FROZEN IN TIME
Juliet Nicolson chronicles a winter when it felt like the world would freeze, with John F Kennedy and the Beatles
Memories buried long ago sometimes float to the surface with the holiday smell of the English seaside or a schoolgirl’s taste of a steamed ginger pudding. Usually they drift away, as if in a dream, but sometimes they billow from the dusty corridors of the mind, returning one in an instant to a time long forgotten. A couple of years ago, when my daughter gave me a gramophone similar to one I had owned when I was eight, its old-fashioned arm dropping with a click onto the vinyl, the contemporary music acted as a sensory trigger, propelling me back almost 60 years to a certain snowbound winter.
The snow started falling on Boxing Day 1962 and continued almost without interruption for three months to coat the fields, roads, runways and train tracks of Britain. Newspapers named the uninvited lockdown ‘the Big Freeze’ as icy drifts froze at dizzying heights, travel came to a standstill, families could not visit one another, milkmen delivered their rounds on skis, and birds in midflight, struck by pockets of cold air, fell lifeless to the ground.
Politically, the world was still living under the threat of nuclear war that lingered long after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and for me, the terror of being blown up by an atom bomb was everpresent. My younger brother and I claimed an abandoned World War II air-raid shelter in our garden as our potential refuge, stocking it with apples and sweets, just in case the worst happened.
But beneath the frozen surface, a revolution was taking place as the liberal views and exhilarating creativity of a new generation exploded into an archaic post-war society. The Conservative government under the Edwardian, moustachioed Harold Macmillan was feeling increasingly fusty and irrelevant in comparison with the dashing, youthful President Kennedy across the Atlantic. A brandnew magazine, Private Eye, and an innovative television programme, the BBC’s That Was the Week that Was, both founded by a generation of daring young satirists, highlighted embedded prejudice and exposed endemic racial, sexual, religious and class biases. The victimisation of women emerged in the turmoil of the Profumo affair, when the political establishment closed ranks against the model Christine Keeler, almost allowing a government minister to get away with his self-preserving lies. In the fashion world, the designer Mary Quant’s liberatingly short hemlines enabled the wearer to ‘move, run, catch a bus, dance’, while the introduction of tights, a garment Quant had once worn for dance classes, became invaluable for both decency and warmth, and were soon selling like hot cakes in Bazaar, her Chelsea boutique.
Then, when the frost eventually thawed in March 1963, a song by four fall-in-loveable, irreverent musicians from Liverpool, almost unknown the preceding Christmas, shot to the top of the pop charts. As I joined millions of others who twisted into the future to the soundtrack of Please Please Me, the apples and sweets in the air-raid shelter in our garden remained untouched.
‘Frostquake: The Frozen Winter of 1962 and How Britain Emerged a Different Country’ by Juliet Nicolson (£18.99, Chatto & Windus) is published on 4 February.