Snow and silence

 In the winter of 1962 it snowed a lot. I was five years old, and we lived near the bottom of a steep hill.

This was our road.

Right at the bottom, tucked in the corner, was our house — the middle one in this picture. It was a new build, and we moved there from north London when I was three.

In the house next door (to the left in the photo) lived an elderly couple called Freddie and Dorothy Paine. They will have been promoted to a mansion in Heaven long ago.

They had a marvellous car like this one, that we children were occasionally allowed to sit in. I don't know if they still have it in Heaven, but it would fit right in.

You can't see how steep the hill is from the photo that shows our road — but you can tell from this photo of the road that ran adjacent to it, which was called Bells Hill.

Our garden (front — tiny — and back) continued the precipitous downhill descent. My father had to cut steps into it to get down to the garden gate at the bottom. Here are the steps I used to go down when I set out for school in the mornings.

My mother used to stand at the foot of our garden and tell me when it was safe to cross the road, and she'd be there waiting for the same purpose when I returned home at the end of the school day.

Several of the other houses included little children in their household. 

That winter when it snowed so much, at the end of 1962, the children in our road all came out of their houses to play in the snow. We made snowballs and ran about enjoying it, and then we had the idea to make a snowman. We started at the very top of the hill, at the start of our road, and we rolled it all the way down to the bottom, stopping outside our house on the pavement hidden underneath all the snow. The rolling snowman's body increased in size as he rolled down the hill, and once we had made a head for him and set it on top of his huge body, that snowman was taller than I was. 

In those days we all had coke boilers to run our central heating (morning was always heralded by the sound of my father riddling the boiler), and coal fires in the little fireplaces. Ours looked very like this.

So when the snowman's head and body were all complete, one of the children tied their scarf round his neck and one of them ran for pieces of coal to make his eyes, and one of them begged a carrot from their mother to make his nose, and so he was gloriously finished. We were immensely proud of him. 

I tried for the first time ever, eating snow. I can still remember its coldness and purity and the texture of it.

My father travelled the world, and spent a lot of time in Scandinavia at that point in his life, so on our mantelpiece we had a Swedish dala horse like this — 

— and I had a warm Norwegian cardigan similar to this —

— and Norwegian mittens like these to keep my hands warm.

But even so my hands got very, very cold playing out in all that snow.

When the snowman was finished and admired, and my mittens were soaking wet and I'd been eating the snow, I came inside to warm up again. My mother had the fire alight, and she made me some hot orange squash (I had never had it hot before), and we said how marvellous was the snowman very visible from our front window because it was a bay window and the garden sloped up steeply and there stood the snowman at the top.

So I think that exciting day with all the children playing must have been far from quiet — children calling out and laughing, shouting instructions to each other as the snowman was rolled down the hill. Quite noisy, I should think.

But then I remember another time when it snowed, forty-eight years later in 2010, by which time I lived here in Hastings.

Sometimes, because a ridge of hills wraps all round Hastings, it snows here but nowhere else, or everywhere else but not here.

But that year it snowed across the whole of England. They had a photo of it at NASA.

My friend Pearl Thornton was still alive then, and I remember her talking about that snow. She delighted in it, she responded so deeply to its beauty and purity; but the thing she loved best was — she said — it covered all the clamour of humanity just for a little while in a blanket of utter silence. 

Pearl loved the hush of fallen snow.

She is gone now (she died at the end of 2018), but she, too, was lovely. On New Year's Eve every year she used to stay up until midnight, then step outside, then put through her front door her picture of beloved Jesus, so that he would have the first footing into her home as the year turned.

This picture.

Rest in peace, Pearl. Thank you for your eagerness and your joy, for your gift of healing and your loving-kindness. Thank you for loving the silence of the snow.