Autumn means smoke. Smoke from autumn fires. The air is thick with smoke some Sundays.
These smokey fires always remind me of our old incinerator when I was a kid.
It was a sort of metal dustbin on small legs and it had holes around the base. It came with a metal funnel-shaped lid. Its job was to incinerate stuff and create volcano-level amounts of smoke.
Incinerate, as I discovered, was a fancy word for burning stuff. This comprised mainly of dry leaves, old wood and branches. I can't recall anyone actually burning this kind of thing but that's down to my memory I'm afraid. I'm sure my folks did.
Proof that we actually had an incinerator is provided by the fossil record of my family i.e. photographs, so I know I'm not imagining it.
My own use of the incinerator was more interesting though .... or at least I thought so.
I would often chuck potatoes into its burning embers ... or is it cinders? I'm unsure.
Anyway, the potatoes - or spuds as they were affectionately known - would cook a treat in that red hot oven at the bottom of the bin. Raw spuds would get a black crispy coat, which came off easily once they'd cooled down or for the more sophisticated palette the spuds were wrapped in tin foil and then lobbed in.
Either way the soft hot white flesh of these jacket taters eaten on the lawn was phenomenal and with a knob of butter they were to die for! A squirt of primula cheese and ham added that something extra too.
Another thing I incinerated was sprigs of a particular shrub my Mother grew in the garden. I think it was a form of holly but it didn't have spiky leaves. These leaves were waxy and had a true super-power.
If you chucked them into flames they would crackle and spit loudly like a machine gun. Well, you can imagine how much of these shrubs me and my mates threw into the burner. It sounded brilliant and those bushes got smaller and smaller!
Ironically the garden was full of plants called red-hot pokers but I never actually incinerated one. I think Mum would have walloped me if I had! She loved her plants and especially her pokers.
Another thing I remember doing was trying to smelt metal. I was seriously into the Martial Arts in my early teens and one of my many books - Nippon To - described how Japanese swordsmiths folded and turned lumps of steel thousands of times to get the perfect Katana blade.
Well, heating up various old bits of steel - carpet door strips mostly - I began to experiment with folding metal. I say folding, I really mean fumbling, as I never really got past the the heating up metal stage! It was fun plunging them into water though!
Nowadays we still have an incinerator in our own garden, continuing the smoky tradition. Its a nostalgic thrill whenever I have to burn anything these days. This consists usually of personal documents, which we no longer need. I always imagine I'm a top UNCLE agent destroying files before SMERSH take over the joint!
Whenever I incinerate anything now I always look back fondly to those far-off days half a century ago when I cooked spuds, burnt gattling shrubs and forged steel. Splitting the atom was just a fire away! Happy days.
Did you have an incinerator readers? Do you still?
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