Pauline Nevins

Perspective can be helpful. I thought about my late mother during the recent power outages. She was one among the hundreds of thousands of women and children evacuated from London to the countryside during World War II — protection from the incessant German bombing.
  
Although Mother was safe in the country — the bombs had stopped long ago — her memories lingered. During stormy weather, I'd come home from school and follow a thin line of gray smoke drifting from the small room under the stairs where the gas meter was located. There I’d find my mother, sitting in a chair, in the dark, smoking.

“When it thunders this bad,” she’d say, waving her Woodbine cigarette, oblivious to the fact she was sitting in a gas cupboard, "it brings back terrible memories of the London bombings. I wouldn't go to the air-raid shelters. People got buried alive in those things. I took my chances in the street."

Remembering this last week, as my husband, Jim, and I sat with our knees touching across from each other at the table in our travel trailer parked near the garage, I was grateful. Grateful not only that we have a travel trailer powered by propane gas, one we almost sold in the summer, but that I’ve never suffered as my mother had — no bombs were dropping.

Camping in your own backyard may not have the same allure as hooking up in a campground but it can be fun. “Let’s play a game?” I suggested to my husband after he forced down the last piece of chicken he ever hoped to eat.

Without having to stand, Jim reached the overhead cupboard and pulled down a spiffy, small leather case. He undid the bronze-colored clasps. We looked at the contents. We looked at each other. We’d forgotten how to play backgammon. The leather case was replaced with a board game appropriately named "Sorry." After one win each we looked at the time. It was 7:30 p.m. Time for bed.

I’m obsessive about staying warm. Just ask my hiking friends. Hazel rarely wears a jacket when hiking. Another Jim always shows up in shorts. Doesn’t he know that little English boys couldn’t wait for the day when they were allowed to swap their short trousers for long ones? I arrive, regardless of the temperature, wearing a wool hat, long pants, a jacket and mittens. My friends swap sidelong glances but are too polite to laugh.
I blame growing up in a cold house, in a damp country, for my obsession with warmth. A coal fire in the downstairs living room was the only form of heat. I would scratch patterns in the ice that formed on the inside of the windows. Luxuries were few in those post-war days, but we did have hot water bottles. The kettle would whistle its heart out just before bedtime as several of us eight kids, old enough to handle boiling water, lined up to fill their rubber bottles. The rest of our little bodies might shiver but our feet were warm.

Being without power has certainly heightened my appreciation of it, but I’ve always been conservative about using utilities. This trait is thanks to my childhood experiences when the gas and electricity to most houses were controlled through coin-operated meters. Each silver shilling inserted into these meters allocated a specific amount of the utility. Naturally, the gas would go off when Mother was cooking the Sunday roast beef, and the lights would go out when we were watching a particularly thrilling part of a television program. Sensible families would insert several shillings in their meters at one time to guard against these inconveniences. Our family was so broke that we barely managed to find one shilling when needed. In fact, we resorted to counterfeiting. The copper-colored ha’penny (half a penny), was worth one twenty-fourth of a shilling and was only slightly larger. My Irish step-father, who thought it was his duty to pay back the English in large and small ways, taught us how to file down the ha’penny to the size of a shilling using a large metal rasp. Hence, when the man from the utility company arrived to collect the shillings, payment for utilities received, us kids scampered out the back door.

Fortunately, I'm now all grown up and have resources. To compensate for my cold childhood I’ve spoiled myself with an electric blanket. The problem is it doesn’t work very well without electricity. Last week I needed my childhood hot water bottle. Absent that, however, a kind hairy guy with a beard, who has on occasion been mistaken for Santa Claus, jumped into our bed first and warmed my place. Christmas came early this year.