Be It Ever So Drafty

by H. F. ELLIS

THERE is nothing by which so much happiness is produced as by a good cold current of air, or draft. From the earliest paleolithic times, when man crouched over his brushwood fire and brooded on the possibility of stretching an aurochs skin over the mouth of the cave, the struggle to keep his ankles warm has afforded him the liveliest satisfaction. And observe, it is the struggle that is allimportant. To be warm and comfortable is nothing; there is neither achievement nor happiness in it, as anyone can see by glancing into a hotel lounge. To make oneself comfortable, to outwit by patient skill the malignant forces of nature, that is what appeals to something deep down and primitive in the heart of man and brings him contentment.

Between paleolithic man, crouching in his cave a hundred thousand years ago, and my own father, settling down for the evening in the early days of the present century, the differences were purely superficial. My father was perhaps more fortunate, in that, instead of a damp cave with a single entrance to contend with, he had the far more formidable obstacle of a rambling Victorian house consisting almost entirely of doors and passages and so cunningly constructed that, when the wind was in the east, even the heaviest Turkish carpets would undulate with a rhythmic swell. But fundamentally, in their obsession with the problem of keeping warm, the two men were at one.

It was an education to watch my father making his preparations for a quiet evening by the hearth — an education in that single-minded absorption in a task that is the secret of happiness. From the moment he came into the room, the battle was on. You could tell it from the firm, even pressure he exerted on the door as he shut it, the calculated pause while he waited to see whether it would snick open again, the careful adjustment with the side of his foot of the little woolly mat that was supposed to block the gap under the door. It was patent in the series of tugs he always gave at the great velvet curtains that masked the French windows.

These preliminaries concluded, my father would stride to his chair by the fire, grasp it by the arms, and swivel it — in itself no mean feat — so that its back was directly opposed to the enemy’s strongest point, the door. The chair was high-backed, towering well above the sitter’s head, with great projecting wings That cut off the view on either side like the blinkers of a horse, and into this imposing edifice my father would now lower himself, supporting his weight with the palms of his hands on the brocaded arms and turning his head and shoulders round suspiciously to left and right, as though to surprise some stealthy undulation of carpet or curtain behind his back. This act of silting was purely exploratory, He did not sit as a man sits who has come to stay. He never at this stage look up a book or crossed his knees, but simply crouched there, paleolithic to the core, waiting to see from which direction his enemy was going to strike him. And very soon, inevitably, he would rise and with a muttered “This house!" set himself to drag out behind his chair the convolutions of a folding Japanese screen, curiously enriched with elephants and pagodas. These screens, even when the wind was not in the east, took as much handling as a road map in a gale, so that my father would be a little out of breath when he returned to his chair and so warmed by the exercise that he often fancied the screen had done some good and would open a book with quite a triumphant air. His fingers would begin to beat out a contented tattoo on the arm of his chair, and when, some five minutes later, he crossed one leg over the other a stranger might have been forgiven for thinking that the battle was won.

It. wasn’t. No screen ever made could baffle a Victorian draft — and there are more reasons than one for crossing the knees. There is, for instance, the desire to chafe an ankle that has suddenly dropped below freezing point. Not that my father was the man to be content for long with so defeatist a policy as mere chafing. He would dash his book to the floor, cross the room in five masterful strides, and attempt, with a sequence of extraordinary grunts and imprecations, to cram the little woolly mat halfway under the door, kneading it with his fingers as if it were dough and pounding it with his fists when it arched its back at him. Then he would stride back and throw himself into his chair — only to rise up a moment later, when scrabbling noises and a despairing “Whatever’s the matter with it? warned him that my mother was trying to get in.

The entrance of my mother (sometimes considerably delayed) lent fresh impetus to the campaign, for she would either pooh-pooh the draft and, by settling down contentedly with her knitting, drive my father into a perfect frenzy of shivering and improvisation, or she would carry out a series of tests with a minute lace handkerchief and finally announce that in her opinion it was coming from the French windows — whereupon he would disappear for long periods together behind the velvet curtains, taking the Times with him and endeavoring, with tremendous rustlings and cracklings, to thrust that resilient paper into the cracks. Once, I remember, he forced such a quantity of newsprint into the interstices between the two flimsy glass doors that their fastening gave way and he was precipitated into the night — returning a little later to announce, in high good humor, that it was quite mild outside. This, I think he fell, in some way proved that my mother’s diagnosis had been wrong.

But in the end there was peace. My father would sit at ease, perhaps with a rug round his feet, gently swinging his glasses and gazing into the fire: full of that deep contentment, the sense of physical and mental well-being that comes to men — Alpine climbers know it well — who by the exercise of their own skill and strength and will power have reached the haven where they would be.

The modern dweller in a draft-proof apartment knows nothing of such happiness as this. He sits down and at once is comfortable. He has done nothing to achieve that status: there is no glory in it. Worse, his mind is unoccupied, a chamber swept and open into which all the chilling terrors of the outside world will presently steal. You will see him lean back and close his eyes; soon a frown creases his brows and he begins to twitch and fidget; he has started to worry about taxes or the price of meat. These are far more troublesome worries than the keenest draft, because there is nothing you can do about them. You cannot unfold an Oriental screen between yourself and the price of meat. You can only go on worrying. Whereas the man with a wholesome draft — well, no man with a current of cold air playing round his ankles cares two brass farthings for the price of anything.

It must not be thought that I am championing the cause of drafts entirely at second hand — that, sitting in some draft-free room, I calmly base a thesis of this magnitude on the experiences of an earlier generation. My own house, certainly, lacks the regular dynamic air flow of that old Victorian house. But it does its best for me. And in some ways I can claim to be closer akin to paleolithic man even than my father was. My furniture is a great deal more simple and cavelike than his; I have nothing like the rich variety of defensive apparatus with which he was accustomed to barricade himself in. Fashion— or at any rate the fashion that was in force when I assembled my furniture — has decreed thal I should have no Oriental screen, no velvet curtains, not so much as a single woolly mat. My chair is built so low that, in the normal sitting position, the whole superstructure of the sitter from the waist up is exposed to all the winds that blow; only by lying flat on the shoulder blades with the full length of the legs extended beyond the edge of the chair (and no one, unless posing for an advertisement, cares to adopt that posture for long) can the head and upper part of the trunk be brought into comparative shelter. Thus, in common with prehistoric man, I have little or no hope of baffling the draft at the receiving end; I must go out and try to block it at the source.

A fascinating thing about drafts is their versatility. To spend one’s evenings t racing cold currents of air to and fro aboul the house is to be constantly intrigued and delighted by their ability to change direction, to come and go, to hide in cupboards as you approach and swoop out after you when you have passed. One has to beware of the pitfalls of the Pathetic Fallacy, but sometimes, when I am on my knees in the kitchen holding a wetted finger to the hinges of the scullery door, I half believe that the draft is entering into the spirit of the game and enjoying it as much as I am — perhaps more. There is no limit to the ingenuity of the drafts in this house. I traced one of them, a beauty, to the empty fireplace in the dining room not long ago. There was no doubt about it. The downdraft was strong enough to stir the locks at my temples and even, as my wife pointed out later, to deposil a line spray of soot on my upturned face. Yet the moment I started to stuff newspaper into the flue, the familiar icy fingers began to play around the back of my neck, and next instant the paper was whisked up the chimney with such violence that even the opening of both diningand sitting-room doors failed to get it down again. Over and over again I have noticed this ability of drafts to reverse themselves in the twinkling of an eye; indeed I have known them to overreach themselves and change direction so abruptly as to come in half in the middle — blowing outwards, as it were, from a central vortex.

It is problems of this sort that call out the very best in a householder, and keep him happily engaged during the long winter evenings.