Letter from America Dominic Green

New England’s snow is crisp, even and much deeper than England’s

It snowed over our Massachusetts house, as it always does.

A nor’easter came in the night, and left two feet of fresh snow by dawn. The road is impassable. We can’t use the car. Not because it, too, is covered in snow, which it is. But because there’s a barrier of ice and mud in front of the drive, left by the snow plough whose apocalyptic rumbling and beeping reverse-alert woke us up in the middle of the night. Its tracks have already disappeared under the fresh fall.

I’m up to my waist in the white stuff, flailing away with a plastic shovel to clear the sidewalk.

My daughters are watching through the window. Three little faces in a row, all pointing and laughing, one of them with furry ears in African camouflage.

The eldest is back from boarding school in England and wearing a giraffe sleepsuit. She says she finds it relaxing. I wouldn’t. If I wore a giraffe suit, I’d be afraid I was about to be jumped by someone in a lion suit. Perhaps not in this weather. It’ll be a snow leopard or an Arctic lynx that takes me down.

The girls let it be known that they preferred The Old House in Massachusetts. It was positively ancient by American standards, built in 1893, and they passed their early childhoods there. It was built entirely of wood, with superglue additions by me. It smelt wonderful in the summer, like an old ship.

But when it rained, it smelt like a pile of old wood – which it was. At the weekends, I crawled around on all fours, looking for bits of mahogany trim to glue back to the banisters and fireplaces. For a bit of peace and variety, I crawled on all fours in the eaves, servicing the monster forced-air heat and air-conditioning units by banging them with a hammer or my forehead.

The Old House stood atop the last ridge before Boston. If you felt the draught in the living room, the wind was in the south-east; if in the dining room, the south-west. If I woke up unable to feel my face and with my teeth chattering, a nor’easter was blowing in.

I laid out torches and storm lanterns, dragged in bags of firewood, stocked up on soup and gin, went to the garage and, after loudly clearing my throat and warning the raccoons that I intended to make ingress, checked the rake.

Arctic air, moistened by its passage over the Great Lakes, paused over The Old House and dumped drifts of snow on the roof, porch and back steps, blocking the road and taking down the power lines.

The previous inmates had replaced the basement boiler and the old radiators with the heating and cooling units and a ventilation system. The heat from the units melted the snow on the roof. The meltwater ran down to the guttering and froze in the colder air, creating ice dams.

These caused the meltwater to back up until eventually it found a chink in the roofing and flooded the house. An ice dam puts on weight during a storm faster than I do, and can eventually bend and even remove your gutters.

It was a rake against time. No ordinary rake, either. The dam-buster. A rake with a telescopic series of handles, each six feet long. My frozen fingers screwed the tip of each one into the handle of the last. On my knees again, this time in the snow up to my neck, I assembled a 48-footlong rake handle.

You have to pick it up in the middle and, like a pole vaulter, swing it to the vertical as you run forward, and then fling it so it lands against the house.

The first time I did this, I smashed one of the bedroom windows. Once the rake is vertical, you feed its length upwards through your numb hands, your face into the blizzard as if you’re rounding Cape Horn in winter. Once it clears the gutter, you take a few steps back. You are now ready to rake the roof.

The snow is fresh and fluffy up there, and it comes off easily. The rake’s head is two feet wide, and each movement of your arms clears about four feet of snow. Thus each movement precipitates at least 16 square feet of snow, plus ice dams, loose tiles and accidental avalanches.

You have to look up when you’re doing it. From down on the ground, all you can see is feather-light snow, falling softly, softly falling till it smashes you in the face and sends you flat on your back.

The last thing you see is the little laughing faces of your daughters. The last thing you hear is a sighing sound from on high, like the breath of angels, as a massive sheet of snow slides off the roof, floats downwards like a duvet in search of its cover and buries you alive.

I do not prefer The Old House.

‘Arctic air, moistened by its passage over the Great Lakes, dumped snow drifts ’