Let there be light
 Chilly-billy! |
After Dad died, the house had to be sold, but before we could do that we needed a family meeting to decide how to dispose of what the second-hand shop down the road called "the furniture and effects".
We all sat around in the front room that we knew so well from childhood and started to make plans. My younger sister would have the dining room chairs. My older sister would take the china set. I would have the small bookcase from the hall.
It was a cold day and I remember, as in childhood, that we'd all automatically eased our chairs forwards so that we were closer to the two glowing bars of the electric fire.
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It must have been an awareness of that movement which suddenly prompted my older sister to cry out. "Listen everybody" - as though she'd suddenly remembered the existence of a box of jewels in the stair cupboard.
"Listen everybody. There's no need for us to crouch round the fire like this. Watch me." And with that she got up from her chair, took one step towards the fire, flicked a switch on the side and then stood back holding out her open palms towards the golden glow now being given off by the third bar of the fire.
"There," said my sister. "I bet you didn't realise there was a third bar. I only found it out accidentally when I was moving the hearth rug yesterday. All those years we spent shivering in this room because Dad would never ever use the third bar. All those days we'd have to plead to have even the second bar."
"Dad, Dad. Can we have the second bar?" cat-called my younger sister.
In the dark
In a moment we'd forgotten the furniture and effects and gone into an orgy of remembrance about Dad and his permanent efforts to save "on the electric".
 Save power every hour |
I remembered the number of times when I'd been sitting by myself in the living room in the late evening and suddenly been plunged into complete darkness as Dad slid his hand around the door and switched off the solitary light.
Both my sisters remembered only being able to make it halfway up the stairs to bed before Dad flicked off the landing light.
My younger sister told the story of how she'd cracked her head on the shower appliance after Dad had flicked off the light as she was having her weekly bath. And I piled in with the tale of how Dad used to like to keep the curtains of the front room open at night so that it would be at least partly illuminated by the street lamp outside.
All those childhood memories of light and darkness came back to me as I read a new book about the arrival of gas and electric lighting in Britain in the 19th Century, and the effect that these enormous technological changes had upon the way people saw and were seen.
All so my Dad could switch these marvellous inventions off at the first opportunity.
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