TheHagueOnLine would like to extend a warm welcome to our new columnist, writer and poet Julie Duke. Julie will be enlightnening our readers with tales of childhood, topical pieces relevant to what's going on around us, and poems. Julie's pieces will be an addition to the popular reading material provided by Jo Parfitt and Niamh Ni Bhrion. We hope you enjoy this new addition.

It was a winter of snow and ice, which began in earnest on Boxing Day 1962. For us it began with a journey by train down to my grandparents in Somerset. My father and sister stayed home for some reason and my mother and I made our way alone on what turned out to be quite an adventure. Dad waved us goodbye at Paddington Station and I sat in the train, clutching my bag of teddy bears that travelled everywhere with me and looking out of the window. As we hurtled along the track the snow fell more and more heavily and by the time we arrived in Taunton in the late afternoon the snow lay so thick on the ground we could hardly finish our journey to the country village where my grandparents lived.

We were snowed in at Nether Stowey for some days until one day a taxi driver came to collect us with a shovel in his cab – to dig us out of snowdrifts on the way to the station, he told us! The train stopped and started all the way home and the snow fell continuously. The train was cold and my mother sipped surreptitiously from a small bottle my grandfather had given her for the journey. “What you drinking, mummy?” I demanded in a loud voice and my mother blushed pink as a whole carriageful of people looked at me, then turned their gaze in her direction and tittered.

The big freeze lasted for six weeks. Ice and snow were compacted on all the roads and the pavements were treacherous. The big hill I had to walk down on my way to school was a skating rink and my father took me down it each morning, gripping my hand tightly all the way, before driving to work. One night we waited for him to come home as he always did, at the same time, just before the six o’clock news. That night was different. We waited and waited. No doubt mum was worried. Then, finally, we heard a key turn in the lock and mum rushed to the front door.

There was dad, normally so proper and neatly attired in his dark suit and tie, standing on the doorstep, hunched and cold under his overcoat and scarf. His hair was covered with drops of moisture and tiny icicles – yes icicles! – hung from his hair and eyebrows! The poor man had got stranded at his office in the snow, eight miles away from home, after the car refused to start in the extreme cold. He had walked all the way home over the ice-covered streets, in the darkness and freezing fog.

And what of our big freeze? How does the winter of 2009/10 compare with my childhood experiences? It’s ‘not over till it’s over’, but my guess is that it will go down in the history books and weather archive as one of the memorable ones. So how are we doing across Northern Europe? One delighted Australian couple were interviewed by a BBC news reporter against a backdrop of an idyllic snow-covered Georgian market town somewhere in England, which resembled a film set out of Cranford. “Temperatures back home are 30 degrees but we’re having the most amazing time” they confessed “in this winter wonderland in Britain.”

Not all of Britain, at least, feels the same. Stories roll in daily of hospitals who are having to cancel operations because hospital staff cannot get to work; thousands of schools across Britain are closed; flights are delayed and cancelled; trains are disrupted; points are frozen; buses are almost non-existent in some places; roads are icy, pavements covered with a thin but treacherous layer of packed down snow and ice; dairy farmers are throwing away thousands of litres of milk because they cannot be collected; supplies of grit and salt in municipal stores are running out.

In the Netherlands we are facing similar problems. The mood is more restrained. Traffic is still flowing (cautiously) along the country’s motorways; trains are delayed but struggling on; intrepid cyclists are still making their wobbly way along icy cycle tracks or, failing that, down the middle of the road. A number of suicidal ‘fietsers’ have also been spotted (and nearly run down), still clinging onto their cyclists’ privilege of cycling the wrong way up one-way streets, but doing it early in the morning, in darkness, without lights and in the middle of the road!

However, the problems here are similar to the ones Britain currently faces. Public transport is struggling, an icy wind blows across the countryside and through city streets, temperatures plummet, the elderly find it difficult to fetch their daily shopping along icy pavements and gritters here are slowed down by the same lack of resources. A news reporter for the BBC in Gateshead was heard to recommend us all just to “dig in and adapt to the situation”. Actually, digging ourselves out would probably be more appropriate advice, but we will try to be stoic and take his advice.

It’s a confusing world we live in. Nowadays, it seems, weather presenters are continually telling us of new records that have been made in terms of the hottest, coldest, driest, wettest day since 1893, 1981, or since records began. We are frightened by scientists’ warnings of global warming but face polar bear winters. Where is the sense in all this? The ice caps are melting but the ice age is being re-enacted here in the 21st century – or so it seems.

However, let us get this in perspective: we hear tales of former ice-skating, medieval fairs and merriment on the frozen rivers of Europe; we see the evidence in paintings by Bruegel and Avercamp. The Dutch love to tell stories of former elfstedentocht adventures (the big skating race along frozen canals which takes place through eleven towns in north Holland but only happens under the most prolonged icy conditions), but we are taken by surprise, once again, by today’s big freeze! In Blokkers the other day I overheard a young woman asking a shop assistant if they sold sleighs. We have at least had the problem of snow solved for us this winter – now how about those hills?

All in all, the outlook is bleak. Unless you are of a particularly optimistic temperament, young in years and obsessive about building snowmen, the landscape is frozen, white and bare and can seem somewhat cheerless, especially if you are hanging about on a frozen train platform, trying to get to work, or caught in a motorway tailback whilst snow falls unexpectedly heavily in Amsterdam. After a week or two of this white ‘wonderland’ even the most cheery of souls begins to lose patience. This morning my husband sounded a note of optimism – a suitable note on which to leave you – peering through the curtains at 6 o’clock in the morning onto our frozen street, he said thoughtfully “It will soon be Spring again…!”

Julie Duke
 

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