Someone just asked what people remembered of their grandparents house. I thought about the open fire in the hearth..

There was a coal fire, they used paper ‘spills’  to light it, my sisters and I would roll sheets of newspaper into long thin tubes which were the spills… Grandma once had a chimney fire. She used to ‘draw’ the air through the chimney with a sheet of newspaper held against the front of the fire. She would leave a little gap at the bottom and the wind above the chimney would draw the air up, and with it the flames from the kindling she had lit (usually small sticks of wood). Once she had it burning she would bank it up with coal and we would stare at the lovely warm flames. But I remember one day the chimney hadn’t been swept and the soot inside it caught fire! I think the firebrigade had to put it out. I remember being outside watching black smoke and flames coming out of the top of the chimney!

Other memories? A big tin bath on a shelf at the far end of the kitchen before they had an inside bathroom. And grandma’s handmade rag rug made by pushing short lengths of cloth through an old sack cloth so it made a shaggy cloth mat which lay in front of the hearth.

Our grandparents had a chicken coop in the back garden and I remember the hens too. I must have been very young… Vague memories…