A Somerset Lad

Ten thousand steps a day? Where do people get these things from? Who said people should do ten thousand steps a day? Probably someone who did not grow up in s small village in rural England.

Of course, there was the bicycle, but the bicycle only took you from one place to another, and while useful on tarmac roads or stony lanes, it would make little headway when winter rain turned tracks to mud. Most of the time, walking was the only option.

On the farm, unless the cows were in the home fields, there was a walk to fetch them for the evening milking. It was always a delight to go with my grandfather, he walked at a steady pace, never hurried, and an undersized, asthmatic boy did not have to struggle to keep pace with him. In times when money was short, there would be numerous farm tasks that would be done on foot. Checking cattle, checking electric fences, walking to draw water from a well for cattle distant from the farm. Hours would be passed walking around, and no-one would have thought it unusual.

The village had a bus service only once a week, it took people to Langport for shopping, the bank, and whatever other services might be visited in the two hours before the bus made the return journey.

In student days, the shopping bus was of little use. Coming home might mean catching the train to Taunton or Yeovil Junction and catching the bus to Langport before walking the three miles home. The fare from Waterloo to Yeovil Junction was much cheaper than that from Paddington to Taunton, but, if expenditure was to be avoided, there was a need to walk from the Junction into the town of Yeovil, in memory, a couple of miles.

Walking was not something done for leisure or for fitness, it was something done out of necessity. Of course, it severely restricted the possibility of going anywhere. I used to buy copies of Time Out magazine, the London “what’s on?” publication and imagine what it was like to live in a city where it was possible to go anywhere you liked, where a world of excitement was only a tube journey away. Stuck in a village, isolated from everything that interested me, I would gladly have chose not to walk anywhere.

Ten thousand steps a day? Is that all that you do?

“You could run a car on that.”

“On what?”

“On the oil in that heating tank. It’s 35-second oil. It’s the same as red diesel. There would be a few people around here who do that.”

In Northern Ireland of 1989, the chance of being caught for using red diesel in a road vehicle was much slimmer than it is now. When I did buy a diesel car, I was never tempted to try running it on heating oil. A neighbour insisted that the heating oil was less refined and would clog up the injectors of the car (whatever the injectors were).

Red diesel in Northern Ireland was agricultural fuel. Taxes imposed on it were a fraction of those paid on road diesel. The red colour came from dye that was added, dye that some people tried to wash out in order to present it as legitimate road fuel (the neighbour said that the dye could damage the engine).

In the Republic, the farm diesel was dyed green, and, judging by the number of checkpoints where Garda and customs officers dipped vehicle tanks for signs of the green diesel, the use of 35-second agricultural oil to run cars must have been a common occurrence.

Given the suitability of farm fuels for running cars, my grandfather’s farm at Huish Episcopi must have provided much temptation in those moments when road fuel was scarce, or was hugely more expensive. Beside a corrugated iron shed in the farmyard, two large tanks stood on brick supports: one contained diesel and the other a fuel called TVO. The more modern Nuffield tractor ran on diesel and the older Fordson and Ferguson ran on TVO.

The operation of the TVO tractor seemed complicated. It had two fuel tanks. There was a smaller tank that contained petrol; it was used to start the tractor. Once the engine was running well, the driver would switch to the larger tank containing the TVO, which was apparently like paraffin. The worst mistake a driver could make was to forget to switch from the petrol to the TVO. Petrol was expensive and there was never more than a jerry can of it kept on the farm.

Both diesel and TVO tanks had hoses fitted to allow the filling of the tractors. To have used the red diesel for a car would have been a simple matter of pulling up beside the tank and putting in the fuel (unlike trying to extract it from a central heating tank). Perhaps the excise men kept an eye on such temptations.

A square, turquoise-coloured metal can with a filler cap on the top and a tap at the bottom of the front of it, the picture on Instagram recalled a world that would seem like something from Victorian times to the Year 7 students I teach.

Paraffin in 2020 comes in tankers to fill heating oil tanks. Type the word into a search engine and offers of next day delivery will appear. Paraffin fifty years ago came a gallon or two at a time. A can would be taken to the hardware shop, or would be filled by Mr Bryant, the hardware merchant who did a round of the village on a Monday evening.

In our house, the bathroom was heated by a paraffin heater, it bore the brand name of Aladdin, but it brought no genie who would cast a magic spell to warm the room. A small, upright, rectangular dark blue and white appliance, it had a grille of three bars at the top of the front side. Below the grille, a panel that formed the remainder of the front side could be lifted away to reveal the burner and the fuel reservoir that was filled from the paraffin can. The grille became burning hot, so hot that my sister once accidentally placed her hand against it and burned three lines across her flesh.

There was probably some regulation against there being paraffin heaters in bathrooms, but, if there was, no-one could ever have enforced it. Homes were much more dangerous places then than they are now.

As dangerous as it was, the paraffin heater did at least bring some warmth into the bathroom. My grandmother’s bathroom had a heater that was mounted on the wall just below the ceiling, its circular electric element was intended to radiate heat as an electric fire would at floor level. If you stood directly in line with the heater, there was some warmth, it did nothing, however, to warm the rest of the room. The Aladdin stove was magical in its effects when compared with the dismal efforts of the electric wall heater.

Aladdin heaters are like those Nineteenth Century domestic appliances which are now to be found only in museums or antique shops, superseded by technological improvements. How odd it will seem to future generations that in the times of the moon landings we were still pouring paraffin into a stove to try to keep ourselves warm.