The cost of electricity

[Pye Man]

That's a cosy picture you painted, Nick!

But heating and cooking from a kitchen range - other rooms being unheated- I can't see that somehow.

The range wasn’t an Aga! It had a small grate, oven and a hot plate and some means of heating the water. There was no radiator system. The living rooms and bedrooms each had fire grates but I never remember a fire being made in my bedroom. Hot water bottles for bed were the norm in winter and I still have the ceramic ones. I also have the lidded bedwarmer with a long handle but I don’t recall it ever being used! (Though clearly from the interior it had been at some time.)

I was in and out of the houses of other kids in the locality and they were all the same though we did hear of people who had modernised with something called ‘central heating’. The properties did have bathrooms but the toilet was at the back of the house in a separate block alongside a coal house. I can remember my father building a lean-to between the house and the block which was an improvement most householders made. He converted the coal house into storage and we had a couple of concrete bunkers with sloping swing-up lids for two different types of coal – one sort for the range thing and the other for the fireplace – at the side of the house.

My aunt and uncle lived in a better property but the facilities were the identical other than they had an inside toilet. In fact, my aunt lived to a great age and was living in the house until a few months before she died in the late 1990s. The last time I saw her I called in, as I occasionally did, unannounced when I happened to be passing. She came to the door looking very cold and struggled for a moment to recognise me and then told me that the range thing had gone out. I was wearing a brand new mustard coloured roll neck shirt-cum-pullover and found myself emptying the ashes, bringing in coal and getting the fire going! She had long given up making a fire in the back living room and the heat in there was provided by a two bar electric fire. She mainly lived in the kitchen which was bigger than the one in my childhood house. She had a small TV (I have that now) and when I visited we invariably sat in the kitchen.

The houses were by no means poor properties – this is not an attempt at Four Yorkshiremen – it was just the way it was. I had a happy childhood.