One of our biggest problems in the early days was how to restore the canopy. St Germans station is very unusual in that we have what is called a flying freehold over the station platform. This means that we have the right to have and maintain our canopy over railway land. This was deeply unpopular with the railway, and as soon as we had purchased the building they applied pressure to us to remove the canopy, which was something we didn’t wish to do.
In the years that the station had been empty the gutters had filled with debris, water had collected and caused a lot of rot, so repair was desperately needed. However working on the canopy was far from straightforward, as due to the proximity of the building to the main line we needed to make sure that we followed railway protocol.
In those days, we had signalmen in the station building opposite so knew when the trains were going to be running. Every Saturday the line closed between about 10 o’clock in the evening and 10 o’clock on Sunday morning. This allowed for railway maintenance to take place; a period called occupation. When the line was under occupation, the signalmen were employed because occasional engineering trains would pass. When the line was not under occupation, the signalmen would go home and we could be very confident there would be no passing trains.
At the time there were two British Rail maintenance centres that were applying pressure to remove the canopy; one in Liskeard and one in Exeter. In order to work on the canopy we had to choose a night when the line was shut and there was no occupation. However, although there would be no trains running, railway law required us to have a lookout. It seemed a little ridiculous to have to pay the sum of £18 an hour for a man to sleep in his car for the night, but rules and regulations were something that we simply had to abide by. We tried to get the price down and in the end the railway were very kind and in fact waived the fee.
We organised the lookout with the Liskeard branch of the railway maintenance department and sent a letter to Exeter to let them know what was happening. It took two Saturday nights to complete the work. We rounded up the whole family to pull down boards, put up boards, paint, hammer and run up and down the scaffold tower and along the platform while our lookout worked on getting some rest in the discomfort of his car.
All went well until the middle of the second Saturday night when the police turned up; nailing up 160 boards, each with eight nails, was making quite a commotion and they must have received complaints about the noise. They allowed us to continue, with the request that we tried to hammer as quietly as we could. The newly refurbished canopy was much appreciated by the commuters who were used to getting soaked whenever it rained.
The week after the work was complete I had a visit from two of the railway management team from Exeter. Dave was working, so I was alone. As I opened the door one of the men started a very angry tirade and shouted at me, asking how dare we work on the canopy without the official permits and safety precautions in place, and did we know we were in a lot of trouble? I have to say there was a certain smug satisfaction in being able to reply “You lot really don’t talk to each other do you?”
The truth was that in those days it was often impossible to know who to talk to in the labyrinth that was British Rail, and to this day I’m not sure when dealing with Network Rail whether things have got any easier. There was a comic moment in the mid 1990s when two railway surveyors arrived and asked me what we owned and what they owned. In retrospect perhaps I missed a trick in my honesty when I answered our building stopped at the walls!
Stoves
Over the years we have had three stoves in the kitchen; the last has been there for about twenty five years.
The first kitchen stove had already been used for a few years as Dave’s workshop stove. We put it in the brick fireplace and it was very effective; occasionally too effective.
By the end of our first year in St Germans I’d been asked to teach a number of children the piano, and so by complete providence I ended up becoming a music teacher. I had a student who I was teaching for the first time, and he wanted to bring his keyboard rather than learning on the piano, which meant I would need to teach him on the kitchen table. I always found first lessons a bit stressful, so after setting everything up I threw some wood into the stove then went off to relieve the stress by playing the piano in my temporary music room. Being inclined to get a bit carried away, it must have been half an hour later when I returned to the kitchen to find the chimney of the stove was glowing red, the flue to the chimney was melting and the room was like a furnace. I opened all the doors and by the time my student arrived ten minutes later the smoke and heat had dissipated just enough to be bearable. It was a memorable first lesson.
When we were running our first stove we had to buy wood in, which was expensive. In the first year we spent £200 on logs, which was a lot of money to us. We were delighted to be able to buy our woodland in 1994 for £6600, with Mum, Dad and ourselves going for half shares. Dad had been looking to buy a woodland, and as luck would have it the Forestry Commission was selling off small parcels of woodland in Cornwall including Coldgear Plantation. It has paid for itself many times over in wood, and been a great source of pleasure to us over the years.
The second stove we had was a Victorian cast iron ex-railway stove that we found in some undergrowth on a walk one Christmas day. It was in pieces, but we managed to barrow it from its resting place and to a car. Dave fitted this up and it kept us warm for a few years. One year we had a spectacular chimney fire as a result of burning Christmas tree trimmings. We’d unwisely used a piece of flexible pipe to line the chimney, and a few year’s worth of soot had accumulated and was burning ferociously. The weather was wild outside, but undeterred Dave put a ladder to the canopy and climbed up the slippery slates, and poured a full bucket of water down the chimney. It did the job, and luckily Dave didn’t come to grief, but the fire was so hot not a drop of water made it’s way down to the bottom. Lesson learned, a proper flue was put in place!
Our third stove was a bespoke experiment. Dave had designed it so wood could be fed through the top, increasing the capacity and reducing the regularity with which the stove would need to be fed. Unfortunately this meant whenever the top was open fire and smoke would shoot into the kitchen, so the stove was quickly modified to be a more conventional front feeder. It was done really well – over twenty five years of service and counting. It has many clever features; the flames pass over a water filled boiler then under the hot plate and around the oven, finally going up the chimney. In this way all our water and space heating is done from the stove.
