I’ve been watching the news and seen the pictures of snow-covered landscapes, cars trapped in drifts, people being rescued, power-lines down and sadly people have died in this present dreadful and unseasonable weather. Travel and communication and ordinary life has been disrupted. My daughter’s flight home on Friday night was delayed by six hours because of snow and ice where she was flying from…
We have no snow here. It’s cold, it’s pretty miserable, the wind is icy and it keeps raining but fortunately (or unfortunately if you like walking and playing in the snow) we have no snow.
I was reminded of the bad winter of 1962/3 when my sister and I were little girls and my parents took us from Cambridge to Sheffield to visit cousins. There were no motorways in those days, all A-roads if you were lucky, no service stations… the transport system was on the eve of big change. Our car was an Austin A35, a small, sturdy little beast made by Austin So off we set, mum Monica and dad Donald in the front, my sister Andy and I in the back. There were no children’s car seats so Andy’s feet rested on a box because she was so small. The journey should have taken about four hours, there were no motorways but there was not so much traffic on the roads either.
The snow came down, and kept on coming, it was virtually blizzard conditions but to us children it seemed like an exciting adventure; I’d read my adventure books, I’d read stories of Arctic travel, Himalayan adventure, and crossing frozen wastes of Russia or prairies of Canada. We had no heating in the car, no screen warmers, one setting for the windscreen-wipers, no radio… and yet to us instead of it being a dreadful journey to complain and moan about it was an exciting adventure… this must have been down to my Monica and Donald, I think, they must have set the tone, neither panicking nor complaining as the hours went by. Monica didn’t drive at that time, so Donald drove all the way in the tiny little unheated tin box.
At one point we stopped and Donald bought some glycerine to try and keep the windscreen clear of ice, there were no anti-ice sprays then, no antifreeze in the screen wash – because there was no screen wash. Another time we stopped at a t-junction at the bottom of a hill and the motorist behind us slipped into us. Dad got out and the man was accusing him of backing into him; Donald argued that he couldn’t back up a hill, the man had slid down, even though he had his brakes on. Donald had been a paratrooper and although he was quite small, I guess the man decided Donald was right and not wanting to pursue the argument, got back in his car.
At last we arrived! With great excitement, and no doubt hungry and thirsty and very, very cold, we rushed into Uncle Sid and Aunty Erica’s house, all we children wanted to see or twin cousins, Dick and Will… and the next day when they suggested we went out in the snow sledging, we could think of nothing more fun!!
Lois Elsden 