Nutty slack

[hirez]

Ok, 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.

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta. It's slightly surprising just how large a lump of memory one sound can recall.