Beware! Snow Warning!

Beware! Snow Warning!

“All school sin the city of Birmingham are closed for today due to severe weather” announced a senior officer from the local authority’ on radio four’s morning news programme. He went on top explain how ice and snow had made the roads and pavements hazardous. People should be careful. Not make unnecessary journeys. Transport was likely to be disrupted. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard the threat of extreme hazardness weather when a meeting in a local school was cancelled at the weekend four days before. Either the Met Office or the local authority, or both had done a good job.

I thought back to the winter of ’62. Snow fell early in winter covering everything in a 6 inch white blanket. Soft flakes fluttered sweet softly crashing to the ground with a melancholic pit, pit pit. Quickly a build up whitened the mean streets. For a while the inner city became Christmas box. You could almost see reindeer and horse drawn sledges filled with fat men with rosy cheeks, and white delicate women wrapped warm in coach blankets, with lilywhite hands deep in furry bearskin muffs.

Bit the snow stayed, it stayed for weeks, endless weeks. Weeks and weeks of cold monotonous snow. But the Christmas spirit changed. I can’t remember how long it took. I guess not very long for the blanket to be churned up by traffic, blackened by oil, dirt and grime. Slush filled the roads. Wet slidy icy slush that crept through your shoes. The even blanket was piled along the pavements through successive clearings and pedestrians had to climb across mounds of ankle turning ice humps if ever they needed to stray from the gritted swathes of walkways. It was great a first. The first few days but we grew weary after some time.

At first children rolled great mounds into giant snowballs, and turned some to snowmen complete with sticks and half bricks as eyes and mouths. I never saw a carrot as a nose until I watched cartoons on TV. Games of snowballing were fun, at first. Freezing cold hands and sopping wet feet could be warmed in front of a one bar electric fire on the table of my Nan’s kitchen. Six kids alternating hand warming with feet on the table in front of the fire.

I could hear in the voice of the local authority mandarin the fearful tremor of the hazardous extreme weather. I don’t think it was just the possibility of death, hyperthermia, or starvation for some poor people. Perhaps it was the threat of being sued if some poor person slipped and broke something or worse. “You are to blame!” they would say. “You didn’t act yet you knew the weather was extreme and hazardous. You did not close the school. You knew there would be traffic chaos yet you did not force us to stay at home. The simple solution. You must compensate me for your error” The tremor in the mandarin voice was clear when he said “stay at home”

“Forget attendance league tables. Forget day’s loss at work through absence. There could be 6 inches of snow for God’s sake. Stay at home! Forget lessons and learning. This is a hazardous weather warning and we can’t afford you to be taking risks.

Driving through the bare winter forest late that day the snow was already on the turn. Too much brown stump, shrubby bush and forest litter showing through the dabs of wet melting mush for a warm Christmas feel. Hordes of children slid on plastic sledges overlooked by many parents who did not work that day. Young babies tottered in Eskimo baby grows and toddlers learned the concept of snow, using the word for the first time.