SEE AMID THE WINTER’S SNOW...
Snow and Christmas go together like turkey and stuffing. FRED HUGHES reflects on one festive season when the white stuff failed to appear – and what happened when it eventually did turn up...
SEASONS for a child are long and lingering, especially for village children. Those times of awe and marvel have gone. And yet, now that I am old, the memories of ‘happy highways’ in the ‘land of lost content’ and ‘blue remembered hills’, as the poet AE Housman so richly defined, remain for me, as clear as yesterday.
Today the seasons blur into a single unidentifiable 12 months. But I recall the fierce March winds raging in from the North, and the warm west winds gusting freshness through budding trees, and bending acres of meadow grass, while watching washday lines as billowing bed sheets take on the image of a ship’s mainsails, until all the linen of the street was warm and crisp-dry.
Summers were hot. Streets shimmered under a golden sun melting tarmac into globs of black goo, with balminess making eager perch and roach leap for insects around the fishing sites on the canal at Middleport. Autumn was made for ‘conkering’, cycling to Trentham, Whitmore and Keele to raid the chestnut trees, before the season of Jack-shineyour-lantern and Bonfire Night drew in. A whole year defined by its seasons. But it is always, always Christmas that my memory most fondly returns to.
I grew up thinking it wouldn’t be Christmas if there was no snow. And it always seemed to snow on Christmas Day. It was the custom set down by Charles Dickens with images of putupon Bob Cratchit trudging home to his poor but cheerful family, while Scrooge counted pennies until the ghosts came to preoccupy him. Bing Crosby crooned about White Christmas, and Wham! and their girls frolicked in deep snow in their Last Christmas.
It’s probably a delusion, but I’m convinced it always snowed on Christmas Day. And sometimes it did, but not in 1946 even as the dull overcast month wandered into January 1947. And that was when nature showed us who was boss!
It was the second Christmas after the war. I was nine and attending junior school in Wolstanton, a school spiritually related to St Margaret’s Church on the opposite side of the road.
The impressive red stone parish church, on its elevated position with its landmark 78 feet high steeple, with bells installed during the early 18th century, always caught my agnostic imagination with its tributes to the Sneyd family, and recumbent effigies of stone knights clad in armour. Here is Saxon history, the age of Wulfstan, a Bishop of Worcester, who is thought to have come from these parts, and supposedly gave his name to the village.
I held few feelings about religion as a way of life, and thought it a skive to exchange the classroom desk for a chilly pew in the nave of the church where the school’s Christmas concert was taking place. Most of that experience is vague except for the singing of the carol O Holy Night, with preadolescent voices slowly rising in modulation to register the dramatic line, ‘fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices,’ a command that absolutely took away my breath – it always has, it always will; but as I later discovered, you don’t have to be a believer to love a church choral performance, especially when sung by children.
Anyway, as I said, it didn’t snow for Christmas that year. Actually, it was quite mild with an odd day or two either side dropping in temperature. Winter cold in terraced houses heated only by a single coal fire was the norm. Bed was the warmest place, just as long as it had been heated with hot firebricks or a hot oven shelf wrapped in towels.
Austerity reigned as communities buckled down to post-war reconstruction, and Christmas gifts were still the basic jigsaws, comic annuals, and Dinky Toys. It certainly was a lean Christmas in our house partly given over to my newly married aunt and uncle waiting to get onto the housing list. A better life was still a long way off. A little snow on Christmas Day would have cheered us up no end. But it was not to be.
Nothing seemed to have changed. Indeed, our house seemed overfilled with grumpiness, as strangers with pale complexions smiled heroically through cold-blue lips.
A bleak snowless Christmas was long forgotten as January limped to its closing days. And then it happened. A cold spell started to build, and then snow came in a blizzard. We kids were delighted! But adults became tetchier. It snowed, and it snowed again. And it didn’t stop, as the temperature gauge fell below zero and stayed there. When it iced over, it snowed on top of the ice. Unable to leave the house, factories shut down with drifts clogging the main roads.
It was so deep that whole communities were cut off, with aeroplanes climbing to drop food and essentials. Power cuts were put in place. Domestic gas and electricity were reduced, radio broadcasting was limited, buses and trains stopped running, and there was a serious fuel shortage with domestic fireplaces remaining unlit in cold grates, as families huddled together wrapping themselves in whatever clothes were spare that were able to provide even the minimum hint of warmth.
But it was bliss in dreamland for children. I was soon able to get out from being snowed-in, and took a shovel and dug people out of their houses for threepence or sixpence a time. We built sledging slopes on Wolstanton fields, made long ice slides in the traffic-free streets, and skated across the frozen canal, and on the ice-covered marl holes, even venturing to Westport Lake where it seemed the world’s children and many young adults had congregated to celebrate the never-ending ice festival.
The hard side, though, was ever-present. Teams of families descended on the district’s colliery spoil tips scavenging to retrieve anything combustible to fuel the hearth’s emptiness. I recall going with my aunt and uncle to the huge mound at Wolstanton colliery, and scrabbling among the cinders and shale like a gold prospector, and finding a precious nugget that I put into a shared bucket that took an hour or so to fill.
Schools remained closed, and days were spent building an ice army of snowmen, so many that it looked like an invasion of alleys and backyards. Snowballing was more popular than football.
And it was Christmas. Christmas had arrived. It was late, but here it was at last. And last it did. All through February and into mid-march when at last the snowmelt came to cause widespread flooding.
But that’s another story, perhaps for another time.