A Winter’s (Disaster) Tale

The only virtue of a bad winter is a good disaster story. Here is mine.

In the winter of 1979 I shared a farmhouse in the south of England with a fellow-teacher named Frank. Pamber Farm dated back two centuries to a time when England was nearer the Equator. It had neither sheetrock nor fiberglass insulation. Someone had weatherproofed the windows by sticking cotton up between the hinges and letting them rust shut. A deranged prior tenant had insulated the water pipes by loosely winding a strip of sacking along part of their length.

All this would be bearable come winter, we thought, because the farmhouse had a Rayburn. Rayburns are all-purpose stoves, squat black cast-iron fanfares to the success of the Industrial Revolution. The boiler behind the furnace heated enough water for the whole house; I could raise bread on the top of the stove and bake it in the oven; and it heated the house so efficiently that when we had it going both of us had to retreat into the next room, which was merely toasty.

The first snow fell on New Year’s Eve.  Two days later I drove from my family’s house back to Pamber Farm, following plows and bulldozers between walls of snow higher than my car. Frank was in the dining room, holding a saucepan of snow.

“The pipes have frozen,” he said tersely. He put the saucepan on top of the Rayburn.

At that point I made my mistake. Instead of doing the sensible thing–setting fire to the farm, warming my hands over the embers, collecting the insurance and moving closer to Brazil—I succumbed to that ghastly British psychosis, the Remember The Blitz Syndrome. No cause for panic. Maybe the pipes were only frozen along a few crucial inches somewhere.  Maybe if we stoked up the Rayburn and opened all the vents and flues these aforementioned few inches would thaw out. We loaded the Rayburn with coal, piled the stove-top with saucepans of snow and left it for the night.

Next morning, straining under an unaccustomed combination of heat and cold, the Rayburn’s boiler burst, swamping the dining-room floor with twelve gallons of water. It was the second of January, and the worst winter in sixteen years had just begun.

Two days later, the plumber arrived. Virtually every foot of piping in the house, he told us laconically, was frozen. Five sections had spilt and needed to be replaced. He rigged an auxiliary water-heater, tying a spare tank into the house’s electricity, and ordered a new boiler. Delivery in about a week,  he said. In the meantime, mate, don’t use the Rayburn. Not even for heat.

The house got colder. I went to bed at 9:30 with all my clothes on and took them off one by one during the night as the bed warmed up. One night the saucer of milk we left in the living room for the cats froze solid. I developed bronchitis, and coughed around the farmhouse like a tubercular ghost.

We called the plumber. Funny thing, he said. Lot of people looking for replacement Rayburn boilers. Have to order one from the regional distributors. Take about a month, chief.

Wood heat is the answer, I told Frank in my stirring pioneer voice. He stared at me from the depths of an armchair, where he was wearing his dressing-gown over his teaching clothes.  Next to him was the sitting-room fireplace, one of those small open hearths that suck all the heat from a room and blow it up the chimney. Look, I said. There are dead trees all round the farm. Some of them have even been cut up. We’ll burn wood, heat two or three rooms and not have to spend a penny. Frank raised an eyebrow doubtfully. I went outside with a chopper.

It was a brilliant winter morning. All round the woodshed, frozen heads of cow-parsley glistened like tiaras. Each blade of grass was a silver scalpel. I pulled on my gloves and went to work.

After twenty minutes of hacking, by which time I had produced exactly one millionth of a cord of firewood, the axe-head flew off, narrowly missing my car. I went inside, coughing theatrically. Frank looked at me, and called a friend who had a sledgehammer and wedges.

Meanwhile, strange things were happening to the house. The only way to stay warm, we had discovered, was to take an endless series of baths, which had the added benefit of providing the kitchen and pantry, adjacent to the bathroom, with steam heat. By the end of January the white paint started peeling off the walls and ceiling and falling into the bath, exposing irregular patches of blue underneath.  All the largest and most intelligent spiders moved into the bathroom and hung around in the corners. The whole place became so damp that the wooden head of my badminton racquet curled up like a potato chip.

February arrived and, impossibly, it got colder. One Saturday morning the gearbox oil in my car froze, and the stick would only move downwards from the neutral position. I drove into the village in second, fourth and reverse. Ice formed overnight on the insides of our bedroom windows, up to half an inch thick, sometimes not melting until noon. I got bronchitis again, and took a thermos of hot tea to school, refilling it between classes and occasionally gargling in the middle of a lecture.

We called the plumber.  He’d called the distributor, he said, but they could only get left-hand valve boilers. Ours was a right-hand valve. Have to order it direct from the manufacturers, squire. Be ready in March or April.

We gave up on the Rayburn and invested in a bottle of Grand Marnier. Frank became more and more withdrawn, and after splitting wood for half an hour, he built a fire, paying extraordinary attention to the exact placement of each log and each piece of kindling. The act of concentration, he claimed, excluded the mental experience of cold. Then he lit the fire and slumped into an armchair in front of it, a glass of Grand Marnier under one drooping hand, and stare into the flames all evening. Every third or fourth evening he gave a loud groan, tore himself away from the fire, wrapped himself in a sleeping-bag and graded papers.

By March, so much white paint had fallen off the bathroom walls they looked like a sixteenth-century map of the world, mostly blue ocean with a few white patches of land.  In a desperate attempt at light-heartedness I took a black marker pen and drew a puffing cherub over by the window and a spouting whale above the taps. Within days, both had faded to a fuzzy grey. I got bronchitis again, and took to sleeping in a scarf.  We called the plumber again, just for a laugh, but there was no answer.

On March 21 we threw an Official End Of Winter party. The guests left coats in Frank’s bedroom and bottles of white wine in mine, where they chilled.

The strange thing about that winter was that while it was going on we had to joke about it, and it didn’t seem too bad, but after spring finally arrived in May, something refused to thaw. I got bronchitis again, and had an operation on my sinuses, which were by now suffering from erosion and frost heaves.

Relations between Frank and me grew increasingly chilly, and eighteen months later I had fled the country for Vermont, where everyone has storm windows and replacement parts for woodstoves are made just down the road. I have never been warmer.

This was first broadcast on North Country Public Radio around 2001.