Ian McMillan: Autumn’s arrival starts to fire my imagination

But now I know it’s officially autumn because my wife came into the room with a few sticks and some firelighters and announced that it was time to light the fire for the first time since April.

Autumn’s here, then: and now there’s no looking back till next spring when we put the firelighters away and stop getting the sticks out of Thomas’s old playhouse by the garage.

At Low Valley Juniors, we used to have a News Book in which, every Monday morning, we’d write about what we’d been up to over the weekend.

To be honest, CNN or the BBC would consider most of our South Yorkshire Saturdays and Sundays to be slow news days; I found one of my news books a while ago and the headline (indeed the only item) on the first page was “My dad got the coal in” and there was a picture of my dad looking like a cross between a cave painting and a Picasso Blue Period portrait carrying two buckets of coal, one in each hand. No wonder his eyes were bulging!

Or maybe that was just because I wasn’t holding my crayon tightly enough. It reminded me, though, that every autumn and through the cold winters of childhood, the fire was the central place in the house and in all the houses round here and getting the coal in really was a news event

In autumn at 108 Barnsley Road in the 1960s when the wind whipped round the house and the rain banged on the window, the fireguard went close to the fire and the pants and vests steamed on it as they dried or, just the once, caught fire, my dad’s vast Y-fronts going up in flames just before he snatched them to safety and whirled them round his head to try and put them out, looking like somebody taking part in a strange fertility ceremony on an obscure Scottish island.

If I’d have been quick witted I’d have said “Liar liar pants on fire” but of course my dad always told the truth. Except when he said to my mam that he hadn’t fallen asleep in front of the fireguard and that the pants had just combusted in a split second. He was in fact snoring as the pants began to smoulder over a period of at least 10 minutes.

Perhaps I should have said something, given him a warning, but I was on the lookout for a scoop to put in my news book to impress Miss Parkin and win a gold star.

We banked up the fire at my auntie’s house and Uncle Charlie toasted bread on his toasting fork. Well, when I say toasted, I mean charred. He carefully placed the resulting blackened cinders on a willow-pattern plate and tried to spread butter on them, which was like trying to put jam on bits of lava from Pompeii. He’d gamely chew the resultant dust.

“Grand, Ian lad, and full of beneficial chemicals,” he’d say in his autodidactic way, spraying crumbs everywhere in a fine cloud until my Auntie tutted and came round vigorously with the Bex Bissell. If we lay down too near the fire reading our comics we’d be told to move because we’d get “hotaches”; if we sat too far away from the fire we’d be urged to move closer because we’d “catch our death”.

Somehow, most of my younger years were spent trying to find a place that was just the cool side of hotaches, just the warm side of the place you caught your death, somewhere between sweating and shivering.

And now, with the weather turning and the news (and I don’t mean “My dad got the coal in”) getting gloomier by the day, it feels good that we’ve got the fire lit, it feels good that we’ve got somewhere to huddle closer to away from the weather and the headlines.

I don’t know how people without open fires manage when autumn strikes, to be honest: can you gather round a radiator and tell tales of the old days? Can you toast a slice of thick white in front of one of those coal-effect gas fires that used to be all the rage? I don’t think you can.

When I hutch a little closer to the fire in autumn, I’m only doing what my primitive ancestors did when they edged nearer to the embers; I’m doing what my more recent forebears did in little cottages where the fire was the heat and the light and the cooker and the place around which stories were told. I’m doing what people anywhere in the world will do in autumn, I’m moving a little closer to the warmth.