Fire seems so intrinsic to human existence that we always feel more alive, somehow, when we are in the presence of fire. I've no idea how different this feels for people who have experienced the unpleasant side of fire, but for me the need to respect it, as well as to be enlivened by it, is all part of the magic.
An old house cannot really be true to itself without fire. The Victorian house, to my mind, is designed around a few fairly simple principles:
1. Shelter from the weather - in its original form the Victorian house is not especially good at this, prone as it is to draughty windows, leaky roof/wall connections and damp cellars, but nevertheless it fulfils the basic human need for shelter;
2. Front - generally the Victorians provided you with a grand front door and entrance way and a prestigious front reception room, even if the rest of the house was thrown together from bits of old rubble and driftwood held together with sand and horsehair - so it's relatively easy to show off;
3. Fresh air - the Victorians were obsessed with fresh air, despite the fact that outside air was usually anything but clean, and inside buildings this reflected itself in the high ceilings and sliding sash windows, which enabled fumes and soot from gas lighting and wheezing children to rise to the tops of rooms and be whisked out thanks to bracing draughts;
4. Fire - chimneys form the structural buttressing of the Victorian house, most rooms had open fires for warmth, and coal was delivered via a chute in the cellar, burned at will in vastly inefficient dog grates, and ornate chimney pots celebrated the affluent disposal of dirty exhaust gases into the city air;
5. Servants - if you could afford servants, they'd do your cooking and laundry in a miniscule corner of your house, and sleep in the draughty attic. If you couldn't afford servants, you'd soon learn to live like them, discovering how small a space it was possible to cook and clean your own stuff in.
Modern needs may have forced us to rebel against the tiny kitchens and sculleries, but the other principles seem to hold true to what we enjoy about living in old houses. However, the challenge of heating these big, tall rooms has taken us through the 20th century's era of big, clunky central heating systems, style-free gas fires, electric panel heaters, and "living flame effects" and has now rekindled our love of fire, but in the cleaner, more controlled guise of enclosed stoves with recirculating combustion chambers that minimise smoke emissions and create much more efficient heating than open fires.
In this, our first - and mercifully mild - winter in this house, we've survived almost exclusively on our Morso woodfuel stove. It has worked flat out while there is no other heating in the house, and because we're only living on one floor, it has coped OK. But the really interesting thing has been the way that lighting and feeding the stove has defined the rhythm of our day-to-day lives now for almost five months, in a way that we hadn't anticipated. It takes planning to make sure the wood supply is adequate, time to clean and prepare the stove, and practice and experience to work out how best to set the fire and work it up from cold into a proper inferno, and keep it going until bedtime. You learn to look at a scrap of wood, or a bit of log, and gauge how well and for how long it will burn. You look at junk mail in a new light - "Look darling, someone's sent us some more firelighters!" And often it is much more fun to sit and watch the fire than to see what's on TV.
The question of how "green" a woodstove is is a difficult one - really it must depend on the management of the source of the wood. Burning bits of old floorboarding and stud walling is kind of using up embodied energy in the building, and that can only go on for so long - but it has helped us through our first winter. However, it is hard to imagine a house like this without a real fire in it. One of the most intriguing things, though, is seeing how many bits of wood it takes to keep you warm for an evening, and completely re-evaluating the unthinking act of turning a thermostat up or down on a modern heating system, or putting the washing machine on. Suddenly each turn of that dial becomes directly related to the idea that somewhere, a few miles away, an extraordinarily big and fearfully hot fire is burning to supply domestic energy. Being closer to the fire brings you face to face with the basic issue of how to keep warm, and I don't want to forget that when the central heating is back.
No comments:
Post a Comment