by Jane Burner
Jane Burner lived in Bulgaria between 1970-1972 and 1984-1987 when her husband Alan Burner was 3rd Secretary and Deputy Head of Mission respectively at the British Embassy in Sofia.
Many foreign diplomats and their families lived in the house on 69 Oborishte Street.
During our second posting in Bulgaria, we lived in a house not far from our original apartment on Strashimov Street that we had lived in ten years previously. The house was no. 69 Oborishte. The 69 was painted in enormous letters on the gate and caused a lot of furtive snaggering from the teenagers with whom our daughters became friends.
We loved the house mainly because it was not an apartment in a huge anonymous block. Also, we knew it well from our first posting there ten years previously. It even had a tiny front garden. When we moved in it was the upstairs bathroom that we found disconcerting as hanging from a huge steel hook, slap bang in the middle was a punch bag. I know, oh, how well I know, what a frustration life in the Diplomatic Service can be so it may have been a handy and convenient method to relieve the frustrations of our predecessor. We will never know.
No. 69 had all sorts of wonderful advantages, but mod cons were not part of them. The house was independent of the town‘s heating system. For everyone else, the heating went on once the temperature had dropped to a certain degree for so many days in a row. The same thing happened in the spring when it went off when the temperature rose above a certain temperature so many days in a row. This led to some horribly cold periods and to some swelteringly hot days too. There was no method to enable you to regulate your own thermostat as there was no thermostat except the one kept in the office of the comrade in charge of heating matters.
No such tiresome worries for us. We had a boiler of our own. This was a real live, steaming, hissing, shuddering monster that might have served well on the Titanic before the iceberg incident. And I could imagine that the sheer weight and dimensions of the thing could have accounted in part for the extra speedy journey of the Titanic to the seabed. Our boiler lived in its own room under the house and in every available inch of space around it, were piled logs of wood and mountainous slithering piles of coal. Our blessed monster had to be fed every hour night and day or it just went out and we froze. It was far more demanding that any baby I have known.
A man from the Embassy came very early every morning and coaxed it into life. From then on it was up to me whether we were kept warm or not. So every hour I would descend to the bowels of the house, prise open its iron jaws and feed it with logs and coal till it was full enough to last another hour. I developed arms like a navvy and never quite got rid of the smell of coal and smoke from my hair and clothes. If it was not tended for more than an hour it went out and that was that until the following morning.
On one unfortunate occasion Alan, Andrew and I all went away for the weekend, merrily packing up, glad to be getting out of town for a break. On coming home, we realised that all was possibly not as it should be when we couldn‘t open the front door as it was frozen shut.
We managed to chip our way in somehow and there before us was a scene of arctic devastation. We had failed to drain the heavy old-fashioned radiators over which I dried most of the families washing, and they had exploded. A lot of heavy pieces of metal had shot across the room. Icicles had developed and were hanging from the ceilings, pots with plants had also burst and rugs and carpets crunched like autumn leaves under our feet. The cold, tentacle-like, reached to our very bones. Frozen lakes made every floor an ice-rink.
We did have a very limited supply of hot water from an immersion heater and as the upstairs of the house was not so badly affected, we all got into the bath together, got dressed in every garment we could find and all got into one bed just to keep warm.
The next day the management office came to view the sorry sight and said the house was uninhabitable and we must go to a hotel until it was put to right. Our experiences in Bulgarian hotels wasn’t good, so we refused and said we would stick it out here thanks. And so we did.
People lent us fan heaters, we learnt to eat with gloves on and with so many clothes we could hardly bring our arms to our sides and we lit a fire in the grate which didn‘t help much but offered a little glow of comfort. The Miracle Man from the Embassy came and did his things with the boiler and that soon got things steaming and the icicles began to drop and melt so they need buckets underneath. I could even work up a little glow by taking up my stoking duties again and it was lovely and warm in the boiler room. Andrew was at the Anglo-American school; so he was warm by day and so was Alan in the office, and I soon got to the point when I could manage to take off one overcoat.
Almost the worst part was the Big Thaw as then we had the Big Wet. A lot of things were destroyed and the carpets had to be replaced because they would never dry and were beginning to smell. The whole episode taught us some salutary lessons and we never took the boiler for granted again. And we never left the house again in the winter without draining the radiators.
