Rob Rattenbury: When wood fire was everything in New Zealand homes

Rob Rattenbury remembers refilling the wood box from the wood pile behind the shed in Nana’s backyard. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

It was not that long ago that New Zealand homes relied on fire for heating, cooking and laundry. Certainly when I was a boy.

I learned how to use a small axe to chop wood, including kindling as a kid of about 7.

I was told to watch my fingers and just left to get on with it. Helicopter-parenting had not been invented back then.

Our own family home had an open fire in the lounge and electrical appliances such as an oven and a washing machine but my grandmother still lived in the early 20th century.

I, like many of her grandchildren, was sent to stay with her on numerous occasions to help her. She was not a well woman and had plenty of grandkids to do the donkey work.

We would do the shopping at the local Four Square, butcher and fruit shop. We would all chop firewood for her chip heater, copper and lounge fire. Nana also used a coal range cooker as well.

The woodman would call twice a year with the firewood, dumping it in the backyard for us kids to stack in the woodpile.

The coal merchant from around the corner would deliver sacks of coal regularly.

I often had to call in and pay the bill. As a small boy, I thought it remarkable how covered in coal the man was, a gentle giant wearing a huge leather jerkin even in the middle of summer.

Going to Nana’s was not a holiday. It was work, work and work.

But in return we had Nana’s unconditional love, humour and her wonderful cooking.

She also had a television, one of the first people in our town to get one. So most nights the lounge would have a few neighbours visiting to watch the flickering blue screen in the corner. Everyone smoked, except us kids of course.

A blue haze ascending to the ceiling, just normal in those days.

It was not all bad at Nana’s. She loved games and cards, teaching us all. I learnt to play poker from Nana.

In those days, heating was a big deal in winter time. The wood box in the lounge or living room had to be kept full, even on wet days.

In my memory, the days were always cold and wet when it was my turn to refill the wood box from the woodpile behind the shed in Nana’s backyard. Numb fingers, dirty hands, spiders, wetas.

At some stage the Zip kerosene heater arrived in our lives. Little fire bombs that thousands of New Zealand homes used.

No more chopping endless piles of firewood. No more cold, wet trips outside to get more wood.

Many just decided it was preferable to live with these potential death traps than worry about making an open fire in the lounge every day.

By then, coal ranges and coppers were disappearing. Fire slowly began not to be a necessity in many homes.

For those who don’t know what a kerosene heater is, let me describe it. Take two half-gallon brown glass flagons, fill them with highly inflammable Blue Pennant kerosene, put their special valve tops on and tip one upside down inside the metal heater cabinet so that the valve on the top slowly releases kerosene into a small reservoir that is connected to the heater wick in front of the heater, separated by only a stainless steel cover from the fuel storage cabinet.

Place the second, spare bottle upright next to the upside-down one in the cabinet.

Allow a few minutes for the kerosene to soak the wick. Take the radiator head off and using a match, light the wick. A blue flame would creep around the circular wick.

Replace the radiator and stand back. Often blue and orange flame would erupt towards the ceiling like a volcano from the radiator head.

It would then slowly settle and the radiator would provide a few hours warmth until the upside-down bottle needed replacing - usually a job for the biggest kid in the house to do, as well as filling the bottles when they were empty.

Brilliant, one would think. Warm as toast, flavoured with a faint whiff of kerosene in the house, comforting in time.

The heaters were good but they also had a tendency to set fire to things resulting in many house fires, injuries and even some deaths.

But we all used them until sometime in the mid-1960s when a flash new electric heater came on the market, the Conray. Plug it in, three bars of heat. Safe and no work for the kids.

We could relax; no more chopping wood or getting wood and coal in on wet days. No more filling brown kerosene bombs.

By then, poor Nana had passed so no more hard labour at her place either.