Brrrr

I have just bought another bag of mealworms while I was out. The robins and blackbirds hoover them up, leaving more of the other food for the other birds. By ‘eck, petal, it’s cold. But the, it is winter, isn,t it? And local farmers are hugely relieved that fungus and crop diseases are being killed off. Who are the people shutting schools, cancelling trains, saying “ah well, it’s not worth investing in winter machinery any more.
What machinery did we have in the 50s and 60s when winter was a normal phenomenon? Gritters were two blokes on the back of a council flatbed truck with shovels. More council workers cleared crossroads and zebra crossings while car owners put onwinter tyres and got on with it. Householders did their bit by clearing paths and spreading cinders; everyone had coke stoves and open fires then. (And upstairs, no heating, frost patterns on windows and extra eiderdowns.)
Schools never closed unless the toilets, outside of course, froze up. If the boilers broke down you wore your coat in class. Although most PE Games sessions went ahead, the class in knickers and aertex shirts shivering in ice playgrounds which we had polished with slides during breaktime, sometimes it was just too snowy. Then you did wonderful Music and Movement inside, or country dancing, us Sarf Lunnon kids barefoot on bits of squished cabbage. The big coke stove in the corner of my primary school never broke down. Its heat barely reached us, it warmed our wet gloves draped on its guard, adding the smell of steaming wet wool to that of the gently souring milk. A crate of frozen bottles, with strange white laminated worms with tinfoil hats poking out of them, was placed by the stove to thaw; the unfrozen coke- warmed milk was drunk by all of us, with screwed up faces.
No school buses, everyone walked anyway, I let the red bus go to play snowplough while I save my 4d fare and waded throgh snow which filled my wellies. I do remember my dad being late to and from work sometimes as the trains from Waterloo suffered something called ‘iced up points’.
The winter of 63 turned the whole of Shirley into a playground. Perhaps we did get some time of school then? Parents got to work somehow and Granny turned us out of the house into a white world of wonderful freedom, romping over Shirley Golf Course (usually policed and forbidden to us kids, ) and the gardens of the big houses that backed on to it, their hedgerows, fences, gates totally covered by feet of snow. We did no damage, just explored these usually hidden inaccessible properties, leaving footprints and space snowmen to show we’d trespassed.

Now snow comes down and some people seem to just wait for someone else to deal with it, shovel, lay a cloak, whatever, after all, we all pay our taxes, don’t we? Although the despised public servants who helped everyone smooth their lives have long been made redundant and where does our local council charge, whatever it’s called, go? < shrug > and clean off my shovel.