I can coal dust in my mouth

When the Rayburn was finally removed from the house in 2009, I felt a grief I hadn’t expected. When I first met it, in 1999, I was 27, with a baby and almost nothing else to my name.

We were allocated a house, but I wasn’t that keen on it. The thing about tied housing, though, is you get what you’re given. It was an old building, but it looked like an ugly bungalow and had been used as a bothy for volunteers and ghillies. Years of itinerant workers passing through had left their mark. I don’t think it had been anyone’s home in a long time. They had gone to the effort of painting the walls magnolia, so it didn’t look so bad, but it was a poor palette to work from.

It was also not furnished.

We were poor, having recently been on benefits while trying to find work and living in a very remote spot without a car – I had been very glad to get this job. The house had a gas cooker, a kitchen table and chairs that belonged in a skip and three single beds, two of which were pushed together as a double for us. We had a two-seater sofa, a washing machine, a chest of drawers infested with woodworm, a cot and the rest of our belongings amounted to fifty quid’s worth of freight on the ferry.

The best thing about the house was the Rayburn in the kitchen. I came to realise it was the heart of the house, whether I liked it or not. It doubled as a cooker and the source of hot water and central heating.

It was powered by coal.

I hadn’t seen one in real life, let alone used one. Anne, a local, or as local as you got here, gave me a quick lesson of how it worked. You had to set a fire—easy enough for me, I was no stranger to open fires—then add coal, monitor the air intake so it didn’t burn too hot, too quickly, and keep it going all day. Last thing at night, you would bank it up with more coal and shut down the air intake so it would tick over through the night and still be going in the morning – you hoped. Sometimes, if you forgot and left the bottom door open (you could actually take it off even though you weren’t supposed to) it would take off like a train ‘chonging’, we called it, when it was really, really hot. One time the hot plate even went red and the needle on the temperature gauge started going around again, dangerously hot. When the wind blew in a particular direction it would send backdrafts down the chimney and the kitchen erupted in coal dust which settled everywhere, the woodchip wallpaper had tiny piles of coal dust on each chip. Impossible to clean properly.

The coal shed was outside, the first job in the morning was to check the fire was still in, empty the tray of ashes and get more wood and coal in. When the weather was windy the ashes went everywhere, all over whatever you were wearing, in your eyes and mouth. Rain or shine, snow or gale, it was the first thing that had to be done, generally in pyjamas.

Cooking on a Rayburn was yet a further skill I had to learn. There are books about this designed for fancy farmhouse kitchen cooks. The pictures and recipes look lovely, but the reality was a different ballgame. The learning curve of not undercooking or burning things in the oven was steep. The hotplate was easier, you just moved your pan to the cooler side if everything was too hot or opened the bottom door under the firebox, letting in more air, if it wasn’t. There were two ovens, the bottom one was more of what they would call a proving drawer on the bake-off, perfect for slow cooking casseroles but that’s about all. It was fortunate we had a small separate gas cooker as well; otherwise, we’d have gone hungry a fair amount of the time.

It really was a fine art, but once you know its nuance and personality, it became part of the family; a temperamental child who had tantrums every so often, the teenager who refused to co-operate, the partner who needed gentle encouragement, the loving mum who wrapped you in a warm embrace, the Rayburn was all of these things.

It was also the source of hot water for the central heating and bath. The net effect of this was, if you had a bath and used up all the hot water, which it did, then the radiators would be cold until the water heated up again. I thought these things should be on separate systems, but it didn’t seem to work like that here, so when one of us had a bath, we all had a bath.

Years went by in that cosy kitchen. The magnolia walls became sunshine yellow. The skip-worthy table was replaced by a wooden farmhouse table and benches. The lino remained scorched in places from flying embers. But by the time the baby was twelve, and had two sisters, it was time for a change. A big change that took a few years and changed the house and who lived in her forever.

Rayburns are huge chunks of metal that hold an incredible amount of residual heat, even when you think they’re relatively cold. The kitchen was always the warmest, cosiest room in the house, where we happily spent the most time. It wasn’t until 2009, when the Rayburn was finally removed, that I understood how much heat it had and what a true heart of the house it had been. I felt a sense of loss when it went, and the kitchen has never been the same. I miss the heat from the Rayburn, but not the coal dust, the scorched floor or the non-stop patrol for coal, wood and the emptying of the ash tray. The kitchen looks so very different now, modern with rustic traditional touches, you know; I have a killer range cooker with many gas rings and two ovens, it’s awesome, but not the same. You wouldn’t know a Rayburn had ever been there now, but we know. And if I close my eyes, I can still smell the coal smoke and feel its warmth.