Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing
If you will forgive the Victoriana kitsch opening: spare a thought for the humble chimney sweep. Not only frozen in the public imagination as a Dickens-y grimy child, the chimney sweeps of Brighton and Hove now suffer a greater practical indignity: being asked to park their vans several streets away from their intended address, and approach on foot with all their gear, that their chimney-owning employers should be shielded from the wrath of eco-friendly neighbours.
A “Cosy Killer” campaign haunts the streets of Kemptown: Brighton council seeks to invoke the spectre of innumerable pollutants in the fight against wood-fired stoves and open fires. It feels like a particularly bruising battle on both sides: impossible not to root for better air quality, but equally impossible not to understand that the days are short and the nights are wild, and the rush of a real wood fire feels like the only thing that might see you through to spring. A friend’s toddler daughter, having never seen a real fire, caught a glimpse of Netflix’s Fireplace For Your Home: Crackling Birchwood Fireplace. She ran off, fetched her little chair, and pulled it up close to the screen: totally transfixed. We stole it from the gods for a reason, and — Brighton council might say — they kept it from us for a reason, too.
Fire is always dangerous, one way or another, and the only difference between the fire we want (cosy, contained) and the fire we fear (house-consuming) is the chimney sweep. The chimney sweep, however far away you make him park, knows things you don’t know about fire; about smoke; and how thin a line there is between civilisation and what simmers beneath.
It’s funny that it’s taken this long for chimney sweeps to dip into the stigma associated with all the other ways wildness takes over a home: nobody likes to have the exterminator parked outside; nobody wants the neighbours to know they’ve had to call pest control. What if they think their mice came from inside our walls? I have, as a long-term city dweller, had to call both bedbug man and pest control in my time: bedbug man mutely fogged our home, white-suited and booted, while we took our shame out of town for the weekend.
The mouse man was a different — and wiser — story. He looked like something out of a Roald Dahl book: small, bright-eyed, and with a large, silent son in tow. “Fourth generation!” The son nodded. “He’s learning the trade,” he said. The son nodded. “Tell the ladies how a rat ran up your arm last week, Stephen!” Stephen mutely held out an arm. The mouse man beamed with pride. “When I was his age, I thought I’d be the world’s first no-kill mouse man,” he said, tucking little square boxes of poison into the kitchen corners. “Tried everything. Can’t be done! You have to fight with everything you’ve got.”
He was in his heart, he confessed, a photographer. Mainly of flowers, but other botanicals also. Some animals. He showed us the pictures on his phone. They were lovely. “But you can’t quit a job like this. The mice always come back.” He looked thoughtfully around our flat. “My dad did this one. So did granddad. Stephen’ll do it in 10, 20 years.” This exact house? This exact house.
“We just keep fighting with everything we’ve got,” said the mouse man, cheerfully. “You done them boxes, Stephen?” Stephen nodded. Then, to us: “Did you follow my Instagram?” We nodded. “Best get on,” said the mouse man. “Lots to do!” Off he went, his son at his heels, following in the footsteps of his forefathers.
As we all do, if you think of it in primeval terms. More ancient than the Victorian chimney sweep, we can’t get away from the stuff that goes deep: the desire for fire, the fight against the wild, and the hope that nobody will cast us out, with our shame, into the darkness ourselves.
