‘But where I come from there is snow every winter and the roofs never leak.’
The agent’s assistant blushed. ‘Well, there is a faulty gutter just over your bed.’
‘Over my bed! Hadn’t you better repair it? If it snows and melts any more I’ll wake up in a mess of wet plaster. Or maybe I won’t even wake up.’
The agent’s assistant didn’t look as if he had seriously considered repairing the gutter. After all, I could see him hoping, there might not be any more snow.
‘You better repair it. I don’t want to have to bother you again!’
The men descended and began to swab the discolored and still dripping ceiling with a general air of having things fixed. I ran into the babies’ room in answer to a crash and a scream. My son, in an access of energy, had just shaken his cot apart, snapping all the screws. When I returned, coddling his sobs I heard the men saying ‘Whoops’ to one another. They were holding a yellow plastic bucket to a geyser of ceiling water with the embarrassed air of covering some obscenity.
‘How long,’ I demanded, ‘is this leakage going to go on? You know it’s like Chinese water torture, don’t you, drip drip drip all night. Can’t you put a bucket up in the attic?’
‘Ooo mum, there’s not room to stand a candle in that attic. The gutter lays straight atop your ceiling.’
They left the bucket on the floor, just in case, and with promises to repair the gutter before the weekend, stumped off.
I have not seen them since.
Then the agent himself arrived, with bowler and moisture detector, to see about my leakage, the failure of cold water and the tub full of Alpine fluid.
With the moisture detector he pricked the bedroom ceiling and assured me that it would not, in the immediate future, fall.
‘You realize, though, that you are in danger of having no drinking water.’
I said no, I had not realized it. Why?
‘The builders haven’t properly layered the pipes to the house and they are frozen. I would turn off your immersion heater in case it burns out the empty tank. When the water in the upstairs cistern is finished, that’s the end.’
I tried to recall some of the things one cannot do without water beside washing one’s face and making tea. There were many.
‘I’ll try to get the pipes fixed by tonight‚’ the agent promised. ‘The drinking water situation is more important than your tub.’
He stepped onto the snowy balcony to survey the maze of ancient pipes against the wall, then went in to fiddle with the water taps in the kitchen. ‘Aha!’ he finally said. ‘At first I thought the plumbers might have connected a pipe wrong and that the tub water could indeed be coming from the roof. But look!’ He instructed me to stand and watch the tub full of water while he went into the kitchen and ran the hot tap.
Bubbles and rings plopped up from the open drain hole.
‘You see,’ the agent accused, ‘it is your own water filling the tub. You have a frozen waste pipe, so it can’t escape.’
Then he invited me out on the balcony.
With dazzling glibness he rattled off the sources and origins of the twining pipes. ‘That is your sink pipe, that is your bath pipe, those going up into the air are air pipes.’ I stared in despair. The bath waste pipe alone ran some twenty feet down the wall and along the balcony before it bent to drop its load into an open drain below.
‘Somewhere the bath waste pipe is frozen.’
‘What happens,’ I asked, ‘if you run hot water in the tub?’
‘Oh it just melts the top bit of ice and freezes again.’
‘Then what can I do?’
‘Hold candles to the pipe. Or pour hot water on it. Of course I could have the builders put a blowtorch to it, but you’d have to have it done at your own expense.’
‘But you are responsible for the outside repairs, and the pipes are outside the house.’
‘Ah but,’ the agent evilly gleamed, ‘the bath is inside. Have you been plugging your drains every night to prevent water escaping and freezing?’
‘No-o. Nobody told me to. But I always turn off the taps very tightly.’
I felt cornered. ‘Granted,’ said the agent loftily, ‘the Water Board should have sent round leaflets telling what to do in such an emergency.’
‘What do you do at your flat?’
‘Oh, I run great douches of boiling water through several times a day and bung up the drains at night. Terrible waste of electricity, of course, but it seems to work.’
After the agent had folded himself into muffler, gloves and bowler and left with his moisture detector, I pondered his advice. Douches of boiling water would do nothing if the pipes weren’t already cleared, and I had a limited, perhaps even now extinct supply of water. The candle cure seemed miserably Dickensian. Still, to be doing something, I filled a bucket with hot water and shivered out onto the balcony. At random I emptied the almost immediately lukewarm water onto a spot of black, recalcitrant pipe. Then went in to look at the tub, hoping for a miracle. There wasn’t any.
The dirty stuff didn’t stir.
All that materialized was the downstairs tenant.
‘Did you happen to empty some water on your balcony just now?’
‘The agent told me to,’ I confessed.
‘The agent’s a fool. There is a puddle leaking through onto my kitchen floor. And my front walls are dripping. That of course is not your fault. But how can I lay carpets over a whole lot of water?’
I said I had no idea.
In the street that evening I passed great frozen fields of water. From, I presumed, burst pipes. At a tap newly raised from the sidewalk at one corner, an old age pensioner stopped to fill a fat flowered china pitcher.
‘Is that drinking water?’ I called above the mean east wind.
‘I suppose’, he croaked, ‘they put it there for that purpose.’
‘Shocking!’ we both cried at the same moment, and passed in the darkness like sad ships.
Later that night I heard the noise of a Niagara overhead and feet thudding up my hall stairs and a frenzied knocking. The taps gurgled and choked. I flung open the door and a ruddy young plumber rushed in. ‘Is the water coming?’
I covered my eyes and pointed up to the roaring. ‘You look. I can’t. Will it flood everything?’
‘Oh it’s just filling the cistern. It’s all right.’
And it was. We had water to drink, we were lucky.
As for the tub, I decided to wait until the thaw—that mystical, unpredictable date when affairs would better. Every day I emptied its dirty contents by bucket into the toilet and flushed them away.
Oddly enough, no one really beefed.
I asked a man holding a small blue gas flame to a button of pipe at the side of the house if the flame helped. ‘Hasn’t yet,’ he cheerfully said.
The cheer seemed universal. We were all mucking in together, as in the Blitz. An Indian girl in the Chalk Farm tube told me her house had been without any water for three weeks, when the pipes burst and flooded the lot. They had to go out to eat, and the landlady rationed out buckets of water each day.
‘Sorry to get you out of the warm,’ the milkman apologized, calling for his weekly ten and six. ‘What we got now is nine months of winter and three of bad weather.’
*
Then came the power cuts.
One soot-colored and frigid dawn I snapped on the two buttons of the electric heater the builders had stuck, like a Martian surgical mask, in the middle of my otherwise beautiful Georgian wall. A red, consoling glow—two bars of it. Then nothing. I snapped on a light. Nothing. Had I blown a fuse with my piecemeal heating—the little mushroom-shaped childproof electric fan heaters I lugged round from room to room (there were never enough). They had been going defunct lately, one by one, fanning out icy air. I peered into the grey street. No light showed anywhere. My personal concern must be universal. Still, I felt dismal. What had happened? How long would it last?
I knocked at the flat downstairs
. A warm oil stench flooded the hall, from one of those paraffin heaters I would never buy because of my fear of fire.
‘Oh, didn’t you know, there’s a power cut,’ said the tenant, who read newspapers.
‘Why?’
‘Strikes. A baby died in hospital because of it.’
‘But what about my babies? They’ve got flu. They can’t do this to us, it isn’t right!’
The tenant shrugged with a resigned and helpless smile. Then he loaned me a green rubber hot-water bottle. I wrapped my daughter in a blanket with the hot-water bottle and set her over a bowl of warm milk and her favorite puzzle. The baby I dressed in a snowsuit. Luckily I cooked by gas.
Hours later my little girl crowed ‘Fire on.’ And there it was—dull, red, ugly, but utterly wonderful.
The next power cut came unannounced a few days later, at tea. By this time I had flu too—that British alternation of fever and chills for which my doctor offered no relief or cure. You either die or you don’t.
A neighbor popped in with prize booty—night lights. To see by. The shops were sold out of tapers, candles, everything. She had stood in a queue to get these. In the street old people were being helped down the perilous steps of cellar flats by candlelight. Candles filled the windows, mellow and yellow; the city flickered.
Even after the power cut, the instinct to hoard remained. One ironmonger simply wrote CANDLES in his window and sold out the piles of red and white boxes from some secret source—no other ironmonger had refills yet—in a few minutes. I bought a pound of wax fingers and stuffed my pockets.
An electrician told me the generators simply weren’t equipped to take care of the load of new electrical appliances. They were building new generators but not fast enough. The statisticians hadn’t envisioned the demand.
Then, just a month after the first snowfall, the weather relaxed. Eaves began to drip. With a sordid gurgle my bathtub emptied of its own accord. In the street I saw official-looking men sprinkling shovelfuls of powder on the already half-melted ice.
‘What’s that?’ I demanded.
‘Salt and sawdust. To make it melt.’
I also saw my first London snowplow—small, doughty, with a crew of men helping it along by chipping and chopping the truculent remnants and dumping them into an open van. ‘Where have you been all month?’ I asked one of them.
‘Oh, we’ve been coming.’
‘How many plows do you have in all?’
‘Five.’
I didn’t ask whether the five served our zone only, or the whole of London. It didn’t really seem to matter.
‘What do you do with the snow?’
‘We empty it down the sewers. Then there’s floods.’
‘What will you do if this happens every year?’ I asked my agent.
He blenched. ‘Oh it’s not been this bad since nineteen-forty-seven.’
I could tell he didn’t want to think about it—the possibility of an annual snow blitz. Dress up warm, lots of tea and bravery. That seemed the answer. After all, what but war or weather breeds such comradeliness in a big, cold city?
Meanwhile, the pipes stay outside. Where else?
And what if there is another snow blitz?
And another?
My children will grow up resolute, independent and tough, fighting through queues for candles for me in my aguey old age. While I brew waterless tea—that at least the future should bring—on a gas ring in the corner. If the gas, too, is not kaput.
Part II
Other stories
Initiation
The basement room was dark and warm, like the inside of a sealed jar, Millicent thought, her eyes getting used to the strange dimness. The silence was soft with cobwebs, and from the small, rectangular window set high in the stone wall there sifted a faint bluish light that must be coming from the full October moon. She could see now that what she was sitting on was a woodpile next to the furnace.
Millicent brushed back a strand of hair. It was stiff and sticky from the egg that they had broken on her head as she knelt blindfolded at the sorority altar a short while before. There had been a silence, a slight crunching sound, and then she had felt the cold, slimy egg-white flattening and spreading on her head and sliding down her neck. She had heard someone smothering a laugh. It was all part of the ceremony.
Then the girls had led her here, blindfolded still, through the corridors of Betsy Johnson’s house and shut her in the cellar. It would be an hour before they came to get her, but then Rat Court would be all over and she would say what she had to say and go home.
For tonight was the grand finale, the trial by fire. There really was no doubt now that she would get in. She could not think of anyone who had ever been invited into the high school sorority and failed to get through initiation time. But even so, her case would be quite different. She would see to that. She could not exactly say what had decided her revolt, but it definitely had something to do with Tracy and something to do with the heather birds.
What girl at Lansing High would not want to be in her place now? Millicent thought, amused. What girl would not want to be one of the elect, no matter if it did mean five days of initiation before and after school, ending in the climax of Rat Court on Friday night when they made the new girls members? Even Tracy had been wistful when she heard that Millicent had been one of the five girls to receive an invitation.
‘It won’t be any different with us, Tracy,’ Millicent had told her. ‘We’ll still go around together like we always have, and next year you’ll surely get in.’
‘I know, but even so,’ Tracy had said quietly, ‘you’ll change, whether you think you will or not. Nothing ever stays the same.’
And nothing does, Millicent had thought. How horrible it would be if one never changed … if she were condemned to be the plain, shy Millicent of a few years back for the rest of her life. Fortunately there was always the changing, the growing, the going on.
It would come to Tracy, too. She would tell Tracy the silly things the girls had said, and Tracy would change also, entering eventually into the magic circle. She would grow to know the special ritual as Millicent had started to last week.
‘First of all,’ Betsy Johnson, the vivacious blonde secretary of the sorority, had told the five new candidates over sandwiches in the school cafeteria last Monday, ‘first of all, each of you has a big sister. She’s the one who bosses you around, and you just do what she tells you.’
‘Remember the part about talking back and smiling,’ Louise Fullerton had put in, laughing. She was another celebrity in high school, pretty and dark and Vice-President of the Student Council. ‘You can’t say anything unless your big sister asks you something or tells you to talk to someone. And you can’t smile, no matter how you’re dying to.’ The girls had laughed a little nervously, and then the bell had rung for the beginning of afternoon classes.
It would be rather fun for a change, Millicent mused, getting her books out of her locker in the hall, rather exciting to be part of a closely knit group, the exclusive set at Lansing High. Of course, it wasn’t a school organization. In fact, the principal, Mr Cranton, wanted to do away with initiation week altogether, because he thought it was undemocratic and disturbed the routine of school work. But there wasn’t really anything he could do about it. Sure, the girls had to come to school for five days without any lipstick on and without curling their hair, and of course everybody noticed them, but what could the teachers do?
Millicent sat down at her desk in the big study hall. Tomorrow she would come to school, proudly, laughingly, without lipstick, with her brown hair straight and shoulder length, and then everybody would know, even the boys would know, that she was one of the elect. Teachers would smile helplessly, thinking perhaps: So now they’ve picked Millicent Arnold. I never would have guessed it.
A year or two ago, not many people would have guessed it. Millicent had waited a long time for acceptance, longer than most. It was as if she had been sitting for years
in a pavilion outside a dance floor, looking in through the windows at the golden interior, with the lights clear and the air like honey, wistfully watching the gay couples waltzing to the never-ending music, laughing in pairs and groups together, no one alone.
But now at last, amid a week of fanfare and merriment, she would answer her invitation to enter the ballroom through the main entrance marked ‘Initiation’. She would gather up her velvet skirts, her silken train, or whatever the disinherited princesses wore in the story books, and come into her rightful kingdom…. The bell rang to end study hall.
‘Millicent, wait up!’ It was Louise Fullerton behind her, Louise who had always before been very nice, very polite, friendlier than the rest, even long ago, before the invitation had come.
‘Listen,’ Louise walked down the hall with her to Latin, their next class, ‘are you busy right after school today? Because I’d like to talk to you about tomorrow.’
‘Sure. I’ve got lots of time.’
‘Well, meet me in the hall after home room then, and we’ll go down to the drugstore or something.’
Walking beside Louise on the way to the drugstore, Millicent felt a surge of pride. For all anyone could see, she and Louise were the best of friends.
‘You know, I was so glad when they voted you in,’ Louise said.
Millicent smiled. ‘I was really thrilled to get the invitation,’ she said frankly, ‘but kind of sorry that Tracy didn’t get in, too.’
Tracy, she thought. If there is such a thing as a best friend, Tracy has been just that this last year.
‘Yes, Tracy,’ Louise was saying, ‘she’s a nice girl, and they put her up on the slate, but … well, she had three blackballs against her.’
‘Blackballs? What are they?’
‘Well, we’re not supposed to tell anybody outside the club, but seeing as you’ll be in at the end of the week I don’t suppose it hurts.’ They were at the drugstore now.
‘You see,’ Louise began explaining in a low voice after they were seated in the privacy of the booth, ‘once a year the sorority puts up all the likely girls that are suggested for membership….’