Two Weeks Without Power

The storm came in from the west on a Sunday evening and was over by midnight. In the town at the bottom of the valley the power was back the next morning. In the twelve houses above the bend it stayed off for two weeks.

Elin was seventeen and had planned to revise all week. She had made a timetable which she had stuck to the fridge door. On Monday the fridge was warm, and the timetable was still there, looking silly.

Her father Ivar found two torches, one of which had no battery. They lit candles in the kitchen and put a blanket along the bottom of the back door, because the house cooled down faster than either of them had expected.

The first real problem was the freezer. It had been full since the autumn: beans, bread, a whole box of fish. By Tuesday afternoon everything in it had begun to soften, and the smell reached the hallway.

So they cooked. Ivar carried the camping stove up from the cellar, and for three evenings the neighbours ate fish. Mrs Halvard from the last house brought salt and stayed until nine, which she had never done before.

The water was still running, but it was cold. Elin learned to wash her hair with a kettle of water heated on the stove. It took eleven minutes and she counted them every single time.

By Thursday her phone was dead. She charged it in the car for twenty minutes each day, which was enough for messages and nothing else. Her friends in town found the whole thing funny for about four days.

An engineer came on the Friday and walked up the hill in the rain. He said that three poles had come down in the forest, and that the supply could not be restored until a track had been cleared for the machines.

After that, nobody asked when it would be finished. A generator was delivered to the village hall, and the hall was open from ten until six. People charged phones there, and the room smelled of wet coats and coffee.

Elin did revise, in the end. She read in the afternoons by the window, because that was when the light was best, and she stopped at four when it went. She got through more pages than she had in October.

The strangest part was the evening. Without a screen, the day simply ended. Her father talked about his own childhood, and Elin heard two stories which she was fairly sure she had never been told before.

On the thirteenth day the machines got up the track. On the fourteenth, at twenty past four in the afternoon, the hall lights and the street lamps came on together, and somebody down the road cheered.

The power cut cost them a freezer full of food and a pair of shoes that never dried. Elin passed her exam in June. She kept the candles in the drawer by the sink, and she has never moved them since.