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.