Snow and icy conditions certainly make cocooning the most inviting option and tomorrow I am planning a satisfying session of marmalade making and bread baking, having spent most of today tramping cross country to the lovely foodie pub in the next village for a bowl of hot, spicy soup whilst thawing out by the fire and reading the newspapers.
With schools closed across the country, I was thinking of the
heavy snowfall in South Yorkshire where I grew up, during the severe winter
of 1963. At least a foot of snow fell overnight but, nevertheless, we got
up before first light as usual, dressed in our freezing cold bedrooms,
breakfasted and went out into the thick snow well wrapped up against the biting
cold and waited patiently at the bus stop for the first of the two buses I took
every day across the city to reach my Catholic
convent school; a journey of over 6 miles. Amazingly the bus arrived eventually. Those were tougher times
and people just carried on regardless and, anyway, this was Yorkshire! We didn't get far however as the
bus got completely stuck on the first of the many hills we had to negotiate on the journey
and, delighted, we returned home for a day of snowballing and snowman-making followed by mugs of hot chocolate by the coal fire.
The reckoning came
the next day by which time, amazingly, the roads had been cleared and transport
was back to normal, despite the heavy snow still lying in drifts all
around. The nuns kept us under a strict regime of humiliation and
tongue lashings and we lived in daily dread of being singled out, annihilated
by an icy look, seared by a harsh word, made to stand isolated in front of the
class for a sharp character assassination. The survival strategy was
simply to keep our heads down, not to be noticed. So, each girl who did
not make it into school the day before, and there were many as we came from
miles around, had to stand up and explain to the class exactly the
circumstances that prevented her from making the epic journey. The feeling
was that we should have walked to school, even if it took us all day. I
still remember how, a very shy child, I was quaking in my shoes, waiting for my
turn to justify my awful transgression!
