The Fruit of the Tree (7 page)

It was a wonderful surprise, although the house was not in a state of tidiness I would have liked; the hearth was not swept, and Robert had been sitting in his high-chair aiming bread fingers at the still un-linoed kitchen floor. But no one had ever arrived on days when I had been efficient—and actually, they still never do.

Susan’s visit gave me the opportunity to invite her for dinner—and it was one of the few occasions of its kind that autumn, for only special friends were invited to share our hardships. Candle-lighting time had gradually been brought forward to the early evening, and the room looked at its best, decked with candles and illuminated too by the blazing log fire.

We had ordered a lorry load of logs from a local man, and each day, I would clean out the grate and relay the fire; first the paper, then the kindling wood, finally one or two of the logs. I became quite an expert; for although the days were delightful, as darkness fell, the house became chilly and the roaring fire became a necessity, not just an attractive feature of our lounge.

Bruce warned me: ‘Collect plenty of timber now, while it’s dry.’

He was right, of course; the fire was one of the mainstays of our existence. I didn’t like to think too far ahead of the approaching winter, but we couldn’t expect this golden Indian summer to last much longer.

It was Robert’s birthday in October, his second birthday, on which another child should have been born; but I had no feelings of regret about that now. How could we have introduced another baby into this situation without proper heating or washing facilities? As it was, we had to make a regular weekend trip to the launderette in one of the firm’s vans, packed out with washing. However, we were thinking again about another pregnancy; I wanted Robert to have a companion, while he was young enough to enjoy a brother or sister. Perhaps a two-year age difference was a little narrow, bearing in mind the apparent contrariness of two-year-olds, but a gap of another six months—that surely must be ideal. I did not imagine that Fate would play any more unkind tricks on me.

I had, for some time, been summoning up my courage to invite Michael’s family over; we had always invited them in appropriate sections before. But now the bungalow was big enough to house all of them on one occasion, and a birthday seemed an auspicious enough occasion to entertain Robert’s aunts, uncles and grandma. Including us, the family amounted to nine adults and four ‘halves’. The question was, could I cope with the sheer numerical impact of Michael’s exuberant (and efficient) family?

It was the chip on my shoulder about being less efficient than my sisters-in-law that made me accept the challenge. There was always the chance that, with our present difficulties, I might show up to better advantage.

So I roasted and baked and fried; and dusted and ‘carpet-swept’. (I couldn’t use my vacuum cleaner, of course.) Robert’s birthday—and the family—arrived on a perfect autumn day. We had homemade cakes for tea; then, in a Luben-like frenzy, they rushed outside to find conkers and they played enthusiastically with one-ers and two-ers, dropping chestnut shells on the carpet; but never mind, it had looked fine when they arrived, and that was the important thing. As dusk fell, we lit the candles and unveiled the buffet supper on a long trestle table in the wide hall. Cold chicken and roast beef, cold fried fish, cooked in the Jewish style; carefully prepared vegetable salad, potato salad, tomato salad; and fresh fruit with cream (for those errant members of the family who would flout the Jewish tradition not to combine milk with meat). I had made a success of it and I knew it; and it was difficult not to glow with pride in the warmth of the fire and the appreciation.

As always, I felt how good it was to be part of a family, and how lucky I was to have acquired this good-humoured bunch of brothers and sisters.

Another member of the family, Michael’s first cousin Colin, a wizard with motors, was an occasional visitor. At that time, although not living in the vicinity, he worked for the local A.A. and made a point of dropping in spontaneously.

Once he called in when I had run out of gas and drove me to the local suppliers to buy a gas bottle, and connected it himself.

On another occasion, he actually let me drive his own car into the village to get some shopping.

Apart from purely sociable reasons for calling, he was interested in our old Wolseley and spent a lot of time renovating the engine. He was a meticulous worker and Michael also asked him to look at the generator, which we had been given by a scrap dealer.

He was quite content to spend hours working outside and whenever I asked what he was doing he always seemed to be ‘cleaning the carbon brushes.’

Sometimes he shared with us a candle-lit dinner, and it was always a pleasure to have a guest at our table. But these few social occasions were merely oases in a desert of unrelieved difficulties, and as we moved towards winter, it was difficult to quell my increasing frustration and loneliness.

7. No Electricity, No Heating, No Car, No Telephone,

November…With Apologies to Thomas Hood

The days grew shorter and colder and the tensions increased. We awoke in darkness and breakfasted by candlelight. Last night’s dinner plates and greasy pots and pans awaited my attention in daylight.

Now, though I lit the fire early each chill morning, the house temperature would not reach 60 degrees F until around midday. At the first glimmer of autumn sunshine, I would open the windows to induce some warmth into the house. But it was a vain effort.

Water streamed down the windows daily and each morning the bedspread was wet with condensation like a dew-soaked lawn.

Many times, the heavy use of gas in the morning caused the bottle to run out after Michael had left the house. Then Robert and I would walk the mile to the telephone to contact him, only to be confronted on many occasions by the answering machine. On those days, I could only boil a kettle on the fire for tea, or cook a tin of soup. Spiders’ webs bejewelled with misty drops were draped across each holly bush, as we set out on our expeditions. I observed them, but was too irritated by the chilly and too often abortive treks to appreciate Nature’s artistry.

We were no longer playing an amusing game. I had always disliked darkness; now I often returned from our shopping expeditions in dusk, gazing with envy at the brightly lit homes I passed. Filled with despondency, I would fumble around for matches. The daylight hours were not long enough for everything I had to do. Often I was forced to go out into the thick blackness of the night to get in more logs to keep the fire going, accompanied only by the small circle of light from the torch. Michael often brought in a basketful of logs, but he worked long and late hours, and the possibility of the fire going out merely because of his absence was unthinkable.

To a certain extent, Michael was insulated from the problem. When he came home in the evening, he would sit in the lounge-cum-dining room where the fire was burning brightly and the drawn curtains kept the room at a comfortable and pleasant temperature. Weekends were often spent escaping to other members of the family. In any case, Michael was a warm person, often not noticing the cold at all, whilst I was acutely aware of it. I felt, therefore, that this was my personal martyrdom, and when I described it to my friends, made sure they realised how long-suffering I was.

Why didn’t we give in? We had always doubted that the Electricity Board would accept money from us, but we could have contacted the Colonel privately; and in our reluctance to do this there was an element of pride and an unwillingness to be manipulated, feelings shared by both of us. In any case, initially we were under the impression that the Electricity Board’s compulsory powers would be implemented much more quickly, and had not really imagined that we would still be without electricity in the winter. Even now, it was difficult to believe that the Electricity Board would allow this situation to continue for much longer. There was the financial aspect too; we were always short of money, but in my heart, I do not think this was the main reason for digging our heels in.

However, Michael was not insensitive to the increasing difficulties, and when he came home one evening to find me warming frozen fingers in front of the fire before returning to the kitchen to peel potatoes, he said, ‘We can’t go on like this.’

Within a day or so, he made two purchases—an oil heater and a gas light—and of the two, it was the latter which was the most spirit lifting.

With a young child in the house, we had not previously given much thought to an oil heater. Now we lifted the carpet, and, for safety’s sake, screwed the heater down to the concrete. Thereafter, we had a delivery of paraffin each week, and ran the heater night and day, but to be honest, the difference in temperature was not great.

The light had much more impact! We attached it by a long flex to a smallish gas bottle, which was not too heavy, and transported it between the kitchen and lounge. It was almost as good as a light bulb; miracle of miracles, almost possible to read by it. How wonderful it was to come in from the dark outside and not be faced with the prospect of lighting seven or eight candles and balancing them on saucers. How satisfying to light the delicate gas mantle and see the little flame turn into a bright glow. And how heartbreaking when, in our eagerness to light it or replace the mantle, we accidentally destroyed it with clumsy fingers, when we had no replacement. But we soon learned to avoid such disasters.

‘One day,’ Michael promised extravagantly, ‘I’ll turn this place into a palace of lights.’

Buoyed up by the morale-boosting effect of the latest purchases, I asked my two aunts from Hove to stay for a weekend. It was a fairly foolish thing to do, but on the one hand, I wanted to invite people to share our lonely adventure, and at the same time I wanted to behave as normally as possible. Social occasions were small goals to aim for. The days seemed less monotonous with the prospect of visitors ahead and there seemed to be a purpose in boring domestic chores.

The Aunties were my closest relations with the exception of my parents, and I wanted the chance to show off to them my improving skills in cooking and running our attractive new home. My father was a sick man, and it was quite impossible to subject him to our problems. The Aunties, however, were a pair of sports and, despite the fact that Auntie Betty was over 60 and Auntie Ethel was approaching it, I felt that they would put up with our difficulties without complaint.

Unfortunately, in one respect, the Aunties’ visit was something of a disaster, for as soon as we had crossed the South Downs in the car we had hired to transport them, we discovered that the rest of the South was covered in snow, which grew worse as we drove towards Surrey. Only Michael’s quick reactions prevented us from being stuck on any of the hillier roads that had entrapped other motorists who had attempted them, but the journey was long and slow, and the bungalow only a few degrees above freezing when we arrived home. We would not have chosen to inflict such conditions on the Aunties, but they endured them stoically and merely congratulated themselves on remembering their hot water bottles.

They came from the generation that lived through the Blitz and they had done war work together in the sugar beet factories of Lincolnshire. This small adventure would simply add another tale to their repertoire.

The next day, the sun melted the snow and shone through the windows. We looked out and admired the chaffinches and bullfinches, swaying to and fro on the long, long grass in the garden. Perhaps we were not quite mad to live here.

The first snow dispelled any doubts we might have had that winter would finally arrive. But we had been lucky; we had had a wonderful summer, and a bright and beautiful autumn. It could have been so much worse.

Our next visitors were cousin Colin’s sister and fiancé, and in their honour, we were able to provide lights in the lounge for one hour.

Colin’s occasional visits and careful work on the generator had eventually borne fruit, for we were finally able to connect it up. However, we had lost touch with the electrician who had carried out the first stage of wiring, a year before, and wires stuck out of the walls, awaiting the fixing of switches and points, which Michael had not yet found the time to do.

When the generator was finally ready, Michael sent me out for light fittings for the lounge, and the first connections were made. However, we could only afford to have lighting on special occasions, for the generator used a gallon of petrol in an hour, and even if it had provided lights for the whole house, it would still have been too costly to run on a regular basis. In addition, the ancient contraption made a noise like a steam engine and emitted dreadful fumes from its exhaust, which we aimed in the direction of the Colonel’s empty field, next to us.

Disappointment that the generator could not be the means of solving all our problems was slightly mitigated by the resolution of another difficulty. We were going to have a telephone.

We had always assumed that our principled Colonel had prevented us from having this facility, since its wires would have to cross his footpath. However, in the course of a general enquiry, which Michael made from the office, he discovered that we had misjudged him; for it was our near neighbour, Mrs. Baker, who had failed to sign the forms agreeing to our telephone wire being linked to hers, at a point near the eaves of her house.

‘Oh, if only we’d known.’ I moaned, thinking of the many unnecessary walks to the village, just to use the phone. I felt sure that Mrs Baker’s action, or rather, lack of it, had been one of simple forgetfulness rather than deliberate awkwardness.