Snow

Adults and children love snow , the only difference is that children admit that they like it and adults pretend that they don't but , deep down inside , the child in them remembers....

A very heavy snowfall when I was young still stays in my memory . We woke up one morning and there it was ....The whole suburban neighbourhood looked different . During the night an invisible hand (as the saying goes ) , had decorated trees ,walls , fences , and made ordinary or in some cases , ugly -looking buildings look beautiful . At first it wasn't really deep , certainly not crisp , it wasn't even even....even . But it was SNOW....and later on it snowed some more and more until footpaths were indistinguishable from roadways . We decided to make a giant snow-boulder , just as we had seen ' Desperate Dan ' do in the Dandy .
It was not as easy as it looked and three of us struggled to push a huge ever -increasing snowball in the general direction of Orwell Hill , gathering leaves , twigs , empty cigarette cartons , all the pavement detritus of the locality including occasionally , pieces of dog-poo . But despite our efforts we never did make it as far as the hill and had to abandon it , and for all I know it may still be slowly melting away somewhere in the area to this day .
We made our snowmen , pelted each other with snowballs and enjoyed the free entertainment .
But the best was still to come . It froze . This must have been 1947 , because , since , I have heard many people who are even older than I am talk about the terrible winter of '47 .
When the snow froze , the deep ruts that had been made , by the few cars that were around at the time , became icy channels , we built tunnels and bridges for our toy soldiers . We made slides on the already slippery footpaths , completely oblivious of the danger to our elderly neighbours .
These slides were 10 or 12 feet long and gave us great excitement but were very dangerous ,and we occasionally received a 'skelp' of a walking stick or an umbrella from the old folk . No running to parents or guardians or the police in those days , we reckoned that we had it coming . Besides , we could always get our own back by throwing snowballs , but even snowballs were dangerous then , because when the snow was compacted it became ice and could cause serious injury....
For the growups that must have been a particularly bad time .Most deliveries were still being made by horse-drawn vehicles , and horses often slipped on the frozen surfaces and had to be removed from the carts . Trams stopped or had infrequent services .But people generally seemed to manage and the older generation were particularly cared for by their neighbours and close family.
Eventually the snow melted and the traffic reclaimed the streets , frozen waterpipes were fixed , schools re-opened and we walked to school , still trying to make slides on the , now almost ice-free , footpaths.......