1950s winters

Now that summer is over, thoughts turn to the coming winter. In the 1950s we had “proper” winters that brought new phenomena to explore and excite us. I would wake up and all seemed deadly quiet. The room so cold you could see your own breath. Opening the bedroom curtains would reveal a snowy world that had turned white over night. It was incredibly exciting and I couldn’t wait to get out into it and be the first to run around the houses and garden paths to leave my footprints, make a snowman or roll up a huge snowball that quickly became too large and heavy to push any further.

With luck some friends would be out too and snowball fights with them were great fun until eventually you realised your hands were so cold that they were numb. Woollen mittens would have been discarded once they turned wet and soggy and bare hands were the tools to use. When we finally gave up, went home and they warmed up, the blood flowed again and they hurt like hell. In those days we had snow that was deep and sometimes stayed for weeks. It would be piled up along roadsides and turn black with dirt from the traffic. Eventually it turned rock hard after continual hard frosts.

Winters were very cold and sometimes mum would put her washing out on the line during the day and forget it until evening when it would have frozen stiff. You could stand my dad’s heavy overalls up against a wall until they thawed. Hard frosty mornings would turn puddles to ice to be hacked at with the heels of your shoes. The toilet overflow pipes that jutted out of the stone outhouses sometimes dribbled water, which then froze into long icicles. We would snap them off and sometimes treat them as free, iced lollies, sucking them to a sharp point.

When it snowed and we got to school, kids would have made a slide down the playground and be queuing up to take a run and see how far they could slide down it. The best ones were when they had frozen overnight and had become hard, glassy and incredibly slippery. We would get the fun out of them for a day maybe before the caretaker eventually threw sand on them.

There is a small pond or “tarn” on the moors here. After a week or so of hard frost, it would ice over thick enough to stand on. If you went there at the weekend, it would be heaving with adults and children sliding and skating on it. I remember skimming lumps of broken ice across it, which would make a weird echoing, whistling noise as it zoomed across.