Little has been written about central heating’s effect on
family life, and less still has suggested that it may be for the worse. Yet
that is my bold contention. To say that mine is a lonely stand would be an
understatement. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who will even pretend to
agree with me, least of all my husband, who grew up in the frozen wastes of North
Dakota. But to me, the conclusion seems inescapable: the advent of central
heating dealt a crushing, perhaps even a mortal blow to the nuclear family.
Consider, if you will, Plug, the Neolithic cave man, huddled
with his family around an open fire. They are warm, or at least their fronts
are toasted almost to the point of spontaneous combustion while their backs
freeze in the bitter night air. As long as the fire burns, they are safe from
the unwelcome advances of the friendly neighborhood saber tooth tiger. The
winsome Hlug eyes their dwindling supply of firewood apprehensively. Will it
last till morning? Her gaze rests on her teenage son, Glug; she shudders as she
remembers the piteous screams of Vlug, her firstborn son, who strode off into
just such a night as this in search of more firewood, and never came back …
(Anachronism alert: we all know that teenagers were an
invention of the early 20th century, and that Glug must therefore
have been either a boy or a man, but this does not affect the overall message:
if you want to survive, stick together!)
Fast forward to medieval times, to spectacularly cold
castles in which rich tapestries serve as a barrier between the bitter cold and
damp of the bare stone walls, and the inhabitants bravely striving to obey the
songs of the period and "make merrie.” (Hard to do when your hue is blue.)
Before the advent of the chimney around the 12th century, banqueting
halls had a nasty tendency to fill up with smoke whenever the wind direction
changed. Better a hall full of smoke, however, than marauding Vikings! Safety
in numbers meant that, red eyes or no, this was where anyone interested in
keeping safe and/or warm spent much of their days, and definitely their nights.
Fast forward again to the mid-twentieth century, to the
England of my youth. Common sources of heat included a coal stove or fireplace,
a one or two-bar reflective electric heater, and in some homes, the luxury of
an open gas fire (perfect for toasting crumpets.) Typically, only one room was
heated—the living room. And kitchen, if the oven was in use. If I wanted to
indulge my teenaged angst, which was by now quite fashionable, I was free to do
so in the privacy of my bedroom. If, that is, I didn't mind my body turning as
blue as my spirits. Saber tooth tigers—not
a problem. Marauding Vikings—ditto. With personal safety out of the mix, the only
incentive to sociability was keeping warm. To rewrite the old hymn, “Shall We
Gather By The Fireplace?”
So you may imagine my horror when I learned of the newest
development in Scandinavia: open plan houses. Instead of having one room that
was a fortress against the cold, with stuffed rolls of fabric keeping out the
fearsome drafts that otherwise whistled under the doors, these northern
wastrels designed houses with no doors (except on bedrooms), so that the whole
house had to be heated. Imagine that—family members roaming freely through a uniformly
warm house!
One winter, a lengthy power outage gave our family the
privilege of experiencing several thousand years of heating history. For three
days we huddled round the wood-burning stove in the basement. It was our sole
source of heat, and all our meals and cups of tea originated from its flat top.
As evening drew on, and the brief hours of daylight came to an end, I read
aloud by candlelight while my husband wreaked his culinary magic on the stove
top. To all intents and purposes, the rest of the house, in all its Arctic
splendor, ceased to exist. We rediscovered our inner caveman, and we liked it. I
even harbored hopes that the experience would be transformative—that this
feeling of family unity, this contentment in togetherness, would carry through
the return of electrical power.
Not a bit of it! When the lights came back on with a
suddenness that had us all blinking like myopic owls, the children seemed
almost to dissolve; I discovered them moments later, returned to their natural habitat—their
very own, electric lit and heated rooms. They all enjoyed the outage, but
showed no interest whatever in recreating it; my suggestion that we should have
one electricity-free day a week (a month? a year?)
was met with incredulity as one of my daftest ideas ever (believe me, in my family’s eyes that’s saying something.)
We never had another outage that lengthy; the City of
Everett cut down the trees nearest the power lines, and thereafter losses of
power were measured in minutes, not days. And yet, all these years later, the
children still recall those days as “awesome.”
Because without central heating, family living really is
“chill.”
