Gladstone took up his tree-chopping in 1852, aged forty-two, and continued with inextinguishable ardour until he was eighty-five, after which, he noted meticulously in his diary, he contented himself with mere ‘axe-work’ rather than ‘tree-felling’.
I mention Gladstone merely because, although he’s possibly the most celebrated British example, in my experience most men find at least the idea of chopping wood appealing. In America the axe is an emblem of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. It’s the great symbol of the settler, the outback, of rural survival, self-reliance and the frontier spirit. Seven Presidents of the United States were born in log cabins.* Possibly this explains the axe’s curious romance. All I knew was that if my idealised rural existence had to be summed up in a single image, that image would be me either snoozing by the fire, or splitting logs on a frosty morning. Either way, the two elements were indispensable: a fire and logs to go on it.
Now, obviously lots of people like open fires. It’s tempting to say everyone, were not my reason for bringing up the subject that the two most influential figures in my life emphatically didn’t. My childhood was fireless. In the Woodward household, fires were one of the few subjects about which my parents were in complete agreement. They put their case peremptorily. Open fires were a chore. They had to be made, fed, poked and raked out. They were dirty. Their smoke ruined books. They were inefficient: everyone knew the heat went straight up the chimney, sucking draughts in its wake. They were dangerous, in a timber-framed, timber-clad house. None of these was the real reason for their antipathy, of course, which was that fires were yesterday’s way.
To understand their viewpoint, it’s necessary to remember the era. This was the 1960s and ’70s: the nuclear age, the space race, motorways, comprehensive redevelopment, Concorde, and Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. My parents were academic scientists: Da a research chemist,* Ma a botanical geneticist. Science, to my parents, was the way forwards. My mother was feeding us limitless quantities of instant food. My father was experimenting with disposable paper underwear. In our house there would be no ugly radiators or visible heat sources (at least not to start with). The future was electric: clean, silent, odourless and available at off-peak rates. Arguments (during one of my brother’s and my periodic campaigns) that fires were cosy were ignored. 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.*