In the first January the four door, tomato red Aga we had bought with the house finally died. The beast had only ever loved the Vendor, and it had disliked me from the moment I had first walked into the house. On any normal day it’s demise would have been cause of great celebration but the fact that it chose to choke it’s last on the very morning of the baby’s Christening simply underlined its vindictive streak. As it turned out, it had already tried to kill both me and the baby: in the early days the marital bed in the room above the (then) kitchen was pushed up against the chimney breast containing the flue from the hulking metal monster directly below. For some weeks I had marvelled at how soundly and long the newest apple of my eye slept, but I had also started to grumble at the blinding headaches I seemed to be getting. It was only after the Christening debacle (forty people, cold food, January, no heating) that the local experts declared that it had been belching carbon monoxide into our bedroom, the bed, the baby and me, declared the thing unfit for further purpose and refused to relight it.
As far as I was concerned, the rural idyll into which we had thrown ourselves would only stand even the slightest chance of being idyllic if it involved an Aga. A shiny, gleaming, pulsating Aga covered in drying washing and full of slow roast meat, several cakes, drying potpourri, and probably an orphaned lamb reviving in the bottom left. Keen to defray the thousands of pounds cost of a new one, we considered selling the carcass of the old. I pored over the classifieds in the back of all the obvious magazines and found someone who claimed to buy Agas, whatever their condition – a ‘we buy any Agas, dot com’ if you will …. I rang him, and told him that ours was at least 500 years old and had seen considerable service and had been condemned, but he still offered me £1,000 on the spot. I managed to sound lukewarm, and he said he would drive down the very next day from Bradford to view it, with a mind to paying up and taking it away on the spot.
To my surprise he did: bang on time an ancient pick-up drove up the drive and dropped it’s front bumper on the gravel. A very small man in a dirty black leather jacket got out and kicked it back on, clearly used to the procedure. Once inside he checked over the brooding hulk of cold cast iron, sucked his teeth and said it was missing a critical part. This, he said, was why it hadn’t been lit in the last ten years. I told him it most assuredly had, and he said that even if that was the case he couldn’t possibly now pay us anything more than £200 for it.
‘Bother’ I said. ‘Poor you. All that way! Have a cuppa before you go.’
He hummed and hawed and rang his boss (/wife, I’m fairly sure) and sucked his teeth and said for my benefit what a useless pile of junk it was. I took the phone and told his boss (/wife, I’m fairly sure) that it wasn’t to be relit, either. I handed the phone back and there was a pause while more biscuits were eaten. Then he coughed up £1,000, dismantled the thing and left with it and his front bumper in the back of his truck.
Score one! for the ingenue up from the city.
