Frost, but not in May

Having been off for over a week now lounging about recovering, I have masses of stuff charging about in my head, and think it's best some of it is offloaded soon.

The lounging about was due to my having been much more tired than I thought I was going to be after my nose op. The op itself went well. The only alarming thing was a tendency to sneezing fits, which, when the inside of your nose is held together by whatever is the modern day equivalent of catgut, are worrying. My surgeon could obviously teach Matron a thing or two about good strong sewing, as I am still in one piece. It's just as well I was not the one doing the sewing: needlework is not one of my skills, and it was the exam I failed most spectacularly in my school career (26%).

But back to the frost. This week fuel prices have shot up enormously. During previous increases, husband and I have talked about what we might do: turn heating off in the bedrooms; rely on the woodburner; strap ourselves to the Aga. The difference is that this time we really mean it.

Thinking about it, it's not that long ago that central heating over the whole house became normal. I was born in the 1960s, and it wasn't until I was just about to leave home in 1980 that my parents had full central heating. Before this, we had huge brown storage heaters, which sat in most of the rooms; great heavy useless toads, sulkingly keeping any warmth they'd generated during the night to themselves. They had stern messages on forbidding us from putting anything on them; not, we thought because this would stop any warmth from coming out: it was far more likely the heaters would suck in and destroy anything left on them. That was the sort of beast they were.

So, we used to retreat in winter. Most of the house was unused, and we would hole up during the day in one room, which had a solid fuel boiler, and just about enough room for a sofa and a table. And there we stayed until the weather finally warmed, surrounded by the 1970s splendour of a glass fibre brown carpet, our lovely sofa: a virulently green and yellow thing my father's ex-wife had chucked out, and curtains in fetching blocks of ochre and orange.

There was not a lot of choice about family togetherness then: we scrapped and fought, did homework; painted, read but unless things became intolerable we put up with each other as it was better than facing the freezing wastes of the rest of the house.




The house was achingly cold in winter. I used to have six blankets and two quilts on my bed. Baths were interesting in a bathroom with a huge 1930s cast iron bath which our hopelessly inadequate water heater could spittingly manage to cover to a 2 inch depth, while the temperature of the rest of the room was affected not at all by one of those wall mounted radiant heaters which look as if they're doing a decent job, but aren't. We had ice pictures on the inside of the windows all the time (though even this chilliness wasn't as bad as one of my student houses in Sheffield: my hot water bottle froze, and it was still in the bed with me). But ice pictures were beautiful: they were something we looked forward to in winter.

Heat, or the lack of it, had its place in literature. One description I remember with particular fondness is from Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse. During the bitingly cold journey to Moonacre:

"Maria clasped her hands sightly inside her muff, and Miss Heliotrope clasped hers under her cloak, and they set their teeth and endured."

Which is a far cry from the heated luxury we travel in now.

"...the fireplace was the tinest she had ever seen, deeply recessed in the wall It was big enough for the fire of pine-cones and apple wood that burned in it, filing the room with fragrance.

But when Maria started to explore her room she found that it was not without luxuries. Over the fireplace was a shelf, and on it stood a blue wooden box filled with dainty biscuits with sugar flowers on them, in case she should feel hungry between meals. And beside the fireplace stood a big basket filled with more logs and pine-cones - enough to keep her fire burning all through the night."

To me, as a child whose bedroom fire was never lighted (but neither was anyone's: we all shared the spartan chill), this was the ultimate in luxury. I absolutely knew how marvellous it would be to come into your bedroom; not just a downstairs room, but your bedroom, and find it warm, warm all the time, and with provision to keep it that way.

The sort of biting winter cold in Keats' The Eve of St Agnes certainly meant something to me when I read the poem for the first time for A level. We were lucky enough to be able to afford to heat at least one room, but I could imagine easily what it would be like for the upstairs chill to be permanent, and everywhere.

"St Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith."

Cold doesn't make much of an appearance in modern literature unless it's a travel book and the chill is one reason why you went there in the first place, or unless disaster has befallen you. So, I suppose with the coming cold, we will at least have a much keener appreciation of Mrs Norris' witchiness in keeping Fanny Price's room at Mansfield Park unheated, and maybe books yet to be written will have more lyrical descriptions of being warm, and the horror of grinding cold about which you can do very little.