Essay

My Kingdom for a Plumber

With apologies to Richard III and Captain Oates

Sometimes life’s most important considerations sharpen, become clear and unequivocal. Usually, they are times of adversity.

Last week, the fridge broke—a mild inconvenience in winter when the icebox-garage easily becomes an ersatz cooler.

But Sunday it was the boiler. Compared to boilers, fridges are pretentious things, mere fripperies.

In fact, since Sunday I have discovered that in matters of importance only a solid roof and sound windows trump a boiler. Looking after your boiler is the environmental equivalent of looking after your teeth.

Sunday we woke to silence. No thump and rumble of pipes expanding, filling, gurgling, no quietly hissing radiators. And with exquisite timing a noiseless freezing fog, white and bright and still, descended like a phantom beyond the windows. The eaves of the roof glittered white, and the car was sheathed in white.

We had no heat and no hot water.

Ours is an old house with fireplaces and thin windows. The living room is too big to heat by fire alone. So we lit a fire in the hall. It’s a good fireplace and despite being rarely used, the smoke from the coal and wood deftly disappeared up the chimney. I fetched a chair and my notebook and sat in an unaccustomed place.

There’s a romanticism about an open fire, as if you can commune with the original inhabitants of a house, back to a time when a fire was the only form of heating. We closed every door, either to keep heat in or keep cold out. The upstairs became no-man’s-land, a wilderness that we rushed through to reach the kitchen and the electric heater.

I enjoyed sitting at the fire; the wood hissed and spat and the coal sizzled. But soon, a pile of ash spilled onto the floor and more wood had to be fetched from the garage and more coal fetched from the coal bunker. I dreamed of a parlour maid in white hat and apron who tended my fire.

How quickly romanticism fades! In the absence of such a servant, at such times, you wish you had encouraged your son to become a plumber. For a plumber is what we really wanted, what we really needed, what we most desired.

You can take your hedge fund managers, your polymaths, your AI gurus and you can stuff them; plumbers hold the real power of civilization.

Running water and shelter are the very minimum of human requirements, followed by heat and a toilet. Notice that three out of the four require — depend on — a plumber. Plumbers are the most necessary people on the planet.

I phoned the boiler company but was told that as it was a repair, I must call on Monday. I was filled with guilt. The boiler hasn’t been serviced since 2020. I had neglected what beyond the roof is the most important thing in the house.

Temperatures fell to minus 4 during the night, and scarce got above freezing on Monday.

Son, who’s not a plumber, who’s in IT, suggested turning the boiler off and on. I seized on the idea, there being nothing else to try.

Standing in the garage, shivering, like supplicants before our God, we turn the boiler off, give it a moment to collect itself, and then son flicks the switch on.

Comes a rumble.

Our spirits lift.

Can it be? Has the boiler sprung, like a miracle, to life —

But the sound we hear, the low throaty growl, is the boiler laughing. In a commanding voice, it says,

Think your IT trick will work on me! Get back to your server room, Sonny.

We have to wait until Wednesday for a plumber from the manufacturer of the boiler. And I have to pay a large sum of money in advance to book the plumber. I have no choice. If I was Richard III, I would pay my kingdom for a plumber.

Meanwhile, we shiver and huddle and turn on the electric blankets for the cats. Happily, despite my husband being American, he has lived in England long enough to imbibe a bit of the mettle of our great explorers. When he leaves the kitchen to go to the bedroom via the wasteland that is our hall, he stands at the door wistfully,

I may be some time…

By the time you read this, we may be once again in warm, snug boiler land. Or we may still be in the arctic depths of our home.

Much I have learned in our adversity, this being the most important:

Besides looking after your teeth, look after your boiler.

Unless you happen to be one of those most exalted, most smug of people, a plumber…