We had a bit of snow last week, just a little, just enough to stop the world for 24 hours and then everyone could go back to work again, although yesterday I went to Berwick, half a mile from the Scottish border, and the Cheviots still had a bit of snow on top of them.
But generally we don’t get snow anymore, not like the snow of my childhood.
Mind it probably seemed deeper then because I was half the size I am now, but still…
We moved to the highest part of the city in 1964, following the winter of 63, the winter acknowledged by most to have been the coldest and snow-iest winter in the UK since, well, forever, and it was during that winter of 63 that our dad took to stealing trees from the council with the aid of the seven year old me and the five year old Ned.
The law was very simple in our dads eyes, if someone had chopped or knocked something down and then left it lying around for 24 hours then it was fair game for anyone else to make use of it, he was once almost arrested by a police officer who caught him helping himself to some bricks on a demolition site, it was probably only the fact that it was the eight year old me that was actually loading them into the car that stopped the pair of us spending the night in a cell. as it was the rozzer let us off if we promised to put all the bricks back, we promised that we would then when his back was turned we jumped in the car and drove off at speed – well, as speedy as a Vauxhall Viva full of bricks would speed anyway.
So, winter of 63 – the council is building a new housing estate at Ireland Wood, part of which involves knocking the actual Ireland Wood down to build the houses, said wood being on top of a steep hill with the only access road being at the bottom of the hill.
Enter our dads master plan, with three foot of snow lying on the ground for most of the winter it would be a bugger of a job to spend all day sawing up trees at the top of the hill and then have to carry them all the way down to the car at the bottom of the hill, but if he took his two young sons on the pretence that they would spend all day sledging down the hill, then maybe, just maybe…
So it was that we found ourselves freezing cold and soaked through with snow down our wellies, our socks slipped down around our toes and the backs of our little legs chapped and sore, merely half an hour after arriving, with our dad busy chopping logs off a huge pile of felled trees and intent on spending all afternoon doing so in order to harvest a huge stock of firewood for the winter.
He sent us both to the periphery of the wood, telling us to “look out for Red Indians”, such “Red Indians” being cunningly disguised as council workers investigating the sawing and chopping noises coming from their demolished woodland handywork.
After hours of sitting on dead trees and shivering ourselves warm again he called us back to where he had sawn most of a sycamore tree into fireplace-sized chunks, a huge pile, all of which needed to be carted back down the hill to the car…
…on our sledges.
So while he sat at the top of the hill protecting his woodpile Ned and I made hundreds of trips trudging down and then back up the hill with huge piles of logs on our sledges, what fun, oh how we laughed, the fact that Ned and I still remember that afternoons torture 45 years later is testament to the fun we had, eventually, tired and with no flesh left on the back of our legs where our wellies had rubbed right through to the bone we set off for home, crying, cold, wet and sharing the back seat of the car with most of a sycamore tree.
But even that experience of the winter of 63 is beaten by Les Tennick’s recollection. Les was one of our electricians from Durham, raised in a small village way up in the Durham wilderness he told me the tale once as we sat in a site cabin sharing a mug of tea of how he and his young chums coped without school for three months during the worst of the winter of 63. In their village the snow lay six feet deep for months and months and you could only go to the shops if someone dug a tunnel all the way there, he swears its true, that they existed for months by walking along snow tunnels, only emerging above ground occasionally to go sledging or similar.
I believed him right up to the point where he swore to god that he and his schoolboy chums would find amusement from ringing the church bell – nothing unusual about that you may think – until he told you that to ring the bell all they had to do was run up the snow drift that went all the way up to the top of the church belltower – thats when I told him he was pulling my plonker.
But he swears it was true…
