Baby Can You Light My Fire

If you are the milkman’s Saturday helper you are seen as a responsible young person and therefore a prime candidate for being asked to help light someone’s fire.

Why would someone need help with lighting a gas fire? Ah, you see, it is because it is Saturday and they are a pious Jew.

I never knew this until in my teens I did the Saturday milkround, some Jewish people considered it sinful to do any work on the Sabbath, and work in this context included lighting a fire, extending even to putting a match to the gas.

Many religions don’t travel well. It’s one thing decreeing that someone who lights a fire to keep warm on a Saturday will descend into purgatory when you are sitting on the sunny thirty-first parallel, quite another when your followers find themselves in the middle of winter in 1950s Newington Green, are getting old, and quite conceivably, without any heat all day, could freeze to death.

So the scripture-abiding elderly couple bear the chill until about nine or half-past in the morning, then when the milkman comes round they catch him and ask pitiably for help.

For me at age fifteen this all seemed very strange. I would go with the man into his dark flat – presumably dark because work also included turning on the light – and be led to the gas fire where he would hand me a box of matches with one match already removed from it, one he had taken out of the box the day before in case taking matches out of a box is also a form of work, he would turn on the gas at the inlet pipe, for there’s nothing in the scriptures about gas taps presumably, and then I would light the match and put it to the gas jets and the fire would spring into life with a gerroomph!

Would never happen now, the Health and Safety Inspector would be round in no time, and whack the bloke over the wrist with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mail.

Once the fire was alight I would leave the couple to their darkened rooms that smelled of cheap lino and go back to placing pints of milk on peoples’ doorsteps.

What I was never sure about, and I’m still not, is whether the type of work that included lighting a fire, also included turning if off again at the end of the day. Possibly not, because if you are pious enough not to light one, you need no regulations about putting one out – could be.

These days I imagine a pious Jew will take care to find themselves a flat that has central heating, then the problem is solved because the heating is turned on and off by a machine. Or is it? Whether that is actually within the bounds of the scriptures . . . probably is as the technology would not have existed when the rules were laid down.

Though by the same token it is not clear to me, and was not at the time, whether asking a small boy to do the job for you constitutes work, just as much as doing it yourself does. For if it doesn’t, then by implication managers don’t work, which means that a pious Jew could get a managerial job on a Saturday, stay pious while being somewhere warm, and as a bonus make a few quid.

But of course, the moment you start treating religion rationally, it never quite stacks up, and it’s all really a matter of people’s faith, of what they believe in, and they believe because they believe, though I must say, I did get the impression at the time, that the old blokes I was lighting a fire for never did look quite convinced that they were staying on the straight and narrow, they seemed by their look and behaviour to be engaged in an amount of personal moral struggle, which came down in the end on the side that stopped him and his wife from all that awful shivering.

If those old geezers are still alive they can take comfort from the Muslims who now live in the north of Norway, who have a problem because during Ramadan they are not supposed to eat between dawn and dusk. Ramadan falls at different times each year, and in the north of Norway in mid-summer there is no dusk, and in mid-winter no dawn, so when it falls in mid-summer or mid-winter you shouldn’t have to fast at all, but of course that’s no good, that isn’t following the spirit of the Prophet at all, so they have invented a virtual dawn and dusk, and some years live in a kind of religious virtual reality. (Article in Der Spiegel English language edition).

I should have said that to the old Jewish blokes at the time: remember, virtual reality is cool, er, no, er – warm, man.

Dave