Long after the Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys used to have nightmares that it was about to happen again. “To this very day I cannot sleep a night without great terrors of fire,” he wrote in February 1667, six months later. “. . . This very night I could not sleep until two in the morning through thoughts of fire.” I can’t say that I have been beset by Pepysian terrors, though it is a year exactly since our own, slightly smaller, conflagration in Edinburgh. The images remain clear and stark — the great whoosh as the blaze leapt from our Christmas tree across the ceiling; the angry fingers of flame, clawing their way through a red-hot door; the burnt-out shell of our beloved drawing-room. But they have never kept me awake at night.
That may be because we managed, all of us, to escape, sustained by the hope that one day the house would be restored again. And so it has been. Just before Christmas, precisely 352 days after fire brought a premature end to our Hogmanay celebrations, we have moved back in. We are still surrounded by packing cases, making the place look more like an Oxfam warehouse than a home, but home it is, and the comfort of being beneath our own roof again means that we have slept more deep and dreamlessly than Pepys.
It has been a long year, but in truth the miracle is that we are back so soon. Friends from Paris, who visited us soon after, said that they were still waiting for their house to be repaired, two years after it suffered a flood. “If this was France, you would still be arguing with the insurers,” they said. In our case, our architect James Simpson was on the doorstep next day, bringing contractor and loss adjuster together to agree a plan; they set to work within ten days.
The last of these three has become, over the past year, the most important person in our lives — I am amazed there has not been a play by Pinter, or perhaps it should be Ionesco, called The Loss Adjuster, the man who orchestrates events, advises you on the value of your possessions, takes your side when things go wrong, but remains the solemn arbiter on critical issues such as non-fire-related structural defects (no, you cannot use your building insurance to repair the dodgy guttering you’ve been meaning to fix for the past ten years.) In our case he became a friend, which was just as well — you should never fall out with your loss adjuster.
Because the whole house was damaged, not just by fire, but by smoke, which leaves its greasy legacy on every surface, and by water, which seeps into every recess, the building had to be stripped to its essentials and redecorated from top to bottom. And because this was the hallowed New Town of Edinburgh, part of a neoclassical World Heritage site, where every detail is monitored by eagle-eyed conservationists, the restoration had to be done right.
Walls were rebuilt with lathe and three layers of plaster in the old style; floors were laid with redwood; cornices, running round the edge of the ceiling, were specially made to replicate the 18th-century pattern, using a process known as a “squeeze,” which has clearly not changed much in 200 years; the glass for the Georgian-style windows, no longer manufactured in Britain, was imported from France; brass picture-rails were drummed up from somewhere; wooden shutters were copied from others in the house. My wife, exercising a woman’s prerogative, asked for the walls to be repainted in greyish-pink rather than pinkish grey, after the whole thing had been finished. No man would have dared to change his mind so unequivocally.
And then, because we had lost pictures, books and furniture, we set out round the salerooms, something I never expected to have to do in my lifetime again. We struck it lucky; “brown” furniture, as anything which is not made by Ikea is referred to these days, is surprisingly cheap, especially if you are prepared to travel. We found the best of it in an auction room in Montrose, but I did my share of bidding against gimlet-eyed collectors in Edinburgh and got the occasional bargain. Throughout, we were humbled by the generosity of friends and strangers alike. I was offered (and, I admit, accepted) a set of Rudyard Kipling to replace the one I had lost; an artist friend, whose picture had been destroyed, painted another, of great beauty, and presented it to us; from Australia came a trio of pen and ink drawings from the artist and Spitting Image creator, Roger Law; a neighbour, whom we had never met, picked up a burnt page from the Folio Society edition of Fanny Burney’s Diary, then tracked down a new copy of the book, which she gave us; letters arrived by the score, including one from a former colleague, the Australian journalist Murray Sayle, whose house in a small village in Japan had been completely destroyed by fire some years ago. He recalled that when that happened, the villagers got together, and each presented him with money to help to rebuild the house. And so, all the way from Sydney, came a cheque for £50, “according to an old Japanese custom”, as Murray wrote.
There has been a remarkable symmetry about the whole experience. Friends who were with us on the night and escaped from the fire, offered us shelter until we found accommodation for ourselves. This time around, we saw in the new year at their house — keeping a wary eye on their Christmas tree — then came back home, arriving at precisely the moment, one year on, when the fire had first taken hold. Everything was reassuringly normal — the only difference was that Edinburgh was in the grip of a monumental storm; if it had been raging last time, fanning the flames, we might not have been so lucky.
This, then, is our legacy from the year of the fire. A house restored to its former self, a deep sense of gratitude to friends and strangers, a warm welcome back from neighbours, and the blessing of being once again in familiar surroundings. Sam Pepys summed up his fire year by moaning about the Government (“Thus ends this year of publick wonder and mischief to this nation . . .”) counting his money, and offering thanks for his good health. To which I would add, as he might have done, “thankfull to have come through this disaster unharmed, happy that the cat survived, glad to be in mine own home again . . . and so to bed”.
