It was my father’s fault, talking loosely about sparks as he did, that I somehow confused electricity with Kabbalah.  After all, were not souls sparks too, split from the infinite fire that was God?

As a small child fire had been my demon, spitting and crackling through my dreams with the same regularity as the trains that thundered by at the bottom of the garden.  There had been a real fire in a house further down our road.  Sirens screaming and the smell of it bitter on my tongue.  The next day there was nothing left, only a blackened cavity, with the neighbouring houses gazing across at each other through smoke-dark windows. 

“Electrical,” muttered my father. 

“What’s electrical?”

And that is how I first learned about electricity.  It’s a sort of spark, my father explained, that runs along wires.  Like invisible fire, he agreed.  Physics was never his strong point.

As I grew older I became a worshipper of fire.  I would steal boxes of matches and strike them furtively in my room, crouching in the dark and cradling the brief flame in my cupped palm.  My parents, worried that I was becoming a secret smoker, surreptitiously sniffed at my clothes when I came downstairs.  But only the sulphurous fumes of spent matches clung to me, the incense that pleased the nostrils of my god. 

I discovered that each day was filled with opportunities for arson.  My parents began to hide matches and lighters, though never quite well enough.  I was told I had an igneous obsession.  At last, in despair, the family council decreed that I should spend the summer with Uncle Otto.

            Uncle Otto was obsessed with ice.  Our family had come from Karabash.  That is in Siberia.  You might know it as the destination of countless trains of deportees, sent from civilised lands where seasons change gently, to the arctic wasteland where first souls and then bodies freeze into a wilderness of white.  There is no fire in Karabash.  My grandfather, being pragmatic and half-Jewish, had decided to emigrate there in the thirties.  This way he pre-empted the authorities, saving himself the indignity of a forced journey by cattle truck.  His trading company prospered; money and favours owed in unpaid debts allowed his three daughters and four sons to leave with false documents.  They settled happily in Croydon, feeling that semi-detached suburbia was a fair exchange for the frozen tundra.  Only Uncle Otto remained unsatisfied.   To feed the vacant space in his heart he created his own kingdom of ice.