The Last Snow of Childhood

 

Snow in the garden, Lichfield, circa 1964

It’s a sentiment one occasionally hears from persons of a certain age: the notion that the winters of our childhood were snowier than those of today. Certainly most winters would include at least one significant fall of snow, often around January or February, but much depended upon where one was living. In the midlands, where our family lived, snowfall was probably close to average. The memorably snowy winter of 1962-63 lies just beyond the limits of my recollection, but there were some heavy snowfalls during the next few years, one of them captured in a photograph.

As a child, one hoped for two things whenever it snowed: firstly, that the snow would settle deeply enough to allow one to play out in it, and secondly that it would lie on the ground for a few days. I judged a snowfall to have been a good one when it completely covered the lawn, so that not so much as the merest tip of a grass stalk was visible. Timing was also critical: if the snow fell during the week, there would be fewer opportunities to get out and play other than in the school playground, where snowball fights were discouraged.

An ideal snowfall would occur on a Friday, allowing the whole weekend for snow-based fun in the garden. There were no hills where we lived, so sledging was never an option: accordingly, I never owned one, and have no ‘Rosebud’ memories to look back on. Even so, a heavy snowfall was always cause for celebration. My earliest diary entry that mentions snow is from Friday 7 January 1972: ‘Today it has snowed heavily and settled very thick. Am hoping to play in it tomorrow.’ And play in it I most certainly did. The timing was propitious, this being the last weekend of the Christmas and New Year break (we did not return to school until Monday 10 January). The diary records no further falls of snow that winter, and judging from weather records, the months of November and December 1972 offered nothing like the kind of snowfall we’d seen in January. The next mention of snow comes in my diary for 1973, exactly fifty years ago this weekend, and once again, the timing was perfect.

On the afternoon of Saturday 20 January 1973, we had been shopping in the local town, and on returning to the car, snow was starting to fall. It came down in the kind of thick, cloying flakes that accumulate quickly and easily, and continued on into the evening, finally petering out around 8pm. I’d been dividing my time between reading comics – as the diary shows, I’d been bought no fewer than three different titles that day – and watching television. Dr. Who’s serial The Three Doctors had reached its fourth and final part, but the item that remains most clearly in my memory is the evening’s feature film, part of BBC1’s ‘High Adventure’ strand.

Invasion was a 1965 sci-fi thriller with a curiously intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. It had much of the feel of a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who, unsurprisingly, considering that the storyline came from DW contributor Robert Holmes (who reused some aspects in his 1970 serial Spearhead from Space). The plot concerns the arrival on earth of a group of alien visitors, the Lystrans, who take over a cottage hospital, enclosing it within a force field, which causes the temperature within the field to rise rapidly (the aliens were played by oriental actors, which reminded me of Gerry Anderson’s UFO). But it was the ‘extreme heat’ aspect of the plot that really fit in with the actual events of the evening. With the snow falling outside, our central heating was running at its usual ‘semi-tropical’ setting, but I was more concerned about the temperature outside. I’d seen the snow accumulating in the garden, but was worried as to whether it would last the night. When the film was over, I crept into the darkened back room and peered out between thick curtains at the snow-covered garden, pale and mysterious in the reflected light of the lying snow. I could hear water dripping from the guttering, and the snow in front of the french windows was dotted with small spots where the drips had been falling. This was not a good sign. Our mum, having heard the dripping, said she thought it was thawing already. This would be a calamity! There was more than enough snow out there to allow for the building of snowmen, but this was not an activity that could be undertaken in the dark. There followed an anxious night during which I hoped against hope that the snow might still be there in the morning. I was right to be worried: the met office report for January 1973 refers specifically to extensive falls of snow between the 19th and 21st, but also records that ‘it was too warm for snow to accumulate to any great depth or to lie for very long’.

My fears proved unfounded, for the next morning, the snow still lay to a depth of two or three inches in the back garden: more than enough for what I planned to do. The day was bright and sunny, as is often the case after a heavy snowfall, and we headed out into the garden right after breakfast, where we made not one, but two snowmen, one of them, apparently, a ‘snow soldier’. Exactly what it was about him that signified his military status, I can’t remember, but what is significant is that I built two snowmen, as though aware that I had to make the most of an opportunity which might not come again. The diary also records that I made an igloo, although this structure was clearly scaled to fit the Action Man-sized Man from UNCLE figures I’d taken out into the snow. The idea of building an igloo was one I’d had for some time, and I was determined to try it out. It was not easy, as the mounds of snow had a tendency to collapse once hollowed out. Maybe I knew this was to be my last chance.

The snow was still with us on Monday but this was a school day, and the diary records that, by Wednesday, it was all gone. I didn’t realise it, but those snowmen were the last I would ever build, and that snowy weekend was the very last time I played in the snow as a child. The winter of ‘73-’74 contained no notable falls of snow, and in March 1974 I became that dreaded phenomenon, the teenager. By the time of the next snowy winter (1976-77) I was too old for making snowmen and igloos in the back garden…

Looking back, I can still recall my anxiety that the snow of January 1973 would last long enough to allow us to play out in it. It’s almost as if, somehow, I knew this was to be my last chance. One thing I do know now is the answer to that legendary poetic question posed in the 16th Century by François Villon: ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ Answer: in my 1973 diary.

The Lost World of the Magazine Rack

It was a funny looking thing, all white wire and red plastic feet, a classic piece of ‘atom age’ design that my parents must have acquired when setting up home together in the late 1950s. I neither noticed nor appreciated its retro asethetic: it was just part of the living room furniture, like the tall ashtray in red enamel and chrome where our dad stubbed out his cigarettes. But, over time, the magazine rack acquired a strange fascination. It became, in effect, a Sargasso Sea of print; for any item deposited therein was destined to remain there seemingly forever, escaping our mum’s weekly purges of printed ephemera: newspapers, magazines and comics were routinely left out for the dustmen (no one had heard of reycling back then). Being consigned to the magazine rack seemed to confer a special status on whatever was left there. Rather than the daily newspapers, or weekly periodicals like the TV and Radio Times, it became a repository of items that, I presumed, my parents wished to retain for slightly longer. Whether that was so, or whether the contents accrued there by random chance I never discovered.

The magazine rack tended to find its way into overlooked corners of the living room, such as the recess between a faux leather armchair and the 1950s coffee table on which stood our dad’s Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. On dull days, typically in school holidays or wet weekends, I would occasionally turn my attention to its contents.

I can still name some of that neglected ephemera in specific detail. There was usually an Embassy Cigarettes Gift Catalogue (our dad smoked the brand and collected the coupons which could be exchanged for household goods); a home-making magazine such as the ubiquitous Family Circle; an overlooked Readers’ Digest from several autumns gone by; perhaps a motoring magazine, and the ever-present Christmas edition of Punch.

Alongside this random selection one might find a few instruction manuals for hi-fi or tape recorders, but rarely anything recent. Only the Embassy Catalogue ever seemed to change, as each new edition was mailed out.

There’s one item that I haven’t yet mentioned, and it was the reason why I returned, with increasing frequency, to the magazine rack. Tucked away amongst the magazine survivors was a curious book printed ‘the wrong way round’ (ie. in landscape format), and with a single word daubed in white across a corner of the cover: GILES. This was my first ever sighting of the famous cartoon albums that had been an annual event since 1944, and which would continue onwards to the present day (depite the fact that Giles himself died in 1995). The book belonged to our dad, who had received it as a gift from his parents at Christmas 1967. From conversations I had with him later, I learned that the Giles Annual had been a yearly tradition, and that he’d been given every one since their first appearance. This was amazing! Where were they now? (By this time, I’d taken to collecting Giles in a big way). Unfortunately, they’d gone the way of all such perceived ‘ephemeral’ items. Before he left home, they’d been in his old bedroom, but had long since been thrown out. As for the others, a decade’s worth spanning the years 1957-66, our mum had taken care of them. As Basil Fawlty once said, ‘lucky old bin’.

The survivor dated from 1967 – our first year in our second home – and its cover depicted a croquet match taking place on the lawn of a lovingly-depicted manor house. The players are all reacting to the arrival of a fizzing bomb that has been hurled onto the lawn: the drawing continues onto the back cover where we can see the culprits: a band of football-scarf-wearing and rattle-toting young tearaways in the typical Giles manner. The front-to-back gag was a running feature of every Giles album, with some layed out in the manner of our example, whilst others offered ‘before and after’ versions of a comic scenario.

Giles annuals tended to end up in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, a fact acknowledged in at least one of his cartoons by Giles himself, so clearly we were not alone in considering them ‘disposable’, but how the 1967 edition survived whilst others did not is something I never quite fathomed. No further editions appeared at subsequent Christmases, and none of the earlier albums had survived the move from our former home in Lichfield. When I first came across the book, I had no idea that it was one in a series that went back over thirty years: it was simply a random cartoon album that belonged to our dad. But the fact that it contained cartoons lent it a special fascination.

At first, I was more than a little wary of looking inside. A few cursory glances had revealed the characters to be, for the most part, grotesques, and initially I didn’t much care for Giles’ take on the human race. He didn’t balk at depictions of nudity, either – one cartoon showed a naked Adam and Eve romping through the undergrowth while a knowing schoolboy observed them with a sly grin as his teacher looked on disapprovingly. I noted that each cartoon was dated, and also that many of them included references to topical events, some of which I could still dimly remember. The year 1966-7 included references to Soviet Premier Kosygin, the Aberfan and Torrey Canyon disasters, and, closest to home for me, Batman.

The more I returned to the annual, the more I began to appreciate the quality of Giles’ draftsmanship. These were not the crudely sketched cartoons one found in newspaper columns or the humour sections in TV21 Annual. These were nothing less than mini masterpieces. Giles’ draftsmanship outclassed all of his contemporaries and has never been bettered. His compositions were often audacious in their use of ‘empty’ space: some panels might consist principally of sky, a featureless expanse of wall, or virgin snow (Giles was arguably the best artist since Breughel at depicting snow scenes). Characters were often dwarfed by their surroundings: perhaps this was his way of showing how human lives are overwhelmed by the worlds we inhabit. One aspect of his work that I particularly admired was his ability to suggest depth in two dimensional space. Intriguingly, Giles was blind in one eye following a motorcycle accident early in his career: so was his gift a form of compensation for his inability to perceive depth, or did his monocular vision make it easier to render the world as he saw it himself, in two dimensions? Either way, his abilities went beyond any definition of the word genius.

By the autumn of 1973, I had become hooked on Giles, and in early January I used some ‘Christmas money’ to purchase that year’s annual, whose cover depicted the Giles family picnicing in the woods whilst, on the back cover, Grandma is entertained to tea (and beer) by the Mad Hatter. As yet, it had not occurred to me to seek out earlier editions of the books, and when I first discovered them, in a local second hand bookshop, it was more by accident than design. In doing so, I set myself a task that may never be completed, given that Giles collections continue to be published every year to this day. I now own copies of every annual up to around the year 2000, and random examples thereafter. Some of the earlier editions are facsimile reprints – curiously, Number 5 is rarer than Number 1 on account of many copies having been lost in a warehouse fire – but for the most part, they are the originals, sourced over many years from countless bookshops and book fairs.

It was at one of the latter that I saw my first Giles original. The size of it staggered me: fully four times larger than it appeared in the annual. The distinctive areas of grey dot-matrix tone that were such a feature of Giles in print were indicated on the original by a pale blue wash. This would disappear when photographed for the printing plate, whilst another artist applied the tone areas on an overlay, using the blue as a guide – I once met one of them and he attested to the fact that it was no easy task.
Our dad’s old Giles annual survives to this day, but the magazine rack is long gone. Its place was taken, some time in the 1980s, by a varnished wooden example, utterly lacking in the retro charm of the original. Nevertheless, it had the same effect on anything placed inside it… as, indeed, does the anonymous example I own myself. Perhaps all magazine racks are the same, jealously holding onto anything given into their custody.

In preparation for this piece, I did a Google image search for 1950s Magazine Racks and turned up a pristine example of the exact piece our parents had owned, for sale on Etsy... you can see it above, loaded with some typical vintage content: the aforementioned Giles annual, a November 1967 edition of Woman magazine, an October 1974 Exchange and Mart, an April 1978 Warwickshire & Worcestershire Life (a midlands lifestyle magazine), and two old hi-fi leaflets.