GATHERING WINTER FUEL

Everyone knows that these days the cost of keeping our homes warm in winter is positively scary, no matter what fuel you use the price rises year on year have us all turning down our thermostats and putting on an extra sweater. Here we have a choice of oil for the central heating gas and electricity for the hot water and for cooking, and a couple of hefty wood burning stoves one in the library and the other in the drawing room, and none of these options are exactly cheap!

Today this months load of logs arrived and I am happy to say that they are a good deal better than those supplied to us before Christmas,which bore more resemblance to kindling, burned like tinder and lasted about half as long as usual.

Naturally I took the supplier to task,assuring him that should he attempt to pass off such rubbish in our direction again I would photograph it being unloaded from his truck and post the picture on his review site.

This seemed to concentrate his mind wonderfully and this time we received the best load of logs I have ever seen. The moral …....it pays to complain!!! The driver was helpful and dropped the load in a convenient spot (most unusual) he even managed to get the crate off the truck without smashing it to splinters, (unprecedented). I thanked the driver for his help and then called the owner to thank him for a great pile of logs. The moral, always give praise where it is due!!

By mid afternoon the porch was stacked high with logs and a neat pile covered by a tarpaulin stood beside the front door, I made hot chocolate and we drank it while admiring our log store.

We use very little coal and then only last thing at night before we turn in, this helps to ensure that the fire burns all through the night and makes my job as hearth keeper so much easier, it keeps the cats happy too.

With the worst of winter still to come we are taking no chances and have a back up supply of logs and coal stashed in the green house, only to be used in dire emergency. I also keep a bag of fir cones, great for starting fires and a large bag of kindling collected in nearby woods last autumn, I hate fire lighters and only resort to their use when all else has failed.

Many years ago I started a Tree Surgery and Landscape Garden business. Pa had been ill for some time and had been obliged to give up his job as a Health Service Administrator, I had given up my theatre work to nurse him and at the same time my brother, a qualified tree surgeon had just been laid off. With my design skills and knowledge of gardening, my brothers expertise and Pa,s eagerness to learn we were sure we could make a go of things.

In fact Pa became s good at the design side of the business that he soon took over that area leaving me to deal with the garden work, price up the jobs and manage the paperwork.......the short straw!!!

We did well and soon built up our business and things were looking good, then came one of the worst winters our part of the world had ever known. I t snowed for weeks at a time, it froze, thawed and froze again until the roads in our area were covered with three feet of solid ice and the ground was rock hard.

In such dreadful conditions no garden construction could be undertaken and our tree surgery work consisted of call outs to remove fallen trees which had blocked roads or brought down power lines.

Our first winter in business could well,have been our last but then we came up with a good idea. The owner of a neighbouring farm wanted to remove a massive hedge which stretched for several hundred yards down a nearby field, and the hedge included a good number of trees.

We approached the farmer and offered to fell the trees and remove the hedge free of charge providing we were allowed to sell the timber..... he agreed, we shook hands and the next morning work began.

I believe that I have never been so cold in my life either before or since this long winter of gruelling work. Felling the trees was the easy part, chain saws make the job a breeze, it was transporting the timber from the site to our farm which cause the trouble as it had to be man hauled over a mile across snow drifts and ice sheets.

We would fell for two days out in the field spend two days hauling the wood home and then on the fifth day we would light a pot stove in an old barn and spend a day in comparative luxury as we sawed and split the timber in to logs which we sold locally . The sixth day saw us back in the fields felling and hauling,and this went on unrelentingly for several months.

By the time the weather improved we had cleared the site to the farmers satisfaction and managed to keep ourselves and our new business going. It had been tough, but by the end of this bad time we were all very fit and strong and even more determined to make a go of things.

Luck was with us and our willingness to answer call outs from the Police, Electricity Companies, the G.P.O and Local Councils had given us a name for reliability and determination, we had taken on jobs which others had said were impossible.

That spring we found ourselves at the top of the list of Tenders and a great deal of work came our way.

Of course there were bad times too but after that first winter we felt equal to anything and it was not long before my younger brother joined us in the business becoming a partner and working on garden maintenance.

Pa and I moved to London some years later and my brothers took over the business which they still run between them over thirty years after it began.

They were tough times,but the sense of achievement we all felt made us strong both individually and as a team. There were good times too, evenings spent in our local pub drinking the free ale we had been given in exchange for a few bags of logs for the fire in the snug.

We traded logs for meat at the local butchers and groceries from the village shop and we made enough money to pay our bills and keep things ticking over.

Helping my son to stack the logs this afternoon brought it all back, the biting winds, the glowing sunsets, the warmth of the stove with its pot of everlasting coffee and those nights spent drinking with our friends. Not a bad way to spend ones youth, or ones life for we all made good livings from our gardening skills ,especially Pa. who had been told he would never be able to work again ,yet who made a living as a gardener until his arthritis forced him to retire.

During the later years I did return to the theatre for a while,and it was great fun, yet  I still look back on that dreadful winter as some of the happiest days of my life and I would not trade these memories for a winning lottery ticket!