The cottage chimney was bricked up.
My father was ahead of his time. Our new extension, complete with electric underfloor heating, was in place just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. The price of electricity shot up faster than heat up a chimney. The next six years (when, aged 10–16, my powers of recall were sharpest and my temperament most vindictive) saw strike after strike, power cut after power cut, culminating in the Three Day Week and the Winter of Discontent. Now, the all-electric house, without electricity, has a chilly comfortlessness that’s all its own. With heating under the floor, there are no radiators to hug. I remember long, cold, dark evenings spent hunched round a Valor paraffin heater, as we tried to conserve our torch batteries. I left home fixated with radiators, Agas and roaring pot-bellied stoves; but most of all with dear, friendly, filthy, high-maintenance, chronically inefficient, open fires.
As it transpired, my mother, as she got older, softened in this area, getting me to draw the curtains close on miserable days, wrapping herself in blankets and hugging the electric fire. ‘Granny-bugging’, she called it. And even my father had the temerity recently to declare that he likes open fires—‘in other people’s houses’.*
So, a fire and logs to go on it. With Tair-Ffynnon the archetypal lonely mountain cottage, a near-perfect enactment of almost every literary evocation of the granny-bugging fantasy, it clearly centred around an open fire, but for one small hitch. It didn’t have one. It was patently meant to have one. There was a big stone chimney breast rising out of the sitting room. But the traditional cottage grate and bread oven were long gone, replaced by a tinny metal water heater connected by pipes to the hot water tank.
One of the first tasks with which the ‘tidy’ builders we’d engaged were charged was to remove this excrescence and ‘open up’ the fireplace. With it gone, I waited with mounting impatience for my big moment: an open fire of my own. In preparation, we’d bought an old iron fireback in a salvage yard. This, with due solemnity, was placed in the hearth. I laid a fire, spreading the kindling into a neat pyramid, and struck a match. Almost immediately the room filled with smoke. It curled thickly out under the beam so it was clear none at all was going up the chimney. We endured it as long as we could until, eyes streaming, gasping for air, we had to stagger outside. Once the fire was doused and the smoke cleared, we peered up the chimney. We could see nothing. It was plainly blocked.
The following afternoon Frank the Sweep appeared with brushes and vacuum cleaners. The chimney was swept. No, he said, it wasn’t blocked, but it was a bit tarry, which could have made a difference. Anyway, it was all clear now. As his van departed, we tried again. Precisely the same happened as before. I rang round for advice. It was freely available and readily dispensed: almost certainly the wood was damp and the chimney cold. It just needed warming through: all we had to do was light a really good blaze, keep it going for at least an hour and the problem would be solved.
As it had been raining we didn’t have much in the way of dry wood, so we broke up some of the furniture that had been left behind by the previous owners. Pressing damp tea towels to our noses and mouths, we took turns to stoke the flames until they roared up the chimney so far sparks flew from the chimney pot. With such intensity of flame, it was true there was less smoke. But when we tried to light the fire the following time, it was just the same. More advice was solicited. ‘Screen the chimney breast,’ our experts said confidently. That was the standard procedure. So screen it we did. But however low we brought the screen (and we lowered it almost to the hearth itself), tendrils of smoke snaked determinedly under it into the room. ‘The opening should be more or less square,’ we were told, ‘with neither width nor height less than seventy-five per cent of the depth.’ I measured the fireplace and found this was already the case. ‘Raise the hearth: fires need air, for goodness sake.’ So we splurged £300 on a fine wrought iron grate and fire dogs to go with the fireback. And with like result. ‘Raise it further,’ we were briskly advised, as the smoke billowed forth no less prodigiously. So higher and higher we perched the iron basket, until it looked eccentric, then comic, then ludicrous and, finally, proving our advisers right, the fire no longer smoked. But that was only because it was out of sight up the chimney.
As the weeks passed our advisers’ confidence never slackened. ‘Try a hinged metal “damper” to block out cold air and rain.’ It made no difference. ‘It’ll smoke when the wind’s from the east,’ said someone else. ‘A lot of fires smoke when the wind’s from the east.’ And they were right, it did smoke when the wind was from the east. But as it came round, we were able to determine that the fire also smoked when the wind was from the west, and the south and the north. It even smoked when there was no wind at all. And on it went.*
We transferred our attentions from hearth to chimney. The chimney had been more messed about than the fireplace. The original, sturdy stone stack, when the house was enlarged, had been given mean, spindly brick extensions. But rebuilding the whole chimney was too expensive. Besides, fresh advice informed us that this was not the fundamental problem, which was almost certainly one of downdraught, caused by the position of the house relative to the rise of the hill and the prevailing wind. Just as we were about to despair, one day in the builders’ merchants a leaflet caught my eye. It advertised chimney cowls. And there, amongst the chimney cappers and birdguards, the lobster-back cowls and ‘H’ cowls, the flue outlets and ‘aspirotors’, was the very item for which we’d been searching:
In constant production for thirty years, the Aerodyne Cowl has abundantly proven its worth in curing downdraught, showing clearly that the laws of aerodynamics don’t change with the times. As wind from any direction passes through the cowl the unique venturi-shaped surfaces cause a drop in air pressure which draws smoke and fumes up the chimney for dispersal. The Aerodyne Cowl is offered with our money-back guarantee. If it fails to stop downdraught simply return it with receipt to your supplier for a full refund.
Why had no one suggested this? An ‘Aerodyne Cowl’ was duly ordered. It took three weeks to arrive, two more to be fitted, but at last we were ready once more. All I can say is it was lucky about that money-back guarantee. If anything, the fire smoked more than before.
So we gave in. We ordered a wood-burning stove. By this stage I had my doubts that even this would work, but the man in the stove shop guaranteed it. And it did. The fire roared and crackled: it just did so behind glass. And thus, at last, we had an authentic need for logs. Which is how, by the convoluted way of these things, I came by my first tractor.
Amongst the chattels that came with Tair-Ffynnon (which included two mossy Opel Kadetts, a collapsed Marina van, numerous bathtubs and an assortment of broken and rusting bedsteads, trailers, ploughs, cultivators, rollers and diesel tanks) was an iron saw-bench. A farm saw-bench is a heavy cast-iron table with, protruding through a slit in the top, a big circular blade with scarily large teeth. They date from the time when farmers cut their own planks, gateposts and firewood. Many old farms have one somewhere, superannuated, rusting away in a corner. The moment I saw ours, I wanted that saw-bench back in action. It spoke of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, of replenished wood stores and cold winter months. It was, to an almost baleful degree, a renegade of the pre-health and safety era. Like most of the older ones, ours was worked by a pulley belt, which connected the bench to a parked tractor. Modern tractors ditched pulley wheels decades ago, but a couple of the older makes, Fordsons and Fergies, still had them. All I needed to get the saw-bench into action was one of those.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that an old tractor was just what Tair-Ffynnon was missing. Now the requirement for firewood spelt it out. Jonny’s remark came back to me: ‘Looks as if you’d better get yourself a tractor.’
‘Why?’
