One of the most remarkable texts I came across as we prepared the project was a meditation by George Orwell on exactly this disconnection at the heart of capitalism – the separation between producers and consumers who never meet. He’s living in Kentish Town, working on The Road to Wigan Pier and considering the way his entire society is dependent on coal and the miners (just as today we’re dependent on oil and gas), and yet he sees no real connection between his life in London and the extraction process:
We all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never remember what coal getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’ – something which I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that, hundreds of feet below the road you are on, the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world as the root is to the flower …
It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp, and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants – all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
In the process of our research for the ‘Homeland’ project, I remember talking to a miner, Tyrone O’Sullivan, who was then the branch secretary of the National Union of Miners at Hirwaun in south Wales. He told me that he was very supportive of our initiative, because ‘anything that makes people realise that when they click a switch in London, or anywhere else, that it’s not magic – that it’s people’s labour that brings electricity to the cities – that’s got to be important’. Later in the project we discussed how it might be possible to stop people taking electricity for granted. We wondered about the potential of having one day a year when the supply of power would be cut off (apart from to essential services such as hospitals). Would the enforced absence on one day actually mean we never took such a resource for granted on all the other days of the year?
Well, now I’ll have a chance to find out for myself. With a torch I go through the drawers in the kitchen and manage to find a couple of candles and some night lights, and soon I’m lighting the woodburner. There’s a fine stack of seasoned ash logs around the fireplace so I don’t even need to bring in any wood from the shed next door. I’m impressed by the draw of the stove – within five minutes the flames are leaping. Since childhood I’ve loved this moment – when the fire takes, and the sun’s stored energy in the wood begins to be released. When you know it’s caught, and the flames are hungrily licking around the larger twigs. At least I won’t be cold tonight. Heat. Shelter. Food. The essentials. I root around in the kitchen and find two small, heavy pans with lids – I’ll use these for hot water and to heat things up on top of the stove. The other cupboards are pretty bare, and Megan must have cleared her fridge before she went travelling because all that’s left is an abandoned half-jar of black olives and some shrivelled ginger. Never mind, I’ve got my emergency rations in the car. I find a spare front door key hanging on a nail, and then make several rapid sorties outside to bring in my stuff.
The gale is becoming a storm. The sycamore tree next to the house is now being bent over at almost forty-five degrees. Even the rugged hawthorns, stubborn mountain survivors, are being hammered by the sheer force of these winds. I realise it’s not very intelligent to have left the car under the sycamore on a night like this, so I go out one last time, and move the car a hundred yards back up the track, round a bend, near the gate. The winds are now so violent, coming off the sea, that it takes all my force just to open the car door. As I hurry back to the house, bending to keep my weight close to the ground to stop myself being blown over, an elderly fox lumbers across the track in front of me, low on his haunches, looking as miserable as only a drenched fox can look. I feel an overwhelming sense of companionship tonight with this other animal ‘who bides the pelting of this pitiless storm’ – both of us heading for our respective shelters.
I shiver with relief as I pull the door behind me. I check my phone, just after 3 a.m. now. The sitting room is already thawing. I pull the old sofa as close as possible to the stove. And then my thoughts turn to food. I’m ravenous. I root around in the Hackney recycling box and pull out half a loaf of bread, the lump of old cheddar, the tin of soup and a can of Guinness. Never have such limited resources given me greater anticipated joy. I take a glass down from a dresser, pull the ring on top of the can, hear the soft release of the widget, and then pour the dark liquid, slowly foaming, into the glass. The first slaking of thirst after hours of journeying. I savour every drop of the dark liquid. I feed more logs into the stove, thicker ones now. I take a candle into the kitchen’s sharp chill to find a bowl, a spoon, a tin opener. Then back to my cocoon, feeling the warmth again. I watch the onion soup slowly begin to respond to the heat on top of the stove, tiny bubbles around the edge of the pan, I add a few chunks of cheddar and watch them melting stringily and cut a lump of bread. I eat with a kind of joy I haven’t felt for a long time. Simplicity of the sweet onion and dark broth and salt tang of cheese. I’m absorbed in this moment utterly. To be warm. To be sheltered from the storm. To be fed. In my normal, insulated life, how hard it is to feel any of these things.
I look around this sitting room, illuminated by only a single candle now and the glow of the woodburner. On the massive, dark-wood dresser that dominates one side of the room I suddenly spot bottles, reflected in the light … I go over to investigate, and to my delight, find next to the whisky (which has never really appealed to me) a single bottle of armagnac! So now, as well as being warm on the outside I can heat my spirits on the inside … I’m sure Megan wouldn’t mind. I pour a small glass of the brandy, and take a sip. The fumes reaching my nose moments before the spreading infusion of sweet heat ripples the back of my throat. I try to identify exactly how the intensity of this pleasure happens, the interplay between nostrils, tongue and throat; the difference between the tiniest sip and a more manly measure. I have to pour a second glass to enable my research to go further. At this point I turn on my little radio (luckily fully charged before coming away), and immediately the sounds of Schubert fill the room. At this point I just start giggling. Within an hour I’ve gone from despair to exhilaration. Blissful solitude, the promise of a week’s writing to come, away from all the distraction and absurdity of the city with its vanities and anxieties. Fire, armagnac and Schubert. That’ll do for me.
At the end of the concert, the announcer reveals that it was recorded earlier this evening in Bangor (only thirty miles away, as the raven flies, across the highest mountains), and that the concert hall had been battered by wild winds tonight, as we’d probably heard from the broadcast, but the show had to go on. Before I go to sleep I switch over to the late news and there’s a report from Cricieth, on the other side of the water, with a correspondent saying that gusts of 108 mph have just been recorded at Aberdaron, further to the west, but that the ‘hurricane-force winds’ are now moving inland. I briefly wonder what the precise difference is between ‘hurricane-force winds’ and a ‘hurricane’ itself? As I’m reflecting on this, my mobile starts chirping its relentlessly upbeat call, and I’m temporarily back in my city world. But I see who’s calling and my heart lifts. A close friend, more than a friend. ‘It’s 3.30 in the morning, why aren’t you asleep?!’ I ask him. He’s just wanting to know that I’m OK, that I arrived safely. And when I tell him how wild it is here, I can hear the gentle teasing in his voice as he reminds me that wild is what you like, isn’t it? And he has little sympathy about the power cut, surely that’s part of the deal if you go to such places in February. Yes, I grudgingly have to admit that he’s right.