Boyhood Memories of a Landbeach Winter 1962/63

 

On this day 58 years ago the hardest winter in living memory set in and continued until March. Icy blizzards created a complete white out and temperatures barely, if ever, rose above freezing.

In those days, blizzards failed to close schools, whereas now the merest flurry of snow grinds the nation to a halt.  To me, it seemed that life carried on as usual, despite artic conditions and deep snow drifts. My dad and mum still went to work at their hairdressing salon in Chesterton, passing other vehicles abandoned for weeks by the side of the road, conked out through engine failures, or stuck in drifts.

There was however, one near miss tragedy when my sister and I were traveling with mum and dad along the frozen A10 approaching Milton, and I heard dad say, “Look at that idiot trying to overtake in these conditions.”  Then mum cried out, “He’s going to hit us.” I became aware of a dark transit van skidding broadside from the opposite carriageway across the centre of the road and fishtailing in a deathly pirouette. It loomed dark and menacing in the windscreen of our small mini-van and collided with our front offside spinning us around too, with us ending up on the opposite snow filled verge where we came to a sudden stop. In the days before seatbelts, I was catapulted forward, ending on the floor behind dad’s seat. I was struck in the back by the spare wheel that had snapped its securing strap but was otherwise unhurt. I looked up with an apprehensive smile seeking reassurance from Lynn, my elder sister of 5 years but she was screaming in panic “You’ve killed my mum,” Over and over again. It was then that I became aware of my mum lying back in the passenger seat with blood coursing down her face from a deep gash on her forehead. Dad had gone round to her side door and was applying a handkerchief to the wound. Luckily, a passing RAF medic from RAF Ely Hospital was passing and he took over from dad. Lynn pushed the front seats forward and scrambled out still screaming hysterically.  I climbed out after her and stood helplessly, slightly detached, but with a sense of relief when I saw my mum was still alive but obviously in a lot of pain. Eventually the ambulance arrived, and later still, riding his police issue bicycle, George Utting, the local policeman whose police house and office was a few miles to the North in Waterbeach. The pace of policing was much slower in those days.

The rest of the incident is a blur. I cannot recall how we got home from the scene, or the vehicle recovery. Mum was taken to Ely hospital and had several stitches, and George came round to the house and took a statement from my parents and Lynn. I volunteered but they seemed not to need mine. George consumed copious amounts of tea and spent a lot of time chatting. A habit that I noticed on other occasions when he called for various witness statements to other incidents, but in those days that is how the local knowledge and bits of useful intelligence were gleaned. A direct business approach in and out, rushing from incident to incident may have looked more efficient statistically, but a lot of sound old fashioned bobbying was lost in the drive for modernisation when the snippets of information were no longer volunteered or even unknowingly revealed. Maybe not significant at the time, but subsequently could be the key to solving crime or tracing a missing person for example.    

Some 18 years later I became George’s supervisor when I was promoted to Inspector at Cambridge. He was still fond of a good gossip, but the pace of policing had increased significantly, as had improvement in radio communications to isolated rural beats, and by then he was on the Sector Panda cars, therefore more readily accessible with less time for the other important policing skills that modern day police bosses tended to dismiss or fail to understand, despite the public’s constant requests for the bobby on the beat to be brought back.

 Mum survived the head injury, succumbing to migraines from time to time, but she plodded on stalwartly supporting dad in the hairdressers, whilst keeping house and home together. 

And so, the winter went on remorselessly. We had a frozen burst pipe in the loft. The workmen came and drove a penknife through our bulging living room ceiling, releasing a cascade of freezing cold water into a bucket.

At that time, we had no central heating and the only heating we had was open coal fires and paraffin heaters. My job as the first one home after school each night was to light the fire, so it was warm for everyone else’s homecoming. Sadly, I was not a very organised individual, so I would only cut just enough kindling for that night, often in the dark, illuminated only by the light from the kitchen window. Sometimes it would take ages for the coal to catch. Assisted by firelighters (if we had any) or alternatively, Brasso metal polish, sprinkled on the uncooperative fossil fuels, or, in real desperation, paraffin. Frequently the assistance of a piece of newspaper stretched tight across the chimney breast to act as a drawer of oxygen would also be employed. The trick there was knowing how long to hold the paper, as it would often be sucked in quite fiercely, and burst into flames if held too long, once the flames started to roar. The second trick was to know how to get the flaming newspaper into the fire as it disintegrated in your hand like a replay of the burning Ponderosa map opening scene of the 1960s cowboy series Bonanza, or some magic trick where a dove or rabbit appeared from the flames of a hitherto empty dish. Miraculously no rabbits or doves ever spontaneously appeared whilst I was conjuring with a burning copy of the Cambridge Evening News. Even more miraculously, the house never burnt down, and no evil pantomime genie posing as a Social Services Child Protection Officer popped up through the floorboards despite copious smoke from time to time.

These forays into pyromania taught me one valuable lesson: coal is a difficult fuel to ignite without a well laid pre-starter of paper and kindling wood. A fact that has stood me in good stead over the many years since. I now have a satisfying log store stacked to the gunwales with well-seasoned logs cut several years ago and replenished in a sustainable rota. Read an earlier article entitled “Timber” for more of my exploits with wood, (available on request).

The all-pervading cold and frost made another after school chore particularly difficult too. I kept a  large number of pet rabbits in hutches at the bottom of the garden and fresh wild greens had long since withered and gone underground. Hay and concentrates and the outer leaves of cabbages from my uncle’s greengrocer shop, together with a warming mix of boiled potatoes and bran mash kept them going. As dusk closed in, I would cover their hutches with old carpets to keep out the cold.  Snug in their lavishly furnished straw beds they seemed OK. In the wild, the nibbled bark of low growing willow branches stripped bare, was testimony that the wild populations were struggling to find food in this frozen waste.

Birds too were suffering; frozen carcasses were frequently found stuck to the ground or on the icy ponds. From the schoolroom windows we could see hunched over woodpigeons precariously clinging to brussels sprout plants in the neighbouring allotments, too weak to fly or feed, they clung on until they succumbed to cold and starvation. Taking pity on the birds, the headmistress designated me as humane pigeon dispatcher and I was sent to collect them and ring their necks. A task I did not relish but it seemed the kindest thing to do, knowing that they were enduring sheer misery and would not last long anyway. The pigeons were just skin and bone with their breast bones pressing sharp and angular against their taught skin devoid of flesh. They weighed virtually nothing and most had diarrhoea from attempting to digest frozen vegetation. A nauseating smell of foetid brassicas pervaded their feathers, and this rubbed of onto my hands, so a thorough wash was called for after the humane despatching process was completed.

Another task I was allocated, was stoking up the school coke stove which kept the classroom warm and toasty. This chore gave directly transferable workplace skills as I found when I joined the Cambridgeshire Constabulary (at that time Mid Anglia before the revision of electoral boundaries. At police training school we were nicknamed “ Mad Anglia”).  One of the many duties that fell to the constable staffing the Enquiry Office at the old Huntingdon Police Station, was to keep the office boiler alight. Woe betide the officer who neglected this duty, as it earned the wrath of all the senior officers who sat in their cosy offices slowly getting colder and colder, and the approbation of fellow officers who welcomed a bit of a warmup when returning from a cold duty shift. Once the boiler was out, it was a major operation to relight, as all the dead coals and ash had to be removed and rekindled from scratch. Similar chores fell to the night foot patrol officer at Ramsey Police Station, where an almost identical potbellied stove to the one in my old classroom still survived. A full scuttle of coke would last an 8-hour shift and in the absence of a duty sergeant (they trusted us out in the wild fens) the Duty Tasks Book would include specific reference to stoking the stove.      

The prolonged cold spell was not all doom and gloom. Everywhere looked like an idyllic Christmas card scene. Sublimated hoar frost ice droplets clung to the trees like exquisite diamonds, dazzlingly reflecting light in sparkling miniature rainbows. The artificial Christmas lights of current times are but poor mimics of nature’s bounteous beauty portrayed that winter.

With no central heating, my bedroom was like an ice box.  A rapid dive from the cold room to the cosy warmth of a bed heated with an electric blanket brought one of life’s small pleasures, no longer experienced with touch of a button wall to wall heating. Smoky breath crystallised overnight on the insides of my windows with Jack Frost’s artistic flair flamboyantly inscribed thereon, in delicate patterns of feathers, ferns, fans, swirls and curls. Scientists unromantically describe the process as fractal mathematics. But Jack Frost knows nothing of this. He asks no permissions to create his master pieces, stealing into bedrooms overnight, his artistry wrought with nought but ice and temperature. By morning he is gone as silently as he came. 

Pure expanses of snow blanketed the fields, contrasting starkly with the muddy slush along the roads and footpaths that refroze every night. Precarious traps for the unwary and less nimble. For a budding naturalist this gave me many opportunities to practice my animal tracking skills. Armed with my book of tracks and signs I would wade knee deep through the snowy fields. Following in the footsteps of blackbird and bullfinch, robin and redwing, rabbit and hare, weasel, stoat, cat, rat and fox. Occasionally a splash of blood would stand testimony that within this classic Christmas card scene, life and death was played out on this picturesque wintery canvas.

Giant snowmen were de rigueur, newly fallen snow made soft crunching sounds as it was rolled and compressed into bodies and heads. Feet had to be stamped vigorously to get some life back into painfully frozen extremities, and hot aches with fingers flushed red, like boiled lobsters, were the price to be paid for making snowballs. Jumping into drifted snow higher than us became a new pastime. Compacted snow formed treacherous icy slides on convenient hard surfaces, worn as smooth as polished glass from constant sliding feet, where a fast runup was essential to maximise the distance covered, like human curling stones. Ice skating on the frozen pond in Worts Meadow became a village pastime for all ages, with some spectacular foot work from some of the older residents.

But all things must pass in time, and so it was with the Big Freeze. January came and went, February also came and went, both bound in their icy strait jackets, punctuated by the steamy breath of children playing in the snow. March crept in, and with it, eventually, the green grass tips began to reappear, tentatively at first, and still crisp with frosted blades. Meltwater dripped from icicles clinging tight to roofs like ancient stalactites. Ditches and streams swelled and ran in torrents as the drifted snow, almost imperceptibly, stealthily stole away. Cascades of white water poured over log jams in the streams and ditches, where tree branches, unable to bear the weight of so much snow, had broken and fallen to form dams waiting to obstruct the teeming meltwater.

And so, in the intervening 58 years, winters have come and gone. Christmases have been marked with both joy and sorrow. Happiness at the excitement of young children on Christmas morning. The magic of the whispered words “Has he been yet?” would lift the heart of scrooge himself. Sorrow and nostalgia for loved ones no longer here to share those exquisite moments, and white Christmases few and far between. Frosts no longer hold sway for long, and winters are more often wetter and warmer than in my childhood - yet another sign of global heating and climate change. But looking back, Jack Frost’s ice-cold branding iron has forever etched the winter of 62/63 in my soul.   

Steve Parnwell