The dream was located in and around a large wooden shed, a creosote protected but rather dilapidated shed, of a sort which was once common in large gardens, at a time when we were less concerned with cramming as much as possible into the available space than we are now.
The shed contained a number of rooms or areas, and the action of the dream revolved around a large white bath, standing on a dais in a room in the middle of the shed. The plan was that I was going to take a bath.
Episode 1, was about trying to bolt the door to the shed so that I could bath in private. The door did not have a bolt and I was trying various more or less complicated wheezes, mostly involving bits and pieces of old wood lying around, to achieve the same end, none of which were working.
Episode 2, was me poking around in the back of the shed, turning over all sorts of sub-car-booter junk. A lot of rusty old nails and screws in tobacco tins (the storage container of choice at the time of the shed) and jam jars.
Episode 3, was me trying to find a towel. I thought to cross the road (geography of the dream being a bit muddled) to the house where I was staying to get one off my landlady. A lady with a distinctive but unfamiliar face and with lots of children of various ages, some more or less adult. I spot a pile of smart looking towels as I go in, but my landlady goes out back and comes back to hand me, rather furtively, a rather battered old towel. Perhaps she does not to trust me in a dirty old shed with one of her better towels. I cross back over the road with the towel and wearing a white dressing gown which does not fit me very well.
Episode 4, was the hot water. I realise that the bath is not plumbed in and the hot water will have to been brought in by bucket. I find a hot water tap over a Belfast sink somewhere else in the shed. A chap appears who explains that there is a gas boiler connected to the tap, a gas boiler which I had not noticed but which turns out to be standing in the middle of the room. He fires it up without any bother at all and, after a wait, some luke-warm water starts to come out of the tap.
I associate now, some time later that is, from this boiler to a DIY boiler I used to dream about, a boiler which was connected to a very DIY steam engine. All very Heath Robinson and I think the steam engine never got beyond one or two revolutions of its fly wheel.
I think I must have woken up at this point.
Then, thinking about the dream, I associated to a memory of the coke boiler in the house where I spent most of my childhood. This blue-gray enamel boiler stood in a recess in the kitchen, on a square of red quarry tiles and underneath the kitchen chimney. Various water pipes came into the back of it and beyond the quarry tiles were blue thermoplastic floor tiles, thermoplastic being a sort of higher grade linoleum available at that time.
The boiler was in the form of a two doored box, about a foot square and standing two or three feet high. One put the coke in through the upper door and one could admire the glowing coke through the glass of the lower door. Open the lower door, and the upper part of the opening was a removable iron grid through which or with which one could shake up the fire, the lower part the ash tray. There was a gas fired poker which one poked through a hole in the lower door to start the fire. Regular flame thrower of a thing. There was also a control wheel at the side of the box, numbered one to ten, with nine and ten in red, but if one was in a hurry one left the lower door a bit open to get a serious flow of air through the fire box.
The memory concerned the time when the boiler overheated and I came into the kitchen to find the lower half glowing, from the outside that is, a dull red. The control wheel had somehow been left at red ten. The whole thing looked very unsafe. In something of a panic, my response was to open the lower door, then more or less by accident to pull out the iron grid and to pull the mass of fiery coke out and down onto the quarry tiles, where it rapidly cooled down and the whole situation got rapidly under control.
I then puzzled about whether it was my father who pulled out the coke with me watching, or whether I, perhaps in my very early teens, had been left in charge of the house. I tend towards the latter option, but I don't think that there is any way of being sure now, so long after the event.
Also about why the coke did not set the thermoplastic tiles off, tiles which I would have thought would burn or at the very least scorch. Much explaining to do on return of parents.
Which all goes to show that in those far off days before health and safety, particularly that of children, had been invented, we had much more fun.
PS: I remember now about the ashes from the coke boiler being poured into a galvanised pressed steel dustbin, kept outside the back passage, next to the dustbin for dustman rubbish. The coke ashes were not as inert as they looked and used, after a few years, to rot the bottom out of the dustbin. The idea was that, from time to time, the ashes were scattered around the bases of our many fruit trees.
No comments:
Post a Comment