大象传媒

Fire In His Jacket

The robins came with the first snow. It was a Russian winter 1942, cold like we had never experienced. Our large house was built of cedar wood and hard to heat on the ration of coal allowed. But my father had other ideas about this.

He was exempt from war service, because his skills as a joiner were deemed more important and he worked in the Caledon Shipyard repairing the war-torn ships that limped into the harbour. Father worked long hours, and also had to do his share of fire-watching, which he took very seriously. At the faintest drone of an aircraft, he would drag us all out of bed into the air-raid shelter at the bottom of our garden, even before the sirens began to wail. It was a cold, damp heap with a corrugated iron roof covered by about two feet of earth and stones and anything else that wouldn鈥檛 blow away.

The cold ate up the coal like termites on overtime. In the evening all the family would often huddle around a tiny electric fire supplied by the Council because of the shortage of fuel. We went to bed many an evening to keep warm, while father sat just inside the front door in the pitch dark, with only the fire to warm him. Being an excessive tea drinker earned him the name of Daddy Suck-Suck, which he hated. In the mornings, there would be a sea of mugs on the doorstep.

One dark night, father鈥檚 desperate attempt to keep us warm took him into the Den o鈥� Mains, a local beauty spot and park. He chopped down a tree taller than himself, dragged it through deep snow, kindled it with beef fat into a roaring, sparkling fire, and for many nights we revelled in the heat that only a wood fire gives. Father sat sentinel at this log, kicking it now and then until the flames became embers.

One moonlit night soon after, watching father from an upstairs window when he came home from work, I saw him unzip his jacket in the back garden. Out fell three lumps of shiny black coal about the size of his head into the deep snow. Later, when I questioned him about this, I heard this phrase for the first time : 鈥淲here there鈥檚 a will, there鈥檚 a way鈥�. No more was said about this episode, except that there was plenty of coal in the Caledon.

Maureen Black via Dundee Central Library

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.