Our first winter in the box, by Tom Abernathy

An original contemporary memoir extract.

When we moved into the house on Fernlea Road, my children called it ‘the box’. It is a plain white block with small windows on the north side and huge ones facing south, and it has no radiators at all. The builder had explained this to us three times, and I still did not quite believe it.

The secret, he said, is in the walls. They are forty centimetres thick and packed with insulation, and the whole house is sealed so tightly that warm air cannot leak out through gaps around the doors and windows. A quiet machine in the loft swaps the stale air for fresh, warming the incoming air with the heat of the air going out. The rest of the warmth comes from sunlight through the south windows, from the cooker and the fridge, and from us.

In January the temperature outside fell to minus six. Inside, the thermometer in the hall read twenty degrees. Our energy bill for the whole winter came to less than we used to pay for a single month in our old Victorian terrace.

My mother-in-law came to stay over New Year. She arrived with two jumpers, a hot-water bottle and a fan heater in the boot of her car. On the third morning she came down to breakfast in a T-shirt, and the fan heater went back in the boot unopened.

(a) What temperature did the thermometer in the hall show in January? (b) Give one reason the house stays warm without radiators. (c) What do the items the mother-in-law brought suggest about her attitude to the house?