IT WAS surprising to many to read in this newspaper recently of a fine house for sale in the neighbourhood of Baldonnel Airdrome which had neither electricity nor public water supply laid on. There are still people around who grew up with only oil lamps to light their house. In favour of the lamps, you could say that the light they cast - the good ones anyway - was soft and easy on the eyes for reading. One friend swears that, in his university days when he would be studying at home for an exam, he preferred to read by the light of a favourite lamp (was it an Aladdin?), although his house had electricity and he even had a deskside electric light. It was more restful, he claimed.
Wonder did he have to fill the oil and clean and polish the globe?). And the rest of the house was normally lit. But when you begin to move around a house which has only oil lamps, you go from one small pool of light to another. And unless you carry a lamp in your hand, which can be precarious, you have to move slowly and tentatively. You may not see what is at your feet. And a lamp overturned by someone stumbling against it, could set your house on fire. Indeed, many elderly people living alone, die this way.
Lionel Fleming, formerly of this newspaper and of the BBC, in his book Head or Harp, published in 1965, lived most of his youth in a Cork rectory which only late on in his boyhood got electricity. He wrote: . . . "It is remarkable what the lack of it means to a house. When there is nothing in the evening but a little oil lamp in the hall, and all the rooms but one in darkness, and when there is no switch by the bedside, if you wake up with a nightmare or hear a strange noise, any fears the night may bring you are redoubled. It may have been because of this that we tended to hear odd things after dark. There was one bedroom in particular where unexplained tappings and other noises were heard from time to time by all of us, but even these intrigued rather than frightened us; and we never had any qualms about sleeping there."
Come to think of it, now, surely the ESB hasn't connected with every single house in the State? There must be some houses other than that at Baldonnel to be without electricity. It's not compulsory, after all. Or is it? No, can't be.