Sleepers

Unlike many people today, I grew up with fires. In County Antrim in the early 1960s it was unusual to have central heating. There was none in my parents' house. Instead, an anthracite stove burned day and night in the kitchen. It provided a hob and oven for cooking, hot water for baths, and lent a trace of background warmth to all the rooms. Before we went on holiday, the fire at its metal heart was allowed to die. Coming back, as soon as we opened the front door, the house felt saturated with an unaccustomed iciness. The chill only lifted once the stove had been relit and was burning steadily enough to provide the core of warmth we were so used to. Its absence made the house seem not our own. It was my mother, mostly, who tended the stove's enclosed fire of anthracite embers, though we all knew how to rake and empty the ash-pan, and pour in fresh fuel from the hod. We occasionally relieved her of these chores, but in truth she preferred to trust her own sure hand.

The room we sat in was heated by an open fire. The fireplace was set in a tiled hearth that was framed by a mahogany mantelpiece. The coal fire was only lit on winter evenings, or in the afternoon on special occasions—if guests were coming, or at Christmas. Although it was a coal fire, getting it to light was heavily dependent upon wood. Firelighters—those paraffin-soaked tablets of white, slow-burning wax—were viewed with contempt. My father saw them as a kind of cheating, employed only by the lazy or inept. He prided himself on being able to set a fire with crumpled newspaper, kindling he'd chopped himself, and coal expertly arranged on this carefully constructed pyre, then getting it to light with the strike of just one match.

If, unusually, a fire faltered and went out, it was taken as a reflection of the fire-setter's ability, however much it might have been due to poor coal, damp kindling, or a soot-fall from the chimney smothering the initial flames. A failed fire cast a pall about the house that was deeper than the temporary absence of heat, or the nuisance of resetting, could account for. It was as if an adverse judgment had been passed on the setter's mastery of an elemental skill. The unspoken mix of disappointment and disapproval that accompanied unsuccessful fires made it feel as if you hadn't measured up against a venerable tradition; that you couldn't be relied on and had somehow let the side down. There was a lot more tied up in our fires than just providing warmth.

________

I don't think my father ever delivered anything as self-conscious as a lesson. But as a small boy I witnessed fire-making so often that I soon absorbed its essential processes by means of that invisible osmosis by which so much passes from one generation to another. As well as learning how to lay a latticework of sticks on top of a layer of crumpled paper, and how to arrange pieces of coal of the right size upon the aerated platform thus constructed, I dutifully absorbed the view that firelighters were wrong. Even today, although I know there's no basis for this judgment, I look askance at those who use them, almost as if they are guilty of some petty crime.

Buying bundles of ready-cut kindling was also frowned on. Like using firelighters, such kindling was seen as symptomatic of the kind of laxity that suggested little moral fiber. My father viewed such purchases as a dereliction of duty: the cutting of essential corners and a deceitful taking of the easy, lazy way.

At the time, I simply absorbed such opinions automatically. It didn't occur to me to question them. It was years before I realized that along with the basic practicalities of fire-making I was imbibing a set of values that had nothing to do with chopping wood and arranging paper, sticks, and coal together so that...