Nutty slack
Dec. 10th, 2005 12:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezOk, that's strange. Stranger even than stopping in on a Friday when all good thirty-summats should be about attempting to recreate their vanishing youths.
There's a sound that I've not heard for about twenty years. The sound of a hod of coal being shuffled into a Rayburn. The coal was kept in... Well, 'room' would be overdoing things a bit, but it had walls, a door, a roof and windows glazed with chicken-wire, so room it shall be... A room in the woodshed complex. At the top end were the huge sections of pine trunk that had been there for ever, since it would take another front-end loader to get them out again. Further down was the cleared area where the chopping block stood, ankle-deep in sawdust and chippings. The open side looked out across the drive and into the kitchen at the back of the house. (Built in 1913, according to the stone set in the eaves, so a couple of hundred years younger than the rest of the place) Located centrally was the coal-room, and on the other side of that was the chicken house and attached run. The whole thing was set into a bank, and as small (and less small) children, we'd pile onto the wavy-tin roof from the copse behind in search of tennis balls, or just to jump up and down on it because we'd been carefully told not to.
One hod was steel and falling to bits. The bottoms and lips of the things have rough lives, since the fastest and noisiest (and therefore the obvious best) way of filling the things is to ram them hard into the base of the coal-pile, lever them upright and shake so the coal clatters to the bottom and repeat until full. The other was newer, sturdier, of Rayburn-colour-matched plastic... And was the one that made the noise I remembered.
The thing about solid-fuel ranges (and indeed gas or oil-fired ones as well) is that you keep them running all the time. The feel and smell of a cold Rayburn or Aga is a desolate and unwelcoming thing. A hodful of coal will keep a Rayburn going all night if you damp the thing right down... And that's what you want to do; it's a lot less hassle to come down first thing to a warm range that just needs riddling out and refilling than it is to have to break out the firelighters and newspaper in a cold kitchen. Riddling? There's a drawer/tray affair in the base of a Rayburn, next to a chrome knob. A cast iron handle with a fork bent at 90 degrees is supplied, which fits into a flange in the knob and allows you to work it in and out about six inches. The rod that the knob is attached to engages in the circular spiral-gridded firebase and levers it back and forth in order to shake the ash and clinker into the tray beneath. That same cast handle can now be fitted into a square loop in the front of the (usually red-hot) tray in order to remove the thing to a place where the clinker can be disposed of.
Adjoining the woodshed was a clinker path that led to a clinker mountain. There was another clinker path going into the copse to the place where the bonfires were.
So what happened was that my mother had some sort of breakdown. As an early teen I was a startlingly unaware sort; if it wasn't on the Peel Programme or in Practical Electronics, I just wasn't interested. Dad had a farm to run and small brother wasn't quite tall enough to be able to carry a full coal hod in each hand. Thus it fell to me, in a surly and non-understanding teenage way, to keep the Rayburn going. And that was kind of the routine I went through each morning before beetling off to school and again last thing at night.
The point is that the sound of a coal-hod being emptied into a Rayburn - a kind of rumbly-stuttering white noise intermingled with a hollow plastic clattering to shake the last lumps out - from a couple of rooms away, means that someone else is keeping the place warm tonight, and that's a good thing.
There's a sound that I've not heard for about twenty years. The sound of a hod of coal being shuffled into a Rayburn. The coal was kept in... Well, 'room' would be overdoing things a bit, but it had walls, a door, a roof and windows glazed with chicken-wire, so room it shall be... A room in the woodshed complex. At the top end were the huge sections of pine trunk that had been there for ever, since it would take another front-end loader to get them out again. Further down was the cleared area where the chopping block stood, ankle-deep in sawdust and chippings. The open side looked out across the drive and into the kitchen at the back of the house. (Built in 1913, according to the stone set in the eaves, so a couple of hundred years younger than the rest of the place) Located centrally was the coal-room, and on the other side of that was the chicken house and attached run. The whole thing was set into a bank, and as small (and less small) children, we'd pile onto the wavy-tin roof from the copse behind in search of tennis balls, or just to jump up and down on it because we'd been carefully told not to.
One hod was steel and falling to bits. The bottoms and lips of the things have rough lives, since the fastest and noisiest (and therefore the obvious best) way of filling the things is to ram them hard into the base of the coal-pile, lever them upright and shake so the coal clatters to the bottom and repeat until full. The other was newer, sturdier, of Rayburn-colour-matched plastic... And was the one that made the noise I remembered.
The thing about solid-fuel ranges (and indeed gas or oil-fired ones as well) is that you keep them running all the time. The feel and smell of a cold Rayburn or Aga is a desolate and unwelcoming thing. A hodful of coal will keep a Rayburn going all night if you damp the thing right down... And that's what you want to do; it's a lot less hassle to come down first thing to a warm range that just needs riddling out and refilling than it is to have to break out the firelighters and newspaper in a cold kitchen. Riddling? There's a drawer/tray affair in the base of a Rayburn, next to a chrome knob. A cast iron handle with a fork bent at 90 degrees is supplied, which fits into a flange in the knob and allows you to work it in and out about six inches. The rod that the knob is attached to engages in the circular spiral-gridded firebase and levers it back and forth in order to shake the ash and clinker into the tray beneath. That same cast handle can now be fitted into a square loop in the front of the (usually red-hot) tray in order to remove the thing to a place where the clinker can be disposed of.
Adjoining the woodshed was a clinker path that led to a clinker mountain. There was another clinker path going into the copse to the place where the bonfires were.
So what happened was that my mother had some sort of breakdown. As an early teen I was a startlingly unaware sort; if it wasn't on the Peel Programme or in Practical Electronics, I just wasn't interested. Dad had a farm to run and small brother wasn't quite tall enough to be able to carry a full coal hod in each hand. Thus it fell to me, in a surly and non-understanding teenage way, to keep the Rayburn going. And that was kind of the routine I went through each morning before beetling off to school and again last thing at night.
The point is that the sound of a coal-hod being emptied into a Rayburn - a kind of rumbly-stuttering white noise intermingled with a hollow plastic clattering to shake the last lumps out - from a couple of rooms away, means that someone else is keeping the place warm tonight, and that's a good thing.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 12:12 am (UTC)fires!
Date: 2005-12-10 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 12:46 am (UTC)I became good (hopefully I still am) at fire lighting out of a sense of bloody mindedness. And not much caring for the cold.
Hm. You know, there's a whole other post to be written about the enjoyment of semi-menial tasks. Especially by those of us who don't have to perform them for a living.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 09:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 02:57 pm (UTC)Henry Ford and Taylorism are terrible things.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 06:14 pm (UTC)I'd also call the sheet of newspaper you hold across the font of the fireplace when the fire won't draw properly a "bleezer", but I think that's just a dialect thing.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 01:07 am (UTC)In summary - the house I grew up in had open fireplaces. In the winter months we had lots of roaring fires, and I really miss them. I'd build the fires, hold newspaper across the mouth of the fireplace to help them draw, we'd burn pinecones on the fire at christmas, and sometimes we'd toast marshmallows.
Current house has one fireplace with a restored victorian gas-coal affair, which doesn't suit the house and I can't burn stuff on it. The other one is very nice, very large, but doesn't have fire bricks and the chimney's beeen blocked. But having a blind cat and a stupid cat, this is probably a good thing.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 05:14 pm (UTC)We ran them on both coal and wood, so I too have memories of the fun of fetching and carrying coal, and the rituals of lighting and maintaining them. I remember trundling round the countryside with my dad while he cut up and carried away trees for people, which we then ended up storing in our vast collection of woodsheds (in addition to all the *other* sheds). I remember being given my first small axe as a child to learn to chop up wood, and many years of chopping wood with axes, or splitting larger bits with wedges and sledgehammers. I used to really enjoy it rather than finding it a chore, at the time at least.
The rayburn was, as I think is the norm for all such things, a strange tempramental beast, which required much fiddling to get it to work right. We used to have lodgers who would fall foul of it on a regular basis, letting it go out, setting the chimney on fire, or particularly one dimbulb who came down before us one morning and decided he'd warm the kitchen up a bit by filling the rayburn with fuel and opening all the dampers wide.
By the time we got downstairs, the whole rayburn was glowing and looked like it was about to leap off the hearth. Not good :)
I've still got a nice cast iron Morsø in my current place - although the previous owners that fitted it obviously decided that actually attaching the flue to the chimney was a bad idea, and so it just terminates a couple of inches up in to the chimney into fresh air, with no throat plate. It's astonishing it works at all... :)