December 2003 Issue - Essay # 4
Our
Fire
By
Helen Keville
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It
was my dad’s job to light the fire each morning.
From an early age, maybe four or five, I realised the day
couldn’t begin properly until the cold bite was gone from the air.
I was allowed to watch dad at work each day, the cuffs of his white
shirt rolled up out of the way, his thick fringe of hair--not yet Bryl-creamed--hanging over his thin face.
That’s how I learned just how temperamental our fire was.
Persuading it to light, without making himself late for work, was
dad’s daily frustration. Dad
had his own Method of lighting the fire.
He was an engineer and he believed it was best to tackle a problem
scientifically. First, he
cleared the ashes out of the dead fire.
That was the messiest job of all.
He had to kneel down very low to brush the ash and grit out of the
tray under the grate. This job
had to be done thoroughly, no half measures, but as he brushed, dad always
hissed impatiently through the cigarette he had hanging between his lips.
He hated dirt so early in the morning. While
he was doing this, I started work on the newspapers that were going into
the clean grate. This was a
special feature of dad’s method. I
had to take a single sheet of newspaper, roll it into a thin tube, and
then twist it into a knot. He
needed a dozen or more of these knots of paper, to build a nest at the
foundation of his new fire. "You
see, you need lots of air circulating around the paper when the fire first
catches," he explained as he carefully piled them on top of each other. Next,
he laid old bits of wood across the paper, to support the coal.
Coal was still delivered to the house by the coalman, who carried
the ragged sacks one by one from his lorry to the coalhouse by the back
door. The quality of our
coalman’s coal was one factor dad could not control, much as he would
have liked to, but he always inspected each piece suspiciously before
placing it on his fire. It
couldn’t be too damp or too flaky, that would stop the fire catching.
By now he was getting quite tense.
If he picked the wrong coal, he would be late for work. Now
came the difficult part, getting the fire to light. Dad
struck a few matches and poked them into the newspapers at the bottom of
the fire. Usually they smoked
a little, but promised little else. Dad
laid his cigarette on an ashtray and dropped to his hands and knees again,
to blow on the smouldering paper. Sometimes
a few feeble flames sprang up, mostly they didn’t. Glancing
at the clock, he lit the fire again. More
smoke, then nothing. The next
time he lit it, dad told me to quickly find a double sheet of newspaper.
As soon as the lit matches were in place, he held the sheet across
the whole fireplace, to force a draught of air up the chimney.
It was supposed to be so fierce that no reluctant fire could resist
bursting into life. On
a really bad day, dad had to dismantle the fire completely.
Muttering crossly to himself, he piled up the lumps of coal, wood
and newspaper knots on the hearth before starting all over again. Sooner
or later, proper flames finally leapt up the chimney.
Dad always allowed himself a few minutes sitting on his heels while
he finished off his cigarette. Then,
when he was sure his fire was crackling away strongly enough to send the
first hint of warm air into the room, he flicked his cigarette end into
the flames and left to get ready for work.
The day could begin at last. |
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Author's Biography I live in
E-mail Helen at hrkeville@hotmail.com
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Essay
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