Disconnection is a thing of the past. Ask any electricity company, and they’ll tell you that in the new world of privatised electricity, no-one has to live in the dark and cold any more. If someone has trouble with a bill, they can have a pre-payment meter. Then they just pop down to the showroom, buy a token, push it into the meter and there it is – fuel without fear of debt. Just look at the figures: June this year saw sixty percent fewer homes disconnected than June last year. It’s a thing of the past…
Lucy and Natalie Godfrey were used to living by candlelight. They had been doing it for more than two years. Lucy was five and Natalie was only three and Natalie, in particular, was scared of the dark, so they always slept with a candle in the room. Their mother, Denise Godfrey, used to buy special safety candles in a tin foil holder, the ones that automatically put themselves out when the wick burns down. It was the candle in the girls’ bedroom which started the fire at their home in Great Chesterford, Essex, just before dawn on August 25 this year.
The girls were fast asleep. Denise and her boyfriend Granville were asleep, too, in the next room. They were all tired. Denise was seven months pregnant with twins and she had just come out of hospital where she had been treated for a complication in the pregnancy, and they had been decorating the third bedroom so that they were all ready for the birth of the twins. No-one knows how the fire started. Maybe one of the girls turned and knocked a blanket onto the candle. Maybe it was one of their dolls or a book that fell off the bed.
The fire moved very fast. By the time that Denise heard her children screaming, it had already swallowed their bedding and filled the doorway with flames. She stood on the landing, crying for help, rooted by fear to the spot, while Granville ran out to the neighbours. Dave Bruce was one of those who came running. He lives twenty yards away, in the next street, and by sheer luck, he is a part-time fireman. He reached the landing, saw the flames billowing out of the girls’ room and knew that his only chance was to duck down to the floor, to try and get under the heat.
Down on the boards, he could see both the girls lying on the floor, as if they had started to scramble out of their beds before the flames dragged them down. The fire was roaring over them. The one nearest to him was whimpering and moving slightly and he managed to crawl towards her and grab her. He pulled her towards the doorway, but his chest was now so full of smoke that he could no longer breathe and he had to fall back. His fingers were burned. Another neighbour, Pat Henry, was behind him.
Pat knew the family. His house backed on to theirs and he used to like to listen to the girls playing in the garden, fooling about on the swing. He had a little routine with them whenever he walked by their house and they would see him and both start shouting “Yahoo, yahoo” and Pat would shout back “Yahoo to you, too”. He always said they were like two little dolls. Now, he swallowed air, crawled into the doorway and dragged out the nearest girl. It was Lucy, the five-year-old. As he took her in his arms and carried her down the stairs, he could see she was ruined by burns.
By now, the fire brigade had arrived with two engines. Dave Curtis, the fire officer in charge, took one look at Lucy and shook his head. He was afraid she didn’t have much chance. Then Dave Bruce and Pat Henry told him there was another child still inside and he sent in four men, all wearing breathing gear, working in two pairs, one to shoot an umbrella of water into the flames, one to go in under it and see what they could do. Outside, Dave Curtis and the neighbours waited. There was a series of muffled bangs: the tins of paint which Denise had bought for her new babies’ room were exploding in the heat. A few minutes later, the four firemen stumbled out. One of them was carrying Natalie across his arms. She was dead.
Denise had been taken into a neighbour’s house and Dave Curtis had to go and find her to tell her about Natalie and that Lucy was in an ambulance on her way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He did his best to break the news gently, but she was distraught, apparently unable to believe it was true. He arranged for her to be transferred to a maternity hospital, where she lay all day in a cocoon of sedatives. She awoke to discover that after twelve hours in intensive care, Lucy, too, had succumbed to her burns.
The firemen went back to the smouldering house and studied the ruin. They found the seat of the fire in the girls’ room. They found the little tin candles in all the rooms. They found a smoke detector, brand new in its celophane container, waiting for the decorating to be finished before it was put up. And, most important of all, they discovered that there was no electricity at all in the house.
At first, the firemen thought that the family had been disconnected. But the new world of privatised electricity is cleverer than that. Officially – for all political, moral and statistical purposes – Denise Godfrey was receiving a regular supply of fuel. In truth, however, her supply ran through one of the new “pre-payment token meters” and it supplied heat and light to her council house only if she was able to afford to buy tokens to feed it. Since she was separated from her husband and lived on income support, it frequently happened that she could not afford them.
In the old days, if she had been unable to pay for electricity, the company would have cut her off and would have shouldered whatever moral and political responsibility went with it. With the new system, Denise Godfrey cut herself off. For her family, the result was exactly the same, but for the electricity companies, it made all the difference between a guilty plea and a clean sheet.
Denise Godfrey had been struggling with Eastern Electricity ever since the spring of 1990. She had cleared her debt by paying extra for her tokens but even then, Eastern Electricity had insisted that she must keep the meter and so, whenever the lights went out, she travelled four miles to Saffron Walden on the bus to buy new tokens. Three weeks before the fire, she called Eastern Electricity and told them the meter was broken. An engineer visited and said it was just that the token had run out. She says she was then billed £70 for the visit, though Eastern Electricity deny this. She had not bought a token for eight days before the fire.
No-one knows how many of these “hidden disconnections” are taking place. They don’t show up in statistics. But there are clues. The clearest is that just as the figures for crude disconnections are tumbling, so the figures for the use of token meters are soaring – to a total of 1.7 million households by this summer – and the signs are that a high proportion of these people cannot afford to buy their tokens. Some go to loan sharks. Some buy home-made “black boxes” which are designed to by-pass the meter and which frequently overheat and melt. Most end up in the dark.
Suzanne Wong, a fuel poverty worker in Liverpool, said: “Most people who are on meters will at some time or another, and probably on a regular basis, disconnect themselves. Everybody is patting the electricity companies on the back because the disconnection statistics are falling, but there are just as many people without electricity as there ever were.”
Pat Conarty of Birmingham Settlement is running a research project to study families with meters. “Some of it brings tears to your eyes. Families end up being faced with the choice of eat or heat. Often, they try and find a balance by having the children eat but not the parents, so that there is enough money left for some heating. Some people ration themselves, they buy a token and when that runs out, they just sit in the dark or go to bed. We’ve found people walking miles to buy cheap food from bulk sellers so that they have enough left over to pay for some fuel. Whatever the statistics may say, the reality is that a great many people are disconnecting themselves.”
The simple problem of living with a meter spawns secondary problems. Some households can’t understand the meter, call for help, are charged for it, cannot pay, are summonsed to court and then face court charges and fines as well as their unpaid bill. Those who try to by-pass the meter risk starting a fire; some get caught stealing electricity, are prosecuted and also presented with a new meter and a bill for more than £250 to install it. Once a meter has been installed, families find it almost impossible to persuade the electricity companies to return them to standard quarterly bills. In Birmingham, the fire brigade has answered calls where people have lit fires in their flats even though they have no fireplaces.
The National Right to Fuel Campaign has been lobbying for an end to all types of disconnection on the basis that electricity is an essential commodity and that no private monopoly supplier should wield the power that is enjoyed by the electricity companies. The Government has resisted.
Out on the grass behind All Saints Church in Great Chesterford, there is a mound of flowers, some of them knocked sideways by the wind and rain. In amongst them, lie the souvenirs of two lost lives: two tiny china unicorns, a wooden butterfly painted with gay colours, a couple of toy hedgehogs, a little plastic goose, a bright red wooden ladybird. At the head of the mound of flowers, there is a wooden cross, no more than twelve inches high, with a mother’s locket hanging from its side and a gilt plaque bearing the words “Lucy and Natalie Godfrey”.
The house where they died is empty now. There are builders swarming over the first floor, replacing the roof and the upper walls, tearing up the floorboards that are still browned by flames on the old landing and deeply scorched in the little bedroom at the head of the stairs. Down in the sitting room, the brightly coloured faces of Mickey and Minnie Mouse still grin from the wall above the wobbley self-portrait that Lucy drew there. The walls are stained by the firemens’ water.
The neighbours are still timid with shock. Denise Godfrey’s best friend is bitter at Eastern Electricity. She says they are disgusting. Pat Harris is doing his best to put it all behind him. His wife often thinks of the girls, laughing the way they used to on the swing in the garden. “Even now, when I go out the back, I hear the swing creaking. It’s not there any more. But I still think I hear it, with the two of them laughing. They were always laughing, those two.”
Denise Godfrey has moved into her mother’s house in a near-by village. She has given birth to twin boys. Her friends say she has good days when she goes whole hours without crying. Eastern Electricity said they were very sorry to hear of the incident. A spokesman added: “The electricity supply had not been disconnected.”
Last year, Eastern Electricity declared gross profits of one hundred and forty three million pounds.
