92. Gathering Winter Fuel
91. Purbeck Marble
November 8, 2024
93. Beachcombing, Birds And The Netherlands
January 2, 2025
W inter heating was always a major expense in Britain. In 1997 the government introduced a payment intended to help pensioners with their heating costs. Reluctant to tie it to means testing, this winter fuel policy became a blanket payment to all pensioners, whether they needed it or not. It was possible to refuse the payment or gift the payment to charity, but it was easier just to accept it as a fact of life. Recently, with the government strapped for cash, this payment has been limited to people who are drawing pension support. Rural folk, like me, so long as they can supply their own winter fuel free, don’t need the payment. City dwellers, on low pensions and reliant on electricity or gas for their heating, manifestly do.
The winters in Purbeck used to be colder. Now, frost and snow are rare. The caravans I often inhabited, poorly insulated, were constructed with summer holidays in mind, however each of the first two vans had an inbuilt small stove, its chimney rising through a small water tank. That made them independent of the grid. Those that followed relied on gas or electricity for their heating. I never used either. In the country there was usually a source of free fuel and someone more skilled than I, who could fit a second-hand solid fuel stove into a van never intended to hold one.
Occasionally I was lucky enough to find a cheap cottage for the winter, which was provided with built-in heating facilities. The best was derelict Ivy Cottage in Acton, then owned by The Bankes Estate. Returning from India, homeless as usual, I found that Trev was negotiating to rent that cottage. The peppercorn rent would be 50P a week providing he reconditioned the building. He suggested I take it on, pay the rent and we would do it up until it was fit for him to take it over. That suited me well. I paid him that rent for several weeks before he pointed out that he’d decided against taking the place. The estate seemed to have forgotten about the place. Having already moved in, I stayed there for a year undisturbed until returning to India. As I remember, it had never been wired up for electricity. The stone fabric of the old cottage provided some insulation, but it was damp. For lighting there was a Tilley Lamp and for heating a small, cast-iron fireplace. There was an oven left of the fire and a bread oven to the right. I never used the latter, but apparently you filled it with a mass of dry gorse, set it on fire then raked it out as soon as the oven was hot enough. That was when you put the bread in the oven. It seemed remarkable that this could retain enough heat for long enough to bake a loaf. Perhaps lack of faith played a part in my never trying it to use it. Acton is not a well-wooded hamlet so firewood had to come from some distance. When it was very cold this was supplemented with coal or Phurnacite, molded ‘eggs’ of coal dust.
I passed one winter at Blue Skies, a newer cottage in Worth, which consisted of three little rooms in a row, a bedroom on either side of a central sitting room with an open fireplace. There, the main source of fuel was the beach at nearby Chapmans Pool, which collects flotsam, including those small cubes of wood used for making palettes. The cottage had a rudimentary kitchen, its water coming from spring up the path. Long ago replaced by something smarter, Blue Skies had been home to Miss Bacon, known as The Lady Gardener, a familiar figure in the 1960s and 70s, whom we would pass on the way to the quarry. Serving nearby folk, she walked to work, towing a wheeled basket containing her gardening tools. Worth village still had a shop cum post office. For a brief period, the local telephone box functioned generously, charging a single copper coin for local or foreign calls.
Driftwood was often laced with waste oil washed out of the ships’ tanks and bright plastic increasingly decorated the tideline. That oil waste had caused the steady decline of seabirds and, staining clothes, became a normal hazard of a day on the beach. We used lumps of oil to liven up our beach bonfires. Now, palmoline waste sometimes replaces it as a lethal pollutant although, being colourless, it is less apparent. There have been improvements: the oil has gone and plastic rubbish is markedly reduced, thanks to the work of volunteers. Previously, each April, a group of us used to carry out a beach clean at Chapmans Pool, ready for the summer. Today, many more folk, more frequently and more widely, collect up the plastic. Some have their own specialization, like Mary Newman, who picks up ‘nurdles’, the tiny plastic fragments scattering the shore. The overall cleansing has left wood and seaweed to dominate the shore.
Driftwood is not the only fuel provided by the sea; there is also blackstone, rarely used now, which collects as brownish discs of a bituminous shale. Shaped by the sea, this derives from one bed in the shale cliffs, following an ancient tradition, I sometimes burnt it. From Roman times, folk burned it and found it could be shaped and polished for bracelets and decorative items. The adventurous traveller, Celia Fiennes, who crossed Purbeck on horseback around 1700, remarked of Purbeck folk: ‘they take up stones by the shores that are so oyly as the poor burn it for fire it serves for candle too, but it has a strong, offensive smell.’ In the mid 19th century there had been an attempt to market Blackstone oil as a fuel for heating and lighting. Briefly, it was used to light Paris, but that experiment was abandoned due to the stench. Another shortcoming of blackstone as fuel is that it doesn’t break down to fine ash but keeps its shape as discoid clinkers. I burned it at Blue Skies, but that didn’t pass unnoticed. When Eileen Newman, then landlady at the ‘The Square and Compass’, sniffed the air and asked who was burning Sea Coal, I had to own up.
At Dunshay firewood has been easily, constantly available. Every storm brings down branches and the occasional tree. A couple of fine old yew trees came down in the front garden after Mary died, then a maple fell last year. There have been dead young elm trees, too, victims of Dutch Elm disease, which invaded in the 1970s and continually kills elms when they are half-grown. We had to thin out the young ash trees, too, and those we cut made good firewood. Ash promises to be my main fuel in future since another disease, ash die-back, has spread rapidly, killing trees across Europe. Inevitably has reached Britain and most of the ash trees at Dunshay have been infected. As the name implies, the tree’s leaves start to darken and die. The sickness gradually passes through the whole tree, eventually killing it. There is no cure, although some trees seem to be immune.
But there are modern forms of fuel, and necessity will increase them and their efficiency. The eleven solar panels on my roof contribute something to the demand for power. As we bemoan our fate, the future is not without hope. Faced with the darkness of Doom, the younger generation will turn their ingenuity towards the actions mine neglected.
