Winter chills and cheer!

Pauline Kenyon recalls when it felt just as cold indoors as outdoors!

As Christmas is on its way, I can’t help but be reminded of the particularly cold winter of 1962. I was 18 and home for the Christmas holidays in Essex after my first term at London University. My family lived in a tiny three-bedroomed semi, where the only heating was the open fire in our one downstairs room and, of course, all the windows were only single glazed and fairly draughty! As usual we were expecting Christmas visitors – grandparents, uncles and aunts – so I was required to give up my bedroom. I wasn’t best pleased to be allocated the top bunk in my threeyear-old brother’s tiny room, but thought I could survive for the sake of my relatives. It was so exceptionally cold that my parents bought a paraffin stove to stop everything freezing up in the bathroom. The snow lay heavily on the ground for days and my parents, like many, lived in fear of the pipes freezing up. Our guests arrived on Christmas Eve and the celebrations began. With so many people in the living room we all felt quite snug and enjoyed gathering round our small TV set for festive entertainment after a family meal together. The Christmas tree in the corner glistened with tinsel and tree lights. Eventually, everyone retired to bed. My brother Chris was asleep on the sofa and I carried him upstairs to our arctic bedroom – where the ice was thickly coated on the inside of the windows and our breath made vapour clouds in the chilly air! We were freezing cold despite piling all the sweaters I could find onto our beds. I even covered us with every visitor’s coat I could snaffle from the hall stand. But it was no good, we just couldn’t get warm and sleep was out of the question. The house went very quiet except for Chris who started weeping with cold, and the bunks were too narrow to cuddle up together, the only way of keeping us from going down with hypothermia. In desperation, we crept downstairs to sleep on the carpet in front of the dying embers of the fire. Thankfully Chris stopped crying and began to think it was a great adventure as, still shivering uncontrollably, we moved silently through the house and opened the door to the living room. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the adults had beaten us to it! There they were, fast asleep, arranged in rows like blanketed sardines. The Christmas tree had been dragged into the kitchen to create more carpet space. There was no room near the fire and I didn’t think sleeping in the bathroom with the paraffin stove was a good idea, so we curled up together in the only place available under the table. Father Christmas still found us – though he had to leave all our gifts under the stairs. The next day, the adults were all up before us children for the only time ever! While they took turns to risk the cold – and the choking paraffin stove fumes – in the quickest ablutions ever, we slept on, cuddled up under the table. We took some rousing – but we had to be woken as our parents needed to return the table to its normal position for breakfast. I recall neither of us was in the best of moods as, tired and grumpy, we were thrust into the stuffy bathroom, before being sent back to the ice-box bedroom to get dressed. Chris was particularly bad-tempered as he thought that Father Christmas hadn’t found us – the pillowcase on the bottom of his bunk lay flat and empty. Despite the extreme cold – and the unorthodox sleeping arrangements – which we had to keep up throughout the holiday period – we both fondly recall that Christmas as one of the most fun ever!

The ice was thickly coated on the insides of the windows and our breath made vapour clouds in the chilly air!