A pot is the top of a flue and a flue goes to a fireplace. You can count them from the street. We have counted ours for nine years and the sums have never come out.
We bought the house in 2015. It is an 1890s end terrace in a town in the north, three up two down with a back addition, the sort of house there are two hundred thousand of.
The chimneys are the reason I am writing this and I need to explain how a chimney works in a house like ours, because it is simpler than people think and the simplicity is the problem.
A fireplace has a flue. The flue is a brick shaft that goes up inside the wall, and it does not bend much and it does not join anything, because a shared flue is how you fill your neighbour's bedroom with smoke. Each flue comes out at the top of the stack, and on the top of each flue sits a pot, which is the clay thing you can see from the street.
One fireplace, one flue, one pot. That is the whole arrangement and it has been the arrangement since the eighteenth century.
We have six fireplaces. Two in the front room and back room downstairs, two in the front and back bedrooms, one in the small bedroom, and one in the kitchen where the range was, which is blocked and plastered but the surround is still there under the shelf.
There are seven pots on our stack.
My wife counted them first, from the street, on the day we got the keys, because she likes a house and she was looking at it properly. She said, that's a lot of chimneys.
I said they are all blocked up anyway.
She said, no, but seven.
And I said six, and we stood in the road and counted, and it is seven, and it has been seven every time either of us has counted it since, and we have counted it perhaps two hundred times over nine years, which is an embarrassing sentence to type.
Here is everything ordinary that it might have been, in the order we tried it.
It might be a shared stack with next door. It is not. We are the end terrace, so our stack is on the gable, and it is ours from the ground up, and the party wall stack is the other one, further along, with its own pots.
It might be a dead flue from a fireplace that was taken out. That was my best explanation for about two years and it is a very good one, because Victorian houses lose fireplaces all the time. A room gets modernised in 1965 and the chimney breast is taken out and the flue above it is left, and the pot stays because nobody goes up there.
The trouble is that a chimney breast leaves a scar. It is a foot of brickwork sticking into a room and when you take it out you have to make good, and you can always see where. There is no scar in this house. I have had the plaster off two walls for other reasons and the brickwork behind is continuous.
And you cannot take out a breast on the ground floor and leave the one above it, because the one above is sitting on it.
It might be a flue for something that was not a fireplace. A copper, a range, a boiler. That was my second-best and it lasted until I found where the range flue goes, which is into the sixth pot, and where the old copper in the outhouse went, which is into a separate little stack of its own that is still there and has its own pot and is not on the main stack at all.
In 2019 we had the roof done, which is the thing that should have ended it.
The roofer was up there for eleven days. Good bloke, sixties, has worked on these terraces his whole life.
I asked him, on the second day, in a light voice, whether he could tell me what the seventh pot was for.
He came down and had a cup of tea and said, which seventh.
We went out into the road and I pointed, and he counted, and then he counted again, and then he said, right, and went back up.
He came down about an hour later and said that from up there, there are six.
I said, six pots.
He said, six pots, on the stack, all sound, all yours, and there is nowhere for a seventh, the stack is not long enough.
And we walked out to the road together and counted seven.
He was very good about it, better than I would have been. He said the thing about the angle and the light, which is fair, and then he said he would take a photograph from the scaffold, and he did, and he sent it to me that evening.
Six.
I took one from the road the same afternoon, from the pavement outside number 41, which is where you have to stand to see the whole stack.
Seven.
I have both photographs on my phone still. They are of the same stack, on the same day, in the same weather, an hour apart.
The seventh pot is second from the left. It is a plain buff clay pot, slightly shorter than the others, and there is a chip out of the rim on the near side.
I know that because I have looked at it through binoculars for a considerable amount of time, which is another sentence I am not proud of.
It has a bird on it sometimes. Not a special bird. A pigeon, and starlings in the autumn, doing what birds do on chimney pots, and this is the detail that undoes me more than anything else, because a bird has to land on something.
I went into the loft in 2021 with a proper light and a tape and I did the only piece of actual measurement in nine years.
The stack comes up through the loft as a solid block of brick. You can walk round it. It is four foot by two foot four, and I measured it in eleven places to make sure it does not change shape, and it does not.
Six flues fit in that. I know because you can see the pargeting lines where the flue-liners run, faintly, on the plaster the builders skimmed it with, and you can count them, and there are six, evenly spaced across the long side.
At the left-hand end, past the sixth line, there is about nine inches of brick before the corner.
Nine inches is not a flue. It is the width of one brick and a bit.
I put my hand flat on it because I wanted to feel the cold of the outside wall.
It was moving air. Not a draught you could feel on your face. A slow cold breath against a palm, in and out, the way a flue breathes when the wind is on the gable, and I stood there for a long time with my hand on nine inches of solid brick feeling something the length of a house going up past it.
We are still in the house. We like it here. The kids are at the school at the end of the road and there is nothing wrong with it and I want to be clear that nothing has ever happened.
But we had the wood burner put in the front room three years ago, and the fitter lined that flue with a stainless liner, and when he dropped the liner down from the top he told me it snagged at about eight foot and he had to work it.
I asked him what it snagged on.
He said, mortar probably, they all do it.
And then he said the thing I have not been able to put down since, which he said as a joke, on his way to the van, with the sack of soot in his hand.
He said, whatever's up there wants keeping, anyway. Somebody's swept it.