Nonfiction | On Fire

On Fire When I Lived Alone In a Cottage in Mayo, Ireland

In the morning the fire is cold. It goes out overnight because I use turf which doesn’t hold the heat like coals might. If I have nowhere to be, I take a long time getting out of bed, especially in the winter. My bedroom is big, the double bed sits with the headboard against the wall, in the middle of the room, and I am like a thick yolk in the middle of that space, yellow and warm, and morning is perfect from there, in the bed. Sometimes I’ll convince myself that it would not be a bad idea to read in bed for an hour. When I read in bed I nearly always fall back to sleep and wake up feeling guilty and dispirited with the same cold rooms to heat ahead of me.

At the fire there is always mess from the night before. The turf produces an enormous amount of ash, and as the day goes on, I load and load the turf into it. I drag bags in from the shed and pull them across the tiles in the living room. The bags often have nicks and holes in them and I watch lines of dirt form behind the bags as I shuffle them to the wall by the fire. Sometimes, in the morning, I pile big pieces of turf on the floor beside the fire so I can get to the little ones near the bottom of the bag which work as a kind of kindling. This spreads more dust and dirt. In the morning I don’t care about the dirt because I want to get warm, I want to see the little orange flames licking at the turf.

Until the fire is going, I move differently in the morning. I am stiff and resistant to the day. As the heat comes, I relax. It’s like a sort of love.

I haven’t bought any oil since last winter because it is expensive and I have an unlimited supply of turf. The barn already holds enough to last at least two more winters, and my landlord, Kieran, will replenish anything I use with this summer’s batch.

I went to his bog last summer. It is four miles from the cottage along a very bumpy stone track ending with a metal gate which, I seem to remember, has nothing – no fence or hedge - on either side. Maybe I’m remembering the fact that the landscape is ungovernable out here. It has a stony independence which would be strong enough to make a gate seem purposeless. People in this landscape, or even signs that people have been here (gates, walls, tracks into forests), automatically wear an air of mythical stoicism.

I first saw the bog when the turf had just been pulled from three feet below the ground by a machine. It sat sliced in rectangles like expensive fudge. Each line was five sods wide and there were perhaps fifteen lines the length of a football pitch. The turf is peat, old earth. Kieran said we had to wait for the top of the turf to dry before we could do anything else.

A week later we returned. We had to turn every sodding sod over. We worked together for two hours, in which time I turned one line of turf and he turned one and a half. It was back-breaking work. I knew wanted to give me a taste of the work that was in it. It was three or four days until I went back again to continue alone, and the whole thing had already been done.

There is more, much more work to follow. After the underside has dried, the turf needs further airing, so each sod is placed upright, leaning against a group of others. The following week I returned. I had hoped to make a dent in the next stage, but arrived to find thousands of little turf wigwams left again to dry. Finally, while I was on holiday in Italy, Kieran and his great uncle who is in his seventies, bagged the turf, loaded it into a truck and brought it in. When I returned, the barn was bursting. The whole process happened in less than a month. There was magnificent sunshine in May and June last year; if it is a bad summer the turf can take months to bag and bring in. Either way, it is an enormous job.

I spend time crouching at the fire, with the stove door open, looking at the flames. I have used the metal stoker to break up the small glowing bits of turf and spread them across the grate evenly, like the burning desert sands of Dante’s Inferno. I love the feel of the heat against my face. The fire sometimes keeps me near the cottage for the day. I won’t leave it long enough to go out. The heat, strong and demanding, I mind as if it were a conscious thing. I am feeding and tending it; I find it strange to think that a fire is not conscious, when I consider those words, feeding and tending. It consumes everything I have at hand, and it will want more. It will need turf from the shed when the rain is battering on the window like bullets. The fire will die at my lazy hand if I do not mind it, and then I will be punished in the cold silence which ensues.

The stove is made of iron and painted black. There is a back-boiler, which heats the radiators and makes fantastic clangs and rumblings as the water gets hotter, burping heat into all the little pipes. When it is very dark at night and I am alone in my bedroom and the fire is still burning and boiling the water, the boiler can seem very much alive, and I have to speak to it then. That is why I started speaking to it in the first place.