I can help,’ I said. ‘It’d be good practice for me.’
Dad was ignoring me too.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen these contractors at work. They’re not to be trusted. Soon as they’ve got their bit done they’re off – and leave you to make good. They rip up floorboards and skirting-boards, bang holes through the wall. The place is never the same again. No, if we’re going to have the place turned upside down I’d rather do it my own way. At least it’ll be our mess, and we’ll be able to fix it in due course.’
‘I can help,’ I repeated. ‘I’m really good at knocking things down.’
‘Oh, do be quiet,’ Mum said. ‘This isn’t a game. You can help by eating up your breakfast and going out to play. I’m sure your father doesn’t want you children under his feet all day.’
I slid off my chair, put my bowl in the old pot sink and stamped my way through to the living room. I could never understand grown-ups. Always going on about making yourself useful, and then when you offer to help they tell you you’re in the way.
I slumped on the settee, between the girls. Oh well, at least it was Saturday morning. We could settle down and watch Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on the telly – or was it Banana Splits? Whatever it was I could guarantee Gillian would want something else. Still, it wasn’t all bad news: a fight with my sister would liven things up.
The great central heating scheme would take a full calendar year and it would turn the place upside-down, just as Mum feared it would. But what fun it was – at least at the beginning.
Mum had decided that she didn’t want to be around when the dust started flying. She took the bus into York and went shopping. Dad decided that he could use a willing pair of hands after all, and although my job wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for – it was he who climbed up the step-ladder and swung the fourteen-pound hammer, leaving me to collect the bricks off the floor and pile them in the wheelbarrow – I still felt I was in on the fun. I got to tie a handkerchief round my nose and mouth and pretend I was a bandit breaking into a bank vault, and that Dad was going to uncover a stack of gold bars and make us all rich.
The old range, he reckoned, hadn’t been used in years, and as he dismantled the chimney, brick by brick, so he brought down an avalanche of soot, a tangle of old twigs – and a dead rook.
‘Wow! Look at that!’ I grabbed the bird, shook the dust off its threadbare wings and tried to open and close its beak. ‘Can I have this, Dad? I can stuff it and take it into school and then it can go in a museum like that one we went to at Hutton le Hole. And maybe they’ll put my name on it so that everyone’ll know – ’
‘Ugh! Put it down. You’ll catch …’ Christine had come into the kitchen and was pulling her I’m-about-to-bring-my-food-up face. ‘It’s disgusting, that is. You’re bound to catch something. It’s unclean.’
Phil had followed her in. ‘Unclean, unclean,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch the plague, won’t he, Dad? The Black Death, most likely. Your face’ll come out in big red blebs and you’ll start choking and you’ll have to go around ringing a bell to warn people. Unclean, unclean.’
‘Yeah, and after that,’ Christine said, ‘you’ll die a horrible death. This time next week we’ll be digging you a special grave – about twenty feet deep so that nobody else catches it. They have special pits for plague victims. We learned about it on our trip to York.’
‘’Cos they’re unclean … unclean …’ When Phil got hold of an idea he hated to let go of it. As I dropped the dead bird to the floor Phil grinned and asked, ‘Can you leave me your Thunderbirds collection in your will? To sell, like. I could do with a bit of extra cash. Go on, I’ll write you a receipt right now.’
‘Now then you two, enough of that.’ Dad had come down off his stepladder. ‘If you want to make yourselves useful I can find you a job.’
But they didn’t. They were off. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, Michael, they’re only trying to get you worked up.’ He looked at the dead rook. ‘But they have a point. You really shouldn’t handle dead things without gloves on. Best stick it in the barrow, eh?’
It didn’t take Dad long to do his part of the job. In fact, I could see why he’d chosen it: it was dead easy. The bricks came tumbling down in clusters as he swung his mighty hammer. I couldn’t wait for him to slip out for a crafty smoke so that I could have a go. But he never did, not until he’d got it all down.
Barrowing the debris out into the yard was what took the time. After the first few runs my arms started aching and each load became gradually smaller and smaller. But we got there, and when Mum came home from town there was a huge expanse of bare brickwork where the chimney-breast used to be, and Dad was busy working out how to dismantle the range itself.
‘My goodness. Look at you two.’ Mum was shaking her head. ‘And just look at my kitchen. It looks like a bomb’s hit it.’ She inspected her watch. ‘And what are we going to do for our tea? I can’t cook in here.’
Dad looked around the room, and ran a finger over the draining-board where the dust lay thick and black.
‘This stuff gets everywhere, I’m afraid. I thought we’d all go for fish and chips.’
‘I think we shall have to,’ Mum said, ‘but not until you two have hosed yourselves down.’
By this time I’d seen myself in the big hall mirror. I didn’t want to get washed. I rather liked my new chimney-sweep look. My face was black, my hair was stiff with dust and had turned grey, and I had white rings around my eyes. I took out a filthy hanky and blew my nose. This was too good a chance to miss. I went into the sitting-room where the girls were watching gymnastics on Grandstand.
‘Wanna see what came out of my nose?’ I said. ‘It’s all black. Here.’
‘Go away!’ they shrieked.
Winding those girls up was a sure way to have a good laugh – and so easy. However, there was no chance of Mum letting me go to the chippy looking like this. I trudged across to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. Nothing.
‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Look, I can’t wash. There’s no water.’
‘No water?’ Mum looked at me, then at Dad. ‘What’ve you done?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Safety precaution. Won’t be a moment.’ And with that he dived under the sink, picked up a huge spanner and restored the supply. ‘Now go and get washed, as your mother told you,’ he said.
This demolition job was just the beginning, a minor disruption amongst many more. Over the next few months – and right through another freezing winter – we learned to live with holes in the ceilings, holes in the walls and no-go areas where Dad had lifted the floorboards to expose the black earth below us. Lengths of copper pipe lay along the hallway or were stacked in convenient corners. A collection of dusty radiators arrived in a van and were piled up in the kitchen by two mysterious men wearing donkey-jackets with leather shoulders. Dad said they were friends of his and he’d done a deal with them. All weekend, just about every weekend, sometimes right into the night, the house echoed to the sound of sawing and drilling, clanging and banging – not to mention the odd muffled curse as Dad struggled to remove hundred-year-old nails from thick, warped floorboards.
All through these upheavals, we did our best to stay warm, piling coal on the living room fire every night and sitting as close as we could without scorching ourselves. Yet no matter how near we were to the blaze, Purdy, Petra and Rosie always managed to squeeze their way in front of us to stare into the flames, half asleep, as we ran our hands over them to check that they hadn’t actually caught fire.
Most nights Mum and Dad would damp the fire down with a bucketfull of coal dust. The idea was that all you had to do in the morning was give it a good poke and it would come back to life. That worked, most of the time, but when the wind was in a certain direction it would blaze up in the night and we’d come downstairs, shivering, to find a hearth full of pale grey ashes.
And so I learned how to light a fire from scratch, rolling up sheet after sheet of newspaper a
nd making little doughnut-shaped rings, adding whatever sticks I could find around the place, and carefully piling small pieces of coal on top. I learned, too, to get a good draught by holding a big sheet of newspaper across the fireplace – and to let go, quickly, when it went up in flames.
Sometimes I managed the boy-scout trick, lighting the fire with a single match. Sometimes I failed. What I wanted was to be allowed to use the paraffin can that was stored in the outhouse, but I knew that was against the rules. Rules, however, are made to be broken.
It was a Sunday morning, and a very cold one. It wasn’t quite light when I woke up. Everybody else was fast asleep, or pretending to be. I pulled back the curtain a few inches and saw frost patterns all over the window. I leaned forward, opened my mouth and breathed out, melting a small circle to see through. Outside the trees were decorated a ghostly white. There was a long icicle hanging from the overflow pipe that jutted out from the wall of the privy. I shivered, put on a sweater and my slippers, picked up my pot from under the bed, and went downstairs to stir the fire into life.
Whoever had banked it up the night before had clearly overdone it. They’d suffocated it. Just to make sure, I took the poker and thrust it into the mound of lifeless coal-dust. Nothing. Just a minor landslide that formed a conical pile on the cold hearth. With my teeth chattering, I weighed up the chances of getting the fire going again without rebuilding it, completely. No. It wouldn’t work.
I went to the foot of the stairs and listened. There was a gentle, rhythmic snoring coming from Mum and Dad’s room. Otherwise all was silent. Purdy slid past my bare leg as I turned around, went to the back door, unlocked it and made my way to the outhouse. I opened the door as quietly as I could, picked up the can of paraffin, and hurried back indoors, grinning as I imagined how grateful they’d all be for this, waking up to a blazing fire and a nice warm house. I sloshed paraffin into the fireplace and watched it disappear into the mound of black dust. Maybe a little more then. Splosh. Which also vanished. One more for luck. Splosh. I put the can to one side and reached up to the mantelpiece for the matches.
I must have mentioned it earlier, how I like a good fire. The bigger the flames, the better. This one was a five-star job. I struck the red-headed match on the brick surround, just the way a cowboy would, leaving a long red streak. It flared into life. I leaned forward and applied it to the moribund fire. There was a deep, soft whoomph! and up she went, a column of yellow flames that reached out and singed my eyebrows before roaring up the chimney.
I stayed where I was for a minute or two, glorying in the success of my efforts. Then I darted into the hallway. Maybe I ought to wake Phil and show him what I’d managed to do. But then I thought, no, all the better if he comes down late and sees me with a plate full of hot buttered toast, stuffing myself.
I squatted down at the hearth once more, reaching out my hands, relishing the warmth that enveloped me. Then I went out to the kitchen pantry, cut myself a fat slice of bread and dug out the toasting-fork. Armed with that, and the butter, I waited for the flames to settle down.
I was dimly conscious of a strange, muffled roaring sound coming from the chimney, but assumed it was nothing more than the draught – always a sign of a good fire, Dad said.
It was only when a big lump of something soft fell onto the fire and landed in the grate, smothering my bread, that the first wave of doubt washed through me. I looked at the little red dots that danced over the scattered soot. Oh dear, I thought. Oh dear.
I dashed into the kitchen and headed for the back door, but I didn’t need to go outside. Through the window I could see a turbid yellow-and-grey fog tumbling down from above and swamping the yard.
I raced into the hallway and took the stairs three at a time.
‘Mum! Dad!’ I shouted. ‘The chimney’s on fire! Quick! The whole house is going to – ’
Fortunately for me, Dad was at his imperturbable best. He appeared at his bedroom door just as Phil, Gillian and Christine spilled out onto the landing. ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ And he walked calmly down the stairs, fastening his thick dressing gown around him. The others followed, Mum too. Phil dashed ahead, poked his head into the living room, then turned back and looked at me.
‘You’ve done it now,’ he said. ‘You’ve really done it, mate.’
The others followed him into the room. They looked frightened. Sleepy but frightened.
Dad took a look at the fire, and the small mound of soot that had now spilled all over the hearth. He crouched down and tried to look up the chimney, but the heat drove him back.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it looks as though you could be right, Michael. About the chimney, I mean. But it’s built of good sturdy bricks. The house should be all right.’
Then he stared at it for a moment more, let out a thoughtful ‘ah’, and turned on his heel, making for the back door.
I followed him outside into the yard, shivering with fear as much as the cold, and coughing as the thick, tarry cloud filled the air around us. The others clustered in the doorway, wafting the smoke away from their faces. Petra shot out from the kitchen and darted down the yard, her tail between her legs. Rosie followed. Dad was walking slowly backwards, trying to get a good view of the chimney.
‘Well, your diagnosis is correct,’ he said. ‘It’s well ablaze. Come on, inside with you or you’ll freeze to death. We need to get on the phone.’
What followed was about as exciting as a Sunday could get in those days, when everything was shut all day and the highlight – after the roast dinner and a steamed pudding – was some ancient black-and-white film or The Big Match. I remember standing and watching as Dad dialled the magical number, 9 … 9 … 9, waiting to hear what he said. I remembered how Phil had dared me to do it one time in the public call-box just across the way, and called me chicken when I refused. Dad was through to the fire brigade and explaining, very calmly, that we had a chimney fire – and no, there was nobody in danger, and he thought that it might burn itself out, but there were the neighbours to think of. I couldn’t believe he was being so calm. In books, when a chimney caught fire, everything went up in smoke and the chapter always ended with a little drawing of a pile of charred timbers and a curlicue of smoke. Now we stood there, watching in rapt silence as Dad replaced the receiver.
Nobody spoke – not aloud, that is; but Phil whispered in my ear, ‘You’re gonna be in for it, you are. Trying to burn the house down. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.’
I didn’t need Phil to tell me that trouble was brewing. It always seemed to when I tried to help, but right now I was far more concerned with the imminent arrival of a big, red, shiny fire-engine. I’d seen one at Malton Show the previous summer and added ‘fireman’ to the growing list of things I wanted to be when I left school. The idea of one coming to our house, bells ringing, was making me shake all the more – with anticipation rather than cold this time.
‘When d’you think it’ll get here?’ I asked. ‘Will they be sliding down that pole now, d’you think? Will they put a ladder up?’ No answer. ‘And where will they get the water from? Will it mean they put the fire out too?’
I was concerned about the fire. It seemed to me that even if I was punished for setting the chimney ablaze I ought to get some credit for getting such a good fire going.
‘Oh, do be quiet, Michael.’ Mum grabbed hold of my shoulders and steered me towards the foot of the stairs. ‘Go and get dressed, and the rest of you. I don’t want an army of firemen trooping in here and thinking I let you lie in bed all morning.’
Dad looked at his watch.
‘To be fair, dear,’ he said, ‘it is Sunday and it is only twenty past seven.’
But Mum was in a determined frame of mind.
‘Never mind that, you children do as I say. Now.’
There were no bells, which was a disappointment, and the first we knew that the fire brigade had arrived was when they knocked on the front door and asked us if we had any carpets to take up, becaus
e they were going to put water down the chimney. Luckily, Dad had been working on a pipe-run in the living room, so it was bare boards in there. I watched, fascinated, as the men in uniform unwound the great fat hose, extended the ladder, and sent one of their number up to the chimney with the hose trailing behind him. When he gave the order there was a lot of hissing, a huge cloud of steam blew into the front room, and there was a fireman commandeering the wheelbarrow and loading it up with a sodden mound of hot soot.
The fire tender wasn’t with us for more than half an hour or so, and I wasn’t able to get into the cab as I had at Malton Show, but as our neighbours gathered around it I stood there telling the tale of how it all came about. I was re-telling it for the third time, and starting to paint myself as the hero of the hour, when Mum came out, clipped me round the ear and told me to get back inside and start cleaning up the mess I’d caused.
Dad eventually got the heating system rigged up in time for the following winter, and replaced the open fire with a log-burner for high days and holidays.
As we revelled in the novelty of having warm, dry towels, constant hot water and an actual shower over the bath, there was a bit of excitement when the lads who’d delivered the cheap radiators featured in a newspaper story about thefts from a warehouse down at a trading estate on the outskirts of York, but Dad assured Mum that ours were from a reputable source. Those fellows, he said, were just the delivery team. I don’t think she believed him, but she settled for that version of events and it was never mentioned again.
So now we were fully up to date, and friends called in to marvel at the hot radiators – and the fact that we could play in our rooms in midwinter and take our coats off.
My punishment for setting the chimney on fire? Well, that was an odd one. I was actually barred from one of the chores that everyone else moaned about: early-morning fire duties.
The Mysterious Hut
I don’t know why it took us so long to discover the place. We’d been going to Staintondale for our holidays for as long as we could remember, and it seemed as though we’d always been left free to explore the surrounding woods and fields, and the many byways that led off the path that wound down to Hayburn Wyke. But somehow we’d never come across the hut before.