Home life
Fire and water
Alice Thomas Ellis
The Regius Professor of Greek and his wife, Mary, Professor in the Humani- ties, are coming to lunch, and the pipes have frozen. What's for lunch? Bread and butter pudding, that's what. It would have been onion soup and saunders* and salad and bread and butter pudding but you can't make onion soup when the pipes are frozen any more than you can boil potatoes or wash lettuce. Mary, who is American by birth, says the level of efficiency in this country makes her eyes water and I know what she means. There's an overall air of despairing lassitude rather like the feeling one has oneself when faced with a form to fill in or a teenager to get out of bed. The second plumber I rang (the first was engaged) suggested wearily that I should just let the pipes thaw naturally.
We had trouble in the country too. When we lit the fire in the sitting-room we discovered that the extractor fan had ceased to function. There are three chim- neys on that house, not a million miles from each other, and two of them work perfectly. The third not only does not work, it seems to have a capacity to exude more smoke than is commensurate with the quantity of fuel on the fire. We puzzled about how those who are known locally as 'the old people' managed. They certainly didn't have extractor fans and must have been utterly kippered, unless — and we think this is probably the case — they knew something we don't, and have taken the secret to the grave.
I went to the grave of our second son on his birthday.. He is buried in the church- yard which lies across two fields and a stream from the house. In the summer I met one of the women from the village there, and I said no one had ever told me, and I hadn't known, that one would go on missing them so much for so long, and she said her daughter had died in infancy over 40 years ago and she still mourned her. There are those who have seen it as their duty to convince me, for my own good, that the dead are well and truly dead and we will never see them again but I can't take that seriously. I always feel remark- ably cheerful in the churchyard and don't want to leave. One of these days I won't have to, since we have acquired the land from the grave to the wall, and there is plenty of room for the rest of us. Someone I know nearly bought a house once because it was adjacent to a graveyard, and when the time came the family would merely have to tip her over the wall. It is comfort- ing to know where one is going to end up. Lends a sense of security.
Returning to the house I noted that the guns were out, banging away at the pheasants. Remembering a harrowing Victorian tale of a little maiden in a fur tippet who was shot by her father in mistake for a rabbit, I suggested to the daughter and her friend that should they find themselves in the vicinity of the hunters they must shout 'hold your fire'. This obviously struck them as a good wheeze, for the next thing I knew, they were up the mountain piping this phrase and I had to rush out and haul them back.
For a few days there was a heavy frost and clear pink skies and one morning the birds posed themselves in the hazel outside the parlour window as though for an illustration in the Ladybird Book of Birds. All manner of passerines perched in its branches looking heartbreakingly beauti- ful, then a robin added itself to the group and it was too much. Ralph Vaughan Williams was once travelling through the Alps with his wife, Ursula. The sun was setting with a fiery glow behind the snow- capped peaks, the dark conifers were gleaming, ice-spangled — you know the sort of thing — so she nudged him and told him to look out of the window. After a moment, as he regarded this scene, he remarked that it looked like the water- colours in an organist's drawing-room and turned back to his dinner. Still, one mustn't get too refined. Taken to the limit this attitude would mean one could only appreciate, say, a view of the backside of Milton Keynes from the motorway on a mid morning in February.
PS. The daughter has just come home because the pipes in her school have frozen.
* saunders: mashed potato layered with minced meat.
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